Diplomacy

The Soviet Union’s first ambassador to Egypt, Nikolai Vasilievich Novikov, recounts his pioneering role in establishing diplomatic relations in 1944 with Syria. Novikov provides a rich context to the genesis of Russo-Syrian partnership, describing the geopolitical arena and its attendant intrigues conducted by rival great powers like Britain and France. Novikov’s passage serves as an excellent background to an alliance between Russia and Syria that has regained strategic significance in the Great Game of our own day. 

The Israeli government believes it is locked in an epic struggle to save Israel from the growing movement calling for an international boycott. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns that Israel must quickly “rebrand” itself to avoid pariah status.
Ordinary Israelis are therefore being conscripted into an army of spin-doctors in a campaign termed “hasbara” – Hebrew for “public diplomacy”, or more literally “propaganda”.

Because the western mass media is so overwhelmingly slanted to corporate and state interests, the need for principled and independent news and information that can reach the masses is vital.

As readers know, I have emphasized for years that European governments are regarded by Washington as vassals who behave according to Washington’s wishes. It has been 70 years–two or three generations–since former world powers, such as Great Britain and Germany had an independent foreign policy.
In addition to this ignobility, European governments are also vassals to the EU, so on the sovereignty front European countries are twice damned. They simply have no sovereignty.

Image: World leaders attend a mass rally in Paris following the recent attacks [Getty]

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu was asked to avoid Sunday’s march in Paris, out of a fear he would use the occasion to exploit divisions in French society

Abbas is in a bind. If he ends coordination and goes on the offensive, why would Israel allow the PA to continue functioning? But if his security forces continue to collaborate with Israel, how can he retain credibility with his people?

by Jonathan Cook                       

Intense pressure from Israel and the US last week on members of the United Nations Security Council narrowly averted Washington’s embarrassment at being forced to veto a Palestinian resolution to end the occupation.

The Palestinian application to the ICC has set in motion a series of events with potentially dramatic consequences for both Israel and the Palestinians
 
(Al-Araby ) - At the weekend, Fatah posted an image on its Facebook page of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu next to a hangman’s noose, alongside the words ‘coming soon’ and the scales-of-justice logo of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

In early January 1998, aware of the soon-to-break story about the Clinton/Lewinsky trysts, the Project for a New American Century saw its “window of opportunism.”  On January 16—the day before the story appeared in the press—PNAC publicized their “open letter” to President Clinton urging him to consider military action against the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein, who was again alleged to be evading UN inspections and stockpiling tons of lethal WMDs.

East of Vienna, that’s where the military action and bloody confrontation in Ukraine is being played out on the ground. But the furtive diplomatic goings on in Vienna are no less intensive nor internationally important, from the standpoint of a small and neutral, (although EU member state).