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    • Mitt Romney\'s No-State Solution

    September 18, 2012, 3:11 pm
    By ROBERT MACKEY

    Secretly recorded video of Mitt Romney dismissing the possibility of a Palestinian state at a fund-raiser in May posted online by Mother Jones on Tuesday.

    As my colleague Sarah Wheaton reports, Mitt Romney said privately in May that “there's just no way” for an independent Palestinian state to be established on the West Bank territory Israel has occupied since 1967. The Republican presidential candidate's comments, during a discussion with donors in Florida, were secretly recorded and published on Tuesday by Mother Jones, a liberal magazine.

    In the surreptitiously recorded video, Mr. Romney can be heard asserting that “the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish,” because “the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace” and remain “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel.” He then cast doubt on the viability of a Palestinian state, given the region's geography:

    Some might say, ‘Well, just let the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security, and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. I don't have a map here to look at the geography, but the border between Israel and the West Bank is obviously right there, right next to Tel Aviv, which is the financial capital, the industrial capital of Israel, the center of Israel. It's what? The border would be, maybe seven miles from Tel Aviv to what would be the West Bank. …

    The other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point or Jordan. And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did in Gaza, which is, the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel. So Israel of course would have to say, ‘That can't happen. We've got to keep the Iranians from bringing weaponry into the West Bank.'

    Well, that means that - who? The Israelis are going to patrol the border between Jordan, Syria, and this new Palestinian nation? Well, the Palestinians would say, “No way! We're an independent country. You can't, you know, guard our border with other Arab nations.” And now how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we going to allow military aircraft to come in and weaponry to come in? And if not, who's going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are going to say, ‘We're not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land in our airport.'

    These are problems, and they're very hard to solve, all right? And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, “There's just no way.”

    Rather than search of a solution, Mr. Romney said, “you hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem.” Comparing the open-ended crisis to the co-existence of China and Taiwan, Mr. Romney added: “we have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

    Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of The Palestine Center in Washington, was scathing in his response.

    Mr. Munayyer also said in a statement: “Usually it is not until candidates attempt to make progress on Middle East peace that they give up. Romney seems to have given up before even starting. To be fair, Obama has achieved little on this front but that is largely because of domestic political constraints and an intransigent Israeli prime minister. While several previous administrations have done little but maintain the status quo, this is not what they stated they set out to do.”

    Mr. Romney's frank remarks, which undercut even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's public endorsement of “a solution of two states for two peoples: a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state,” seemed to break from decades of official American foreign policy. Since before the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Republican and Democratic presidents have thrown their weight behind the effort to secure Israel's future as a democratic state with a Jewish majority by creating a second state for up 2.5 million Palestinians who have lived under Israeli military rule for more than four decades.

    Critics of the two-state solution, however, have argued in recent years that Israel's determination to hold on to large settlement blocks in the West Bank has made the creation of a viable Palestinian state there almost impossible.

    In an interview with The Lede on Tuesday, the Palestinian-American activist Ali Abunimah said that there was “nothing Earth-shattering” in what Mr. Romney said. “In substance, I don't see it being very different than Obama's approach,” he said.

    Mr. Abunimah, who advocates what is known as the one-state solution - in which Palestinians and Israelis would live together in a shared, democratic country - suggested that “there is an agreement among all politi cal parties in the U.S. to pay lip service to a political settlement and a negotiated two-state solution, but if any one of them was speaking frankly,” they would almost certainly agree with Mr. Romney's assessment. In the absence of progress toward a negotiated settlement, Mr. Abunimah observed, there is general agreement among political leaders on all sides in the region that “we're in a stage of so-called conflict management.”

    Two decades after the Oslo Accords, Mr. Abunimah said, the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the occupied West Bank, “needs to maintain the fiction that it is providing momentum toward Palestinian independence,” while, in fact, “they exist in order to keep a lid on the situation.”

    As the peace process has ground to a halt, support for some sort of one-state solution seems to have become more common in the region. According to a recent poll, cited by Mr. Abunimah in July, almost a third of Israelis and Palest inians agreed that “there is a need to begin to think about a solution of a one state for two people in which Arabs and Jews enjoy equality.”

    Edward W. Said, the renowned Palestinian professor, made the case for abandoning the two-state goal more than a decade ago, writing in The New York Times Magazine in January 1999: “it is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that the peace process has in fact put off the real reconciliation that must occur if the hundred-year war between Zionism and the Palestinian people is to end. Oslo set the stage for separation, but real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.”

    In the absence of a negotiated solution, the search for an alternative arrangement has even led some political leaders on Israel's right to flirt with a form of the one-state solution. As the Israeli journalist and blogger Noam Sheizaf reported in 2010, members of Mr. Netanyahu's own Likud Party have suggested that they would rather annex the entire West Bank, including Jerusalem, and give Palestinians full civil and political rights than force more than 500,000 Israeli settlers to abandon their homes.

    Mr. Romney's argument about the region's geography also seemed to echo remarks made last year by Mr. Netanyahu, who told President Obama last year that Israel “cannot go back to the 1967 lines,” because the country's borders before it seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem that year were “indefensible.” In an address to Congress the same week, Mr. Netanyahu insisted that, in any negotiated settlement, it would be “absolutely vital for Israel's security that a Palestinian state be fully demilitarized. And it is vital that Israel maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River.”

    As The Lede reported at the time, not all Israelis agree that a Pales tinian state on the entire West Bank would pose a mortal threat to Israel. Martin van Creveld, a leading Israeli military historian, explained why in an essay for The Forward in late 2010 headlined, “Israel Doesn't Need the West Bank to Be Secure.”

