House Republicans officially gave Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) their seal of approval on Wednesday to sue President Barack Obama, marking the first time in U.S. history that a chamber of Congress has endorsed a lawsuit against a president.
The House adopted the resolution by a vote of 225-201. Five Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic conference to vote against the measure. They were Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Walter Jones (R-NC), Paul Broun (R-GA), Steve Stockman (R-TX) and Scott Garrett (R-NJ).
READ: Boehner Defends Lawsuit Against Obama In Op-edThe resolution authorizes Boehner to challenge Obama in court for exceeding his authority by unilaterally delaying deadlines under Obamacare. Although he has said he’ll target the one-year delay of the health care reform law’s employer mandate penalties, the text of the GOP resolutiongives the Speaker room to legally challenge implementation tweaks to other provisions of the law.
“This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats. It’s about defending the Constitution that we swore an oath to uphold,” Boehner said. “Are you willing to let any president choose what laws to execute and what laws to change? Are you willing to let anyone tear apart what our Founders have built?”
The move comes as Boehner feels elevated pressure to wage new battles against Obama from confrontation-hungry conservatives. It’s a politically awkward one for his party given that Republicans despise the employer mandate, and have voted to eliminate and delay it. Republican aides say they chose the issue for legal reasons as they think it gives them the best chance of victory in court.
VIDEO: Obama Dismisses Boehner’s ‘Stunt’ Lawsuit“Republicans want to sue the president for not enforcing a law they want to repeal,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD). “It is wrong. It is a waste of time. It is a waste of money. It is a distraction from the important issues so important to our people. This lawsuit is nothing more than a partisan bill to rally the Republican base.”
Democrats are aggressively fundraising off the planned lawsuit, portraying it as a precursor to impeachment. They’ve boasted about raising millions of dollars from donors recently over the two issues. Boehner has repeatedly insisted he has no plans to impeach Obama, describing it as a Democratic “scam.” The White House responds that House Republicans were discussing the issue long before Democrats mentioned it, and that GOP leaders also vowed they wouldn’t shut down the government before that happened last fall.
READ: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: Judge Would Throw Out Boehner’s Lawsuit Against ObamaBoehner faces an uphill battle in court. The first big question is whether he can achieve “standing” which requires proving a material injury to the House. Legal experts say that’s a very difficult task because no lawsuit emanating from members of Congress against the president has ever achieved standing in court. The next question, if the courts grant standing, is whether the lawsuit has merit to succeed. Republicans may have better luck on this question, experts say, as Obama’s unilateral decision to delay a statutory deadline is arguably problematic from a legal standpoint.
Progressives and some conservative legal minds warn that if the lawsuit succeeds, it woulddeclare open season for the executive and legislative branches to sue each other over any legal disagreement and empower judges to resolve such disputes.
Reporters love sources who understand their needs.
Getting a call from a reporter who wants to quote you as an expert for his story, review your book or product, or invite you to write an exclusive article for a publication, is a major coup. It means that your marketing efforts are paying off. Who would blow such an opportunity?
Unfortunately, a lot of people. Those who don’t understand journalists’ deadlines and needs are liable to be quickly passed over in favor of sources who do. That lack of knowledge can also rack up lots of wasted time and money for those who take a shotgun approach to blasting their message or products to any and all journalists. If you don’t consider their individual needs, you’re likely making a futile effort.
After a decade of working with journalists, arranging for interviews with and exclusive articles by the experts our public relations firm represents, I’ve learned what works – and what doesn’t – for them.
Here are a few of my tips for becoming a favorite news source:
• Remember – many of them are working on tight deadlines. They need to find someone immediately – meaning right now. People who aren’t used to working with daily deadlines tend to think of “immediately” as “within 24 hours” or “sometime this week.” That won’t do for a reporter who has to report, write and file his story today. She will quickly move on to another source if she has to wait for you.
• If a media contact wants to talk to you – whether it’s today or next Tuesday – make yourself available. I’ve had clients say a particular requested day or time isn’t good because they’ve got a dentist appointment scheduled or a trip to the library. If The New York Times wants to interview you, reschedule the cleaning!
