April 19, 2009

(Communicated by the Foreign Minister’s Bureau)
Jerusalem, 17 April 2009

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Liberman met today (Friday, April 17 2009) with the President of Russia’s Special Envoy, Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Middle East and Africa, Alexander Saltanov. In the meeting, bilateral issues concerning the strengthening of the excellent relations between the two states, as well as regional matters, were discussed.

Both parties expressed their satisfaction with the bilateral relationship and level of cooperation between the two countries, while emphasizing the necessity of significantly increasing this cooperation in many areas. For example, in the economical field, the level of cooperation in the realm of technology and hi-tech should be expanded.
(Read more…)

Jason Koutsoukis, The Age
April 18, 2009
CAN Israel still call the United States its best international friend?

Apparently not, if you believe the tone of the local media.
Watching the drama unfold inside Israel, the increasingly tense dialogue between US President Barack Obama and new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is taking on all the trappings of a duel.

Almost every day brings news of another sore point between the two countries, a source of yet further inflammation of their once warm relations.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the more immediate threat to Israel’s national security lay across the Atlantic rather than from closer to home.
(Read more…)

How insipid can you get?

By Ted Belman

Obama said in Trinidad, after attending the Summit of the Americas, that the language of the draft declaration prepared for the conference

“raised a whole set of objectionable provisions” and raised the risk of a repeat of the 2001 Durban Conference, “which became a session through which folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive.”

“We expressed in the run-up to this conference our concerns that if you adopted all of the language from 2001, that’s not something we can sign up for. Our participation would have involved putting our imprimatur on something we just didn’t believe in,”

You “can’t sign up for it”? You “don’t believe in it”? How about a condemnation in strong terms of its vileness, its lies, its unfairness, its immorality, its racism etc.

The best he could say of Durban I was that it became a session through which “folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive>”

“Counterproductive?” That’s it?

What’s with the “folks”?