Give ... peace ... a chance. That's all he is saying. "Peace," such an enticing word.

I think it's grand that Sinoira seeks the diplomatic path and it's a fact that he (and Lebanon) are in a tough position. Syria doesn't recognize Lebanon OR Israel and its intelligence apparatus remains potent within Lebanon though the soldiers have withdrawn, and there have been assassinations and maimings of politicians and journalists, mostly Christians, all figures who oppose Syrian dominion.

So I understand the delicacy of Sinoira's position and applaud his desire to make peace with Israel.

But a couple of things shocked me about this op-ed - the first of course being the lack of any context concerning the war - ie Hezbollah - the rocket attack on Israel and the kidnapping and murder of soldiers - there have been other attacks since the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and that wasn't mentioned at all, nor the huge weapons buildup, not the failure of Hezbollah and the other militias to disarm, nor the powerlessness of the Lebanese government and army even to deploy to the South let alone enforce 1559.

Now, Hezbollah essentially besieges the legally elected Lebanese government and the country is very delicately balanced and many fear outright civil war. Perhaps Sinoira is just afraid to mention these matters?

But also I was alarmed with the soothing, reassuring, "We don't want to destroy Israel," followed by the comment that the Peace Initiative must recognize the Palestinian "Right of Return."

That of course would destroy Israel - it's the key stumbling block to the Saudi Peace Initiative! But also things HAVE changed since 1949 - inevitably - and this needs to be respected. The pre-1967 borders were never formal borders to begin with and this "peace offer" doesn't reflect that fact that the West Bank and East Jerusalem not only contain Judaism's oldest and holiest sites, but had been ethnically cleansed of Jews and annexed by Jordan in the wake of the 1948 war. Nowhere do I see any provisions for the Jewish people living there now.

What's needed is some creative thinking, regional solutions to try and help people who have remained stateless for almost 60 years - the Arab refugees from 1948 and their descendants - the way they are treated in many Arab states is terrible. There have been mass expulsions and many deny Palestinians the right to become citizens and they have few rights.

Lebanon is actually one of the worst offenders and Lahoud has referred to the Palestinians as a "demographic timebomb," - yet - they are mostly Sunni Muslim and come from only a few miles away - people were already referring to the camps as "open sores" in the 1950's! Now millions have been born and are treated as pariahs.

There must be a way to help the Palestinian people that doesn't involve the destruction of Israel. Sugar coating the words and uttering them politely doesn't alter the fact that "right of return" is a recipe for catastrophe. If nothing else there are more than seven million people already living in Israel and it's tiny and most of it consists of the Negev Desert - which might SOMEDAY be a blooming oasis but for now resembles a moonscape.

Beyond that of course is the fact that Israel is supposed to be a homeland and refuge for the Jewish people - who have largely been "cleansed" from the rest of the Middle East, with the loss of homes, property, businesses, jobs and communities - on top of the horrors in Europe.

So the idea that the Arabs are paying a "high price" for making this offer is not only laughable, it is tragic and insulting.

This always gets lost in the rush to create "peace".

Finally, Siniora's wording implies that the Arab world lives in fear of Israel. That is nothing short of shocking to me given that Israel, and before that the Yishuv, has continously been economically boycotted, attacked, and threatened with total destruction by a region that consists of hundreds of millions of people, a huge land mass and enormous resources.

We need a better mousetrap. The usual soothing words and warmed over "solutions" aren't going to cut it.

"But the report failed to draw the most essential lesson from the July war and the wars that preceded it: military action does not give the people of Israel security."

The Winograd Report provides a sober indictment of the Olmert government for having failed to assert and maintain Israel's military deterrence. Its conclusion affirms that if Hizzbala had been summarily and unequivocally defeated last summer, there would have been no need for a Winograd Report because the war would have achieved better security for the people of Israel.

The Saudi Peace Plan would have been given a chance if it weren't for the Trojan Horse tucked, not so discreetly, between its folds, in the shape of ROR, a surefire formula to give every Israeli except for Ilan Pappe (and perhaps a few others) an instantaneous allergic reaction.

The enormities elided and occluded from Siniora's piece are precisely that: Enormities. As such they can by no means be exhaustively listed or appraised, they can only be indicated and suggested via some markers which shed light upon broader and yet more deeply entrenched problems and cancers. One such marker is represented in Melanie Philips' recent Hamas, by Royal Appointment, a marker that reflects 1) the internally fostered, septic influences within "Hamastan," aka Arafatistan, including religious cleansing, 2) the problems these septic influences represent to Israel and the West in general and 3) Western forms of naivete, appeasement, self-delusion, seduction, etc. that subserve Islamicist and other counter-productive Arab and Persian Muslim influences, represented in Philips' piece in the person of HRH Prince Charles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

A gloss on the speech from a Lebanese blogger.

That is a very good piece.

Whew, interesting, though that is some densely filtered code, at least so to my eyes.

You'd be amazed at how much automated spam there is, just hitting every form on a web page, regardless of the effect. Comment and trackback scripts are churning constantly, thousands, even tens of thousands of times for every one rogue comment or trackback that sneaks through. The thread subscription thing seems particularly vulnerable, and I clear out several hundred unconfirmed emails a day from the list.

Spammers should be skinned alive and eaten by ants.

Lol, that too, though I was actually mocking myself a bit, for not picking up on most of al Jumhuriyeh's take on Siniora's piece. I wouldn't have picked up on all that in a million years.

I was thinking the same thing, Mike B. The al Jumhuriyeh piece put everything in a different light.

It's still frustrating though that Arab leaders, assuming they indeed want to make peace with Israel, can't speak more openly - because how else are solutions going to evolve? And how are Westerners supposed to know if something an Arab diplomat is "code" of if he really means it?

Wasn't there an incident recently in which King Abdullah of Jordan, trying to keep the peace initiative alive, reputedly stated to an Israeli MK that Arab refugees would accept compensation in lieu of "right of return"? He then had to retract the statement or deny he'd made it in the first place, because people were outraged with him.

Yes, it serves to highlight a few important things. That there are in fact actors in the M.E. who genuinely desire peace/comity. That they are typically in some of a "predicatment," to use some understatement, and we can't expect them to speak in the same, forthright manner most of us in the West are accustomed to; likewise as regards the social/political policies they are able to initiate. As such, it reflects both a ray of hope as well as a problem in terms of being able to divine what their true or deeper intentions/motivations are.

All this is more or less obvious, to a degree. But al Jumhuriyeh's interpretation - assumming it's more or less accurate, and intuitively it seems about right - serves to highlight the extent of it all, serves to highlight just how dense and even opaque some of that language is.

Which fact is a reflection of the depths of the problems that need to be faced, and surmounted.