• Have high-resolution image of yourself available. Journalists often want an image to go with their story and that’s great for you – more exposure! So be prepared. Print journalists need high-resolution images, usually 300 dpi (dots per inch). Instructing them to download your picture from your website likely won’t meet their needs. Most images on websites have a very low resolution of about 72 dpi, which looks fine on a computer monitor, but can’t be printed on paper. Instead, have a professional quality face shot of yourself, and your product or book, if applicable, at the ready to email.
• To avoid wasting time and money when pitching your product or book to the media, learn which reporters and editors might have an interest in your message. The automotive writer will have no interest in gardening tips. Likewise, the entertainment editor won’t care about your business book. You should be able to find which journalists cover what beats by visiting the publication’s website. If that fails, pick up the phone and call.
• If an editor invites you to write an article or blog post, pay attention to the criteria and the deadline. If you’re asked for 450 words or less, don’t send an 800-word piece. They may request you focus on a specific topic, or write in a specific format, such as tips or first person. Follow instructions, make sure your piece is finalized and proofread, and file on time. Early is better!
Being prompt, accommodating and reliable may also have some other benefits: You could become the source the journalist saves in her Rolodex and you might just hear from her again. Or, you may get a call from one of her colleagues; fellow staffers often share their good sources.
Whether the medium is a newspaper, magazine or blog, the journalists’ work can result in far-reaching exposure. Their articles are likely to be disseminated all over the Internet; one story could be seen by 1 million readers. How’s that for a return on your investment?
About Ginny Grimsley
Ginny Grimsley is a panelist at the Tampa Bay Marketing Summit (#TBMS14), www.tampabaymarketingsummit.com, scheduled Aug. 8 in Tampa, Fla. She is the print campaign manager at EMSI Public Relations, a national PR agency. She’ll join experts in social media marketing, SEO, online videos, advertising and other specialty areas for a one-day conference aimed at providing professionals and business people with the newest marketing tools and strategies.
Apartment rates in San Mateo County continue to rise, as the county tied with Marin and San Francisco counties for the top three most expensive out of 3,144 other counties in the United States to live in, with renters needing to make $29.83 per hour to afford one-bedroom housing, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
The average rent for an apartment in the first quarter of 2014 was $2,360. The average one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment was $2,136. The average occupancy rate was 93.9 percent, up 0.3 percent from the same time last year, according to RealFacts, a group that compiles apartment data. Minimum wage in San Mateo County is $8 per hour.
Development is growing along the Peninsula, said Nick Grotjahn, sales and client services representative for RealFacts.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth,” Grotjahn said. “People are starting to build properties in San Mateo because rents are out of reach in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Whenever builders see an opportunity where there’s quite a bit of demand, the outlying areas are going to grow as well.”
Meanwhile, Sally Navarro, a rental, sales and property management Realtor for AVR Realty in Burlingame, said the market has been crazy and ever changing in the last eight months. Navarro helps rent out spaces from Daly City to Menlo Park.
“They’ve (rents) just been going up and up and up just like during the dot-com boom,” she said. “People are willing to pay the prices because there’s such limited inventory. … In any given week, we’ll run out of one-bedrooms or don’t have any studios available. It really sort of cycles.”
She notes houses get snatched up pretty quickly. Clients are having to make some concessions to find a place to live too. She leased a house in Burlingame last year with no heat.
“There’s something out there for everything,” she said. “Whether there’s no heat or it’s little tiny one-bedrooms that people will rent.”
Those like Mark Moulton, executive director of the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County, say the discussion of housing in the county needs to be reframed and seen as an opportunity. His group works to accelerate the production of new homes in the county at all affordability levels to create opportunities and a viable quality of life.
“Let’s ask, ‘Who needs housing?’ he wrote in an email. “’Why do they need it?’ ‘Why does housing at the level they can afford to pay, not now exist in San Mateo County?’ Take a look at the downtown specific plan in Redwood City. Take a look at the Grand Boulevard Initiative. Ask, ‘Is San Mateo County together as 21 jurisdictions a place that can discuss the opportunity to grow our rate of housing production to meet our jobs growth?’”
There needs to be a forum to discuss growing housing production, Moulton said.
