Thursday, March 18, 2010

Lost in Translation

Hard to argue with the idea that the current Israeli government is pretty crappy at diplomacy. Or worse.

Is this because they're all so ghastly right-wing, fanatic nationalists and so on? Perhaps. And perhaps not. The diplomatic stupidities will blow over sooner or later; given that the Palestinians aren't ready to make peace with Israel one way or the other, there's no long-term significance to the fact that the negotiations aren't about to succeed. What could be significant, however, would be a righting of the social and economic imbalance between Israel's Jews and Arabs. Which, it appears, may be something Netanyahu's government is seriously trying to do.

Inexplicably, the English version of the story dropped 100,000,000 NIS from the sum reported in the Hebrew version. I have no explanation for the discrepancy.

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