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In keeping with a China Blog tradition, I’ll sign off with a photo from the bureau window. Only this time there’s no snarl of cars to be seen. Amazing how a few tanks (they’re practicing today for the Oct. 1 National Day parade) can clear out traffic.
Sunday was Jerusalem Day in Israel, a holiday once again observed by thousands of young Jews who chanted as they marched through Arab neighborhoods conquered in the 1967 Six Day War. The tension is always highest in the narrow passages of the largely Palestinian Old City. So much so that the city’s police this year tried to route the column of youths — most singing patriotic and religious songs, a few chanting “Death to the Arabs” — away from the Arab Quarter. But in the end, the police proved powerless against tradition, and the original route was restored. On Jerusalem Day, marching through the Arab Quarter is the whole point.
President Barack Obama huddled with President Hamid Karzai in Chicago on Sunday, urging Afghanistan’s leader to accelerate negotiations with the Taliban over a political solution to the longest war in America’s history. But the prospect for Karzai negotiating successfully with the insurgents is clouded by a question raised by Josef Stalin, on the eve of World War II, in response to the suggestion that he offer concessions to the Pope: “How many divisions does he have?” The Taliban now ask the same question about Karzai. And should the Afghan leader also ask himself the question, he might reach a similarly dispiriting conclusion. Karzai’s independent power base is minimal, as is his ability to influence the outcome of his country’s civil war absent direct U.S. involvement. And that gives neither Karzai nor the Taliban much incentive to cut a deal with the other.
Spillover - Lebanon’s Daily Star reports on escalating violence inside the country after soldiers shot dead a prominent anti-Bashar al-Assad Muslim preacher Sunday. “The gravity of the incident… prompted leaders on both sides of the political divide to call for calm and restraint to prevent the country from sliding into sectarian strife as a result of a spillover of the 15-month-old uprising in neighboring Syria,” it says.