In the context of the recent local housing element updates, a coalition of groups, including the Housing Council, Greenbelt Alliance and Sustainable San Mateo County, sent letters to each of the county’s city councilmembers, along with a list of policies that may help the situation.
“We believe that the implications of these high housing costs for our community are serious and profound,” the letter dated March 27 stated. “They are regularly cited as one of the key constraints to economic development in San Mateo County.”
More development in priority areas and other transit-served locations carry with it the risk of displacement of existing low-income populations, the groups wrote. Potential policies recommended to the councils by the groups included committing to development without displacement; considering displacement risks early in the development process; focusing on both direct displacement and indirect displacement; stabilizing existing lower income residents/housing; considering rent stabilization, just cause eviction ordinances, one-for-one replacement of any housing removed from the supply and condominium conversion controls; and making affordable housing a key component of development strategy from the beginning.
Meanwhile, the county’s homeless rate has risen 12 percent since 2011, according to a report from the county’s Health and Human Services Agency, compiled in January 2013. There are 2,281 homeless people in the county as of January, with 1,299 unsheltered homeless people and 982 sheltered homeless people, according to the report. The next homelessness count will be conducted in January 2015.
The number of people seeking shelter space doesn’t seem to have changed much since the last count, said Wendy Goldberg, homeless and shelter care manager at the Human Services Agency. One thing that has changed is that the Project WeHOPE shelter in East Palo Alto changed from being a seasonal shelter from Nov. 15 through April 15 to year round through county funding, making 50 extra beds available.
“There is an increase in the number of beds available in county year round, which is great,” she said. “There still are people waiting to get into the shelters who are staying with friends or staying in a motel.”
There are usually about 40-60 people per night who come and request shelter space and aren’t able to get immediate shelter, she said.
Each new report about where Elon Musk will place his Gigafactory battery plant sparks a round of speculation about the strategy and future of Tesla Motors Inc.
The latest report as to where Tesla will build the $5 billion battery factory? That the little town of Sparks, Nevada, just outside of Reno, may have landed it — or maybe it hasn’t.
Tesla first announced that it would build the factory in one of four southwestern states, later adding California to the mix. Then it said it may begin work on two or more sites at once so that it could avoid missing crucial deadlines.
Now attention is focused on Sparks, where 50 large earth movers had begun work on a site, enough heavy metal to build the 10 million-square-foot site, according to auto blog Jalopnik. Workers there were reticent about details of the project, which reportedly has been dubbed Project Tiger. That might seem like pretty thin evidence to some observers, but to others it means a lot. ( Forbes points out that lithium-ion batteries are often called Li-ion batteries, basing some speculation on carnivorous cat connections.)
Why build in Nevada? It’s the state that’s geographically closest to the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory. California is obviously closer, but Musk has pointed out that California’s circuitous regulatory and approval requirements makes it a distant possibility.
Nevada doesn’t have those problems. Also worth noting, the only lithium mine in the U.S. is located there. We’ve written in the past that the company will need 25,000 tons of lithium to meet its expectation of 500,000 battery packs per year.
Before you get too excited, it’s important to note that Nevada newspaper Reno Gazette Journal has reported grading has stopped at the site, after reaching 85 percent completion, without clarifying whether it’s a temporary pause or a full stop.
Hopefully we’ll learn more when Tesla reports its second-quarter earnings on July 31.
When AOL executive and Comcast customer Ryan Block recently tried to cancel his internet service, he ended up in a near-yelling match with a customer service representative who spent 18 minutes trying to talk him out of it.
Rep: I’m just trying to figure out here what it is about Comcast service that you’re not liking. Block: This phone call is actually a really amazing representative example of why I don’t want to stay with Comcast. Can you please cancel our service? Rep: Okay, but I’m trying to help you. Block: The way you can help me is by disconnecting my service. Rep: But how is that helping you? How is that helping you? Explain to me how that is helping you. Block: Because that’s what I want. Rep: Okay, so why is that what you want?
Block posted a recording of the call online, where it has been listened to more than 5 million times. During the ensuing media frenzy, The Vergeput out a call and sought out current and former Comcast employees, hoping to shed light on the inner workings of the largest broadcasting and cable company in the country. More than 100 employees responded, including one who works in the same call center as the rep in Block’s recording.