    After dealing in detail with the ways that a nuclear-armed Israel could neutralize any military threat from an independent Palestinian state, Mr. van Creveld suggested that continuing the military occupation of the West Bank indefinitely, the approach that Mr. Romney explicitly endorsed in another part of his recorded comments, would be a greater threat to Israel's security than ceding the entire territory.

    “Strategically speaking,” Mr. van Creveld wrote, the risk of giving up the West Bank “is negligible.” He continued: “What is not negligible is the demographic, social, cultural and political challenge that ruling over 2.5 million - nobody knows exactly how many - occupied Palestinians in the West Bank poses. Should Israeli rule over them continue, then the country will definitely turn into what it is already fast becoming: namely, an apartheid state that can only maintain its control by means of repressive secret police actions.”



    A Robot With a Reassuring Touch

    Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

    Rodney A. Brooks with Baxter, a robot he developed with an array of safety mechanisms and sensors.

    BOSTON - If you grab the hand of a two-armed robot named Baxter, it will turn its head and a pair of cartoon eyes - displayed on a tablet-size computer-screen “face” - will peer at you with interest.

    The sensation that Baxter conveys is not creepy, but benign, perhaps even disarmingly friendly. And that is intentional.

    Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future will work directly with humans in the workplace.

    That is a marked shift from today's machines, which are kept safely isolated from humans, either inside glass cages or behind laser-controlled “light curtains,” because they move with Terminator-like speed and accuracy and could flatten any human they encountered.

    By contrast, Baxter, which comes encased in plastic and has a nine-foot “wingspan,” is relatively slow and imprecise in the way it moves. And it has an elaborate array of safety mechanisms and sensors to protect the human workers it assists.

    Here in a brick factory that was once one of the first electrified manufacturing sites in New England, Rodney A. Brooks, the legendary roboticist who is Rethink's founder, proves its safety by placing his head in the path of Baxter's arm while it moves objects on an assembly line.

    The arm senses his head and abruptly stops moving with a soft clunk. Dr. Brooks, unfazed, points out that the arm is what roboticists call “compliant”: intended to sense unexpected obstacles and adjust itself accordingly.

    The $22,000 robot that Rethink will begin selling in October is the clearest evidence yet that robotics is more than a laboratory curiosity or a tool only for large companies with vast amounts of capital. The company is betting it can broaden the market for robots by selling an inexpensive machine that can collaborate with human workers, the way the computer industry took off in the 1980s when the prices of PCs fell sharply and people without programming experience could start using them right out of the box.

    “It feels like a true Macintosh moment for the robot world,” said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who oversaw the development of the and the .

    Baxter will come equipped with a library of simple tasks, or behaviors - for example, a “common sense” capability to recognize it must have an object in its hand before it can move and release it.

    Although it will be possible to program Baxter, the Rethink designers avoid the term. Instead they talk about “training by demonstration.” For example, to pick up an object and move it, a human will instruct the robot by physically moving its arm and making it grab the object.

    The robot's redundant layers of safety mechanisms include a crown of sonar sensors ringing its head that automatically slows its movements whenever a human approaches. Its computer-screen face turns red to let workers know that it is aware of their presence.

    And each robot has a large red “e-stop” button, causing immediate shutdown, even though Dr. Brooks says it is about as necessary as the Locomotive Acts, the 19th-century British laws requiring that early automobiles be preceded by a walker waving a red flag.

    Soon, Dr. Brooks predicts, robots will be mingling with humans, routinely and safely. “With the current standards, we have to have it,” he said of the e-stop button. “But at some point we have to get over it.”

    What kind of work will Baxter and its ilk perform? Rethink, which is manufacturing Baxter in New Hampshire, has secretly tested prototypes at a handful of small companies around the country where manufacturing and assembly involve repetitive tasks. It estimates that the robots can work for the equivalent of about $4 an hour.

    “It fit in with our stable of equipment and augmented the robots we already have,” said Chris Budnick, president of Vanguard Plastics, a 30-person company in Southington, Conn., that makes custom-molded components.

    Employees whose menial tasks are done by robots are not being laid off, he said, but assigned to jobs that require higher-level skills - including training the robots to work on manufacturing lines with short production runs where the tasks change frequently.

    “Our folks loved it and they felt very comfortable with it,” Mr. Budnick said. “Even the older folks didn't perceive it as a threat.”

    Other efforts are under way to design robots that interact safely with human workers. Universal Robots, a Danish firm, has introduced a robot arm that does not need to be put in a glass cage - though the system requires a skilled programmer to operate.

    And late last year Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, where he took videos of workers in factories where jobs have been outsourced from the United States.



    Newsweek\'s \'Muslim Rage\' Cover Mocked Online

    September 17, 2012, 7:52 pm
    By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

    CAIRO - After a week of violent protests over an online video demeaning the Prophet Muhammad, the American news media has conducted a searching psychoanalysis of the Muslim mind to ask why such an offense should trigger such wrath. Essayists have generalized about resentments dating back to the 8th century, an anachronistic discomfort with modernity, or the excesses of Islamist politics, among other familiar themes.

    On Monday, some Muslims online began to turn the tables, poking fun at the whole inquiry. Seizing on Newsweek's invitation to discuss its provocative cover story under the Twitter hashtag #MuslimRage, thousands of Muslim users of the social network mocked the premise by listing a few of the real and imagined irritants that make them mad.

    Some t raded inside jokes about the incongruities of living in a Westernized world.

    Jokes about the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, formed a genre of their own.



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