These employees told us the same stories over and over again: customer service has been replaced by an obsession with sales, technicians are understaffed and tech support is poorly trained, and the massive company is hobbled by internal fragmentation.
The Verge will be publishing excerpts from these interviews over the next few weeks ahead of the company’s proposed merger with fellow cable behemoth Time Warner Cable. (If you work for Comcast and you’d like to contribute, email us atcomcast@theverge.com.) This first installment focuses on Comcast’s relentless pursuit of ever-greater sales.
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Internet not working? Confusing charges on your bill? Moving, and need to cancel your service? It doesn’t matter why you’re calling Comcast — get ready for a sales pitch.
Dozens of current and former Comcast employees told The Verge they had to constantly push products, even if they worked in tech support, billing, and general customer service.
“THE CUSTOMER IS CALLING IN TO TELL YOU WHAT’S WRONG, AND YOU’RE LOOKING FOR WAYS TO SELL THEM SERVICE.”
Mark Pavlic was hired as a customer account executive at Comcast in October 2010 after graduating from a technical institute. He figured he’d be troubleshooting TV, phone, and internet service, but most of his month-long training focused on sales. Every day when he walked into the call center, he’d see a whiteboard with employee names and their RGUs, or revenue generating units.
“I didn’t know that I was going to be selling things,” he says. “The customer is calling in to tell you what’s wrong, and you’re looking for ways to sell them service.”
The longer he was there, the more the company emphasized sales. “They pushed it as a way for us to earn more money,” he says. “[But] if you were low on sales, you got put on probation.” He quit after 10 months.
Pavlic’s call center in Pittsburgh is operated by Comcast, but the company also uses third-party and international call centers. Exact training and incentive structures vary by call center, and on whether employees are working on business services or residential services. Our interviews revealed a common thread across facilities: what often started out as a carrot — bonuses for frontline employees who made sales — turned into a stick, as employees who failed to pitch hard enough or meet their quotas were chastised, or worse.
Brian Van Horn, a billing specialist who worked at Comcast for 10 years, says the sales pitch gradually got more aggressive. “They were starting off with, ‘just ask,” he says. “Then instead of ‘just ask,’ it was ‘just ask again,’ then ‘engage the customer in a conversation,’ then ‘overcome their objections.’” He was even pressured to pitch new services to a customer who was 55 days late on her bill, he says.
HE WAS EVEN PRESSURED TO PITCH NEW SERVICES TO A CUSTOMER WHO WAS 55 DAYS LATE ON HER BILL
Van Horn says he “couldn’t sell water to a man dying of thirst in the desert,” but his other metrics were good: he had high scores on “first call resolution,” meaning that customers’ issues were often fixed in a single call, as well as “attaboys,” where a customer asked to speak to a supervisor in order to compliment him for a job well done. But after repeated reprimands for low sales, Van Horn was fired.
Comcast says it is not company policy to punish reps for having low sales. “Our customer service philosophy is to be there for our customers and to make them happy and provide solutions to their needs,” Tom Karinshak, Comcast’s senior vice president of customer experience, tells The Verge. “I don’t want any of our employees to feel that pressure to go through and sell…or feel like they’re going to get fired. That’s not good for us.”
At the same time, Karinshak says that Comcast may need to “do some retraining” to reinforce those values. COO Dave Watson also issued a memo acknowledging internal policies may be encouraging employees to overlook “the balance between selling and listening.” You can judge for yourself.
The following interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity. The Verge independently verified that all sources currently work, or have previously worked, in a Comcast call center.
That now-famous [Block] call with the retention specialist is something I have seen in my old job hundreds of times. We locked down the ability for most customer service reps to disconnect accounts. We queue the calls for customers looking to disconnect to a retention team who are authorized to give more deeply discounted products to keep subscribers.
The name of the game is RGUs (revenue generating units). Even if the subscriber disconnects cable, maybe we can keep them on internet or voice. A script pops up on the screen, and then another one comes up, then another one, every single one you’re eligible for. “Is it too expensive? You don’t use it? Maybe I can downgrade you to something if you’re only home once a week. Or maybe I can upgrade you. What if I gave you all the channels for a year and you’re still only playing $90?”
It’s not savvy in 2014 to do that — assume people are so stupid that if you rephrase the question in three ways maybe they’ll answer differently. That’s really the only approach they have.
-Billing systems manager, 2008-2013, Georgia
“[THE REP WHO SPOKE TO BLOCK] WAS PLACED ON LEAVE, PENDING INVESTIGATION. HIS DESK IS STILL SET UP, WHICH MEANS HE STILL WORKS FOR US. YES, HE IS A GOOD SALESPERSON.”
[The rep who spoke to Block] was placed on leave, pending investigation. His desk is still set up, which means he still works for us. Yes, he is a good salesperson. I mean if you don’t have stellar numbers, you get fired. One of the issues with [the recorded call] is he actually did his job, just went WAY overboard with it. According to our retention handbook, he did not violate any of the things that can end your employment.
-Retention supervisor, 2012-present, Colorado
Eighty percent [of our training] was sales training. From time to time they would pull us from the phones for in-depth training on how to sell. [They told us] to say how much better Comcast is than the rest of the competition. “Why would anyone leave us?”
I would be frustrated because I would tell them we need customer service training as much as sales training, but it came from Philly [Comcast’s headquarters] so that’s what we had to deal with. [Managers] would listen to the call, even have secret shoppers call in. If we didn’t ask [customers] to get more products we would be spoken to. Eventually, selling became part of tech support and billing.
There would be such frustration from tech support. We would tell our supervisors that our customers are upset. Why would you sell them something? They would say, ‘If the customer is upset, then don’t attempt to sell.’ That was fine, but sales became more and more of what we were graded on. A lot of reps were so worried because the management put too much stress on sales. And tech support reps just aren’t sales oriented.
-Tech support, 2003-2013, California
There were incentives for making sales. The last months that I worked there, there was a constant push to ensure that at the end of every call you make an offer for a new service, or premium channel, or whatever.
I think there was a honest emphasis on customer service. The rule of thumb was “first call resolution” which translates to: “Make sure the customer doesn’t have to call again to fix the problem.” In practice, it was difficult to achieve. I believe we didn’t have enough tools to guarantee first call resolution. There was almost no offline time to work. So you didn’t have time to do follow-up checks on their services, or whether the technician arrived at the scheduled appointment, etc.
-Customer service, 2008-2009, Mexico
“A 90-YEAR-OLD WOMAN CALLED TO ADD PHONE TO HER ACCOUNT AND MY BOSS TOLD ME AFTERWARDS, ‘SHE WAS PROBABLY SENILE… BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE UPGRADED HER CABLE.'”
We were coached on three things mainly: explaining their self-service options, showing empathy, and the number one was pitching products and services. We were coached that, regardless of [the customer] wanting to cancel, or being declined after a pitch, we had to offer at least three rebuttals.
-Video repair, April -July 2014, Illinois
I just had coaching today and it was brought up that I’m not using the new opening. Now when we open a call, we are supposed to push for an account number so that we have them authenticated on the call to make changes, and then offer something on every call. Tech support does not have to authenticate for the call to assist in troubleshooting, so it’s squarely to be able to make sure we can push a sale. I got docked pretty hard for that on my quality, so it’s now definitely being pushed harder than it has been in the past.
-Tech support, 2013-present, Utah
Sometimes if I knew the customer was scared of their technology, I would spend 40 minutes or longer on the phone trying to help them, because it’s good customer service. A good average call time is between 360 and 480 seconds. Imagine how much a 40 minute call affects your metrics. Your manager will sit there and listen to your call and pick it apart for things you should not have done.
We communicated using IM on the floor. Occasionally on a long call (or any call that was chosen to be monitored by a manager), I would get a pop up message asking me why I have been on the phone so long, or that the customer has two lines of business and why haven’t I pitched an offer to them.
-Customer service, 2010-2011, Pennsylvania
I was there for almost seven years. The last four years or so, everything went downhill. It all began with the “integration” of sales department into our customer service department. They told us we would never [have to] become sales representatives. [The sales department was] just there to help us grow. Well, that was a big fat lie. We slowly became sales. We were given quotas. We were at one point told if it’s not a sale, direct them to the 800 number.
-Customer service, 2007-2013, California
I remember thinking and asking my co-workers, ‘If the company has a sales department, why do we have to make two sales a day?’ One day I asked my manager about this. He said it’s revenue, but eventually they lowered the quota [to] one sale a day. It still was hard to keep up.
-Customer service (video), 2011-2013, New Jersey
The pay was great and everything else about the job was a nightmare. I remember when a 90-year-old woman called to add phone to her account and my boss told me afterwards, “She was probably senile… but you should have upgraded her cable. I don’t think you are going to be sitting in this seat for very long.”
-Sales, 2011-2014, Massachusetts “MOST PEOPLE LIVE IN PERMANENT FEAR, CHECKING THEIR NUMBERS AFTER EVERY CALL. I DECIDED TO QUIT BEFORE I SHOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD OUT OF DESPERATION.”
Although we were the sales department, the calls were what they called “dirty.” Every time you called Comcast, hit Spanish, then sales, you should hit one of us. But that wasn’t always the case; many times the calls were just randomly thrown to any agent regardless of what the customer chose, because at that precise moment who they asked for was not available. At least that’s what we were told, though it never seemed like that; more like everything was just done randomly without order.
Then comes Xfinity Home [security system]. We are to sell as many as we can, but there’s just not a market for it in the Spanish community. There really isn’t. But they keep pushing it to the point they’re just about to implement it as a multiplier. In other words, our commission will depend on it.
You can only fail one scorecard. Then you’re fired. Most people live in permanent fear, checking their numbers after every call. I decided to quit before I shot myself in the head out of desperation.
Six reasons why Israel is on the back foot even as it wins the battle against rockets and tunnels
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG-
An Israeli officer in a Hamas tunnel (Jack Guez/Reuters)
Things change, of course—the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change—but as I write it seems as if Israel is losing the war in Gaza, even as it wins the battle against Hamas’s rocket arsenal, and even as it destroys the tunnels meant to convey terrorists underground to Israel (and to carry Israeli hostages back to Gaza).
This is not the first time Israel has found itself losing on the battlefield of perception. Why is it happening again? Here are six possible reasons:
1. In a fight between a state actor and a non-state actor, the non-state actor can win merely by surviving. The party with tanks and planes is expected to win; the non-state group merely has to stay alive in order to declare victory. In a completely decontextualized, emotion-driven environment, Hamas can portray itself as the besieged upstart, even when it is the party that rejects ceasefires, and in particular because it is skilled at preventing journalists from documenting the activities of its armed wing. (I am differentiating here between Hamas’s leadership and Gaza’s civilians, who are genuinely besieged, from all directions.)
2. Hamas’s strategy is to bait Israel into killing Palestinian civilians, and Israel usually takes the bait. This time, because of the cautious nature of its prime minister, Israel waited longer than usual before succumbing to the temptation of bait-taking, but it took it all the same. (As I’ve written, the seemingly miraculous Iron Dome anti-rocket system could have provided Israel with the space to be more patient than it was.) Hamas’s principal goal is killing Jews, and it is very good at this (for those who have forgotten about Hamas’s achievements in this area, here is a reminder, and also here and here), but it knows that it advances its own (perverse) narrative even more when it induces Israel to kill Palestinian civilians. This tactic would not work if the world understood this, and rejected it. But in the main, it doesn’t. Why people don’t see the cynicism at the heart of terrorist groups like Hamas is a bit of a mystery. Here is The Washington Post on the subject:
The depravity of Hamas’s strategy seems lost on much of the outside world, which — following the terrorists’ script — blames Israel for the civilian casualties it inflicts while attempting to destroy the tunnels. While children die in strikes against the military infrastructure that Hamas’s leaders deliberately placed in and among homes, those leaders remain safe in their own tunnels. There they continue to reject cease-fire proposals, instead outlining a long list of unacceptable demands.
3. People talk a lot about the Jewish lobby. But the worldwide Muslim lobby is bigger, comprising, among other components, 54 Muslim-majority states in the United Nations. Many Muslims naturally sympathize with the Palestinian cause. They make their voices heard, and they help shape a global anti-Israel narrative, in particular by focusing relentlessly on Gaza to the exclusion of conflicts in which Muslims are being killed in even greater numbers, but by Muslims (I wrote about this phenomenon here).
4. If you’ve spent any time these past few weeks on Twitter, or in Paris, you know that anti-Semitism is another source of Israel’s international isolation. One of the notable features of this war, brought to light by the ubiquity and accessibility of social media, is the open, unabashed expression of vitriolic Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism has been with us for more than 2,000 years; it is an ineradicable and shape-shifting virus. The reaction to the Gaza war—from the Turkish prime minister, who compared Israel’s behavior unfavorably to that of Hitler’s, to the Lebanese journalist who demanded the nuclear eradication of Israel, to, of course, the anti-Jewish riots in France—is a reminder that much of the world is not opposed to Israel because of its settlement policy, but because it is a Jewish country.
5. Israel’s political leadership has done little in recent years to make their cause seem appealing. It is impossible to convince a Judeophobe that Israel can do anything good or useful, short of collective suicide. But there are millions of people of good will across the world who look at the decision-making of Israel’s government and ask themselves if this is a country doing all it can do to bring about peace and tranquility in its region. Hamas is a theocratic fascist cult committed to the obliteration of Israel. But it doesn’t represent all Palestinians. Polls suggest that it may very well not represent all of the Palestinians in Gaza. There is a spectrum of Palestinian opinion, just as there is a spectrum of Jewish opinion.
I don’t know if the majority of Palestinians would ultimately agree to a two-state solution. But I do know that Israel, while combating the extremists, could do a great deal more to buttress the moderates. This would mean, in practical terms, working as hard as possible to build wealth and hope on the West Bank. A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions. Reversing the settlement project, and moving the West Bank toward eventual independence, would not only give Palestinians hope, but it would convince Israel’s sometimes-ambivalent friends that it truly seeks peace, and that it treats extremists differently than it treats moderates. And yes, I know that in the chaos of the Middle East, which is currently a vast swamp of extremism, the thought of a West Bank susceptible to the predations of Islamist extremists is a frightening one. But independence—in particular security independence—can be negotiated in stages. The Palestinians must go free, because there is no other way. A few months ago, President Obama told me how he views Israel’s future absent some sort of arrangement with moderate Palestinians:
[M]y assessment, which is shared by a number of Israeli observers … is there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices. Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?
Obama raised a series of prescient questions. Of course, the Israeli government’s primary job at the moment is to keep its citizens from being killed or kidnapped by Hamas. But it should work to find an enduring solution to the problem posed by Muslim extremism. Part of that fix is military, but another part isn’t.
6. Speaking of the Obama administration, the cause of a two-state solution would be helped, and Israel’s standing would be raised, if the secretary of state, John Kerry, realized that such a solution will be impossible to achieve so long as an aggressive and armed Hamas remains in place in Gaza. Kerry’s recent efforts to negotiate a ceasefire have come to nothing in part because his proposals treat Hamas as a legitimate organization with legitimate security needs, as opposed to a group listed by Kerry’s State Department as a terror organization devoted to the physical elimination of one of America’s closest allies. Here is David Horovitz’s understanding of Kerry’s proposals:
It seemed inconceivable that the secretary’s initiative would specify the need to address Hamas’s demands for a lifting of the siege of Gaza, as though Hamas were a legitimate injured party acting in the interests of the people of Gaza — rather than the terror group that violently seized control of the Strip in 2007, diverted Gaza’s resources to its war effort against Israel, and could be relied upon to exploit any lifting of the “siege” in order to import yet more devastating weaponry with which to kill Israelis.
I’m not sure why Kerry’s proposals for a ceasefire seem to indulge the organization that initiated this current war. Perhaps because Kerry may be listening more to Qatar, which is Hamas’s primary funder, than he is listening to the Jordanians, Emiratis, Saudis, and Egyptians, all of whom oppose Hamas to an equivalent or greater degree than does their ostensible Israeli adversary. In any case, more on this later, as more details emerge about Kerry’s efforts. For purposes of this discussion, I’ll just say that Israel won’t have a chance of winning the current struggle against Hamas’s tunnel-diggers and rocket squads if its principal ally doesn’t appear to fully and publicly understand Hamas’s nihilistic war aims, even as it works to shape more constructive Israeli policies in other, related areas.
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