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September 21, 2011
by Gunter David
* Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, will shortly appear before the General Assembly of the United Nations to ask for full statehood recognition.
* Israel’s embassy in Cairo, Egypt, was attacked by thousands, who broke into the building and rampaged for hours, while six Israeli security guards were trapped inside. Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement 32 years ago. An Egyptian official last week said that treaty “is not holy.”
* Close relations between Turkey and Israel have unraveled. A technical change in Turkey’s air planes will enable that country to easily attack Israel. It also will increase its fleet of war ships in the eastern Mediterranean.
* Thousands in Amman, Jordan, demonstrated against their Jewish neighboring state.
There is much more.
Israel is preparing for major disturbances in the West Bank, Jerusalem and other areas should the United Nations reject the Palestinians’ request. While the General Assembly stands to approve it, a veto by the United States is expected in the Security Council, the so called upper house.
These days Israel’s economy is solid. Its future is uncertain.
King Abdullah of Jordan, with whose country Israel has a long standing peace agreement signed by his father, King Hussein, put it this way, “Jordan and the future Palestinian people are in better shape than Israel today. Now it is Israel’s turn to be fearful.” It sounded as if there was a smile on his face.
Abbas’ appearance before the United Nations is designed to circumvent the decades long negotiations with Israel. At its highlight, Israeli prime minister Rabin and Palestinian head Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn and won the Nobel Peace Prize. The meeting was arranged by then U.S. President Bill Clinton, out of office now for some 11 years. Rabin and Arafat are dead. So, it seems, are the peace negotiations.
The endangered peace agreement with Egypt is the result of the Arab “spring” that has swept over that world. The Egyptians got rid of their decades long ruler. Next came the Libyans. The Syrians are trying to extract themselves from their dictator, whose father likewise governed ruthlessly.
The problems with Turkey, a non-Arab state, arose after nine Turks were killed by Israeli war ships, which tried to block the approach of Turkish civilian vessels bringing aid to the Gaza Strip. The violence occurred when Israelis who boarded a Turkish vessel were attacked with stones, knives and other weapons. The Turkish government demanded an apology from the Israelis, who declined.
Until then, Israel and Turkey were allied, practicing war exercises together, united by their common enemy, Iran.
It makes me wonder about the Promised Land. Thousands of years ago, the Bible tells us, Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people, left Ur of the Chaldees and headed to the far away land of Canaan, which his God promised him.
Ur is the oil-rich southern part of modern day Iraq. Canaan became what today are Israel and Palestine. Go figure.
Gunter David and his parents fled Germany, their native country, as soon as Adolph Hitler rose to power. They settled in Tel Aviv, in what was then Palestine, where Gunter grew up. He subsequently moved to the U.S., where he worked on major newspapers for 25 years. The Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize. He has returned to Israel numerous times, as a newsman and to visit family and friends, and covered the Yom Kippur War in 1973. His second career was as a family therapist and addiction counselor. Dalia, his wife of 57 years, is also from Israel.
To read more work by Gunter David, Click Here.
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May 24, 2011
THE LONG ROAD TO THE PROMISED LAND
Where are Israel’s Borders?
BY Gunter David
The ’67 borders. Everybody is talking about them. But they are never explained. They came to the fore when President Obama said in a speech the other day that peace between Israel and the Palestinians should be based on the ’67 borders. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been meeting with the president, told his host it was out of the question. He declared them “indefensible.”
What are the ’67 borders? The year is misleading. They actually are closer to the borders that came into being after the cease-fire in 1949, at the end of Israel’s Independence War. On November 30, 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Until then, Palestine had been under British rule or mandate as prescribed by the League of Nations, the predecessor of the UN.
The partition plan was rejected by the Palestinian Arabs, who subsequently attacked the Jews. The latter welcomed the plan as their return to their Biblical homeland. Leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine accepted the partition even though it gave them a minimal territory.
On May 15, 1948, with the withdrawal of the last British troops from Palestine, David Ben Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, the Jewish community, declared the founding of the state of Israel. Surrounding Arab states promptly attacked the new country, but when a cease fire was declared in 1949, Israel had become considerably larger than when the war began. Most importantly, Israel included a good part of Jerusalem, which became its capital. According to the partition, the city was to be under international control.
As for the Palestinian Arabs, they never had a chance to found a country of their own. What today are called the Left Bank and the Gaza Strip were the remainder of Palestine when the war had ended. The ruler of Trans Jordan annexed the West Bank of the Jordan River, and declared himself king of the expanded country of Jordan. Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip.
In 1967, advance Israeli intelligence warned its government of impending war by the Arab countries. Israel promptly struck first. The result was the Six Day War, in which Israel took the rest of Palestine, all of the Sinai Desert, and a section of Syria.
Israel also reclaimed the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall – the remainder of the Holy Temple built by King Herod – from which Israelis had been barred during Jordanian rule. Once it had been called the Wailing Wall, where Jews prayed, then stuck little slips of papers, messages to God, between its stones. But on a day in June, 1967, thousands and thousands of Israelis flowed into the Old City, back to their holy places and to the Wall, where they once more sent messages to heaven.
In time, Israel and Egypt made peace. Israel withdrew from Sinai, as well as from a section of the Golan Heights which it had taken from Syria. It also made peace with Jordan. Over time, some 300,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank. The Palestinians consider the settlements an invasion of their territory. In past negotiations there had been talk of swapping land, with Israel giving up some of the settlements, or trading areas of Israel populated by Arabs for the Palestinian land settled by Israelis.
But going back to the quasi 1949 borders?
Indefensible.
Gunter David and his parents fled Germany, their native country, as soon as Adolph Hitler rose to power. They settled in Tel Aviv, in what was then Palestine, where Gunter grew up. He subsequently moved to the U.S., where he worked on major newspapers for 25 years. The Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize. He has returned to Israel numerous times, as a newsman and to visit family and friends, and covered the Yom Kippur War in 1973. His second career was as a family therapist and addiction counselor. Dalia, his wife of 57 years, is also from Israel. His fictional accounts of his family’s life in Berlin and resettlement in Palestine appear in the pages of Wild River Revew.
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May 9, 2011
THE SHATZKIN FILES
The Old Publishing Value Chain Got Twisted a Bit Last Week
by Mike Shatzkin
Although the value chain in trade publishing for the last century has, for the most part, kept retailers between publishers and consumers and kept publishers between retailers and authors, that has never been 100% true. Doubleday covered the whole value chain in the 1950s, when it not only owned the Doubleday Book Shops and the Literary Guild book clubs, it also owned printing plants. In the early 1960s, the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company bought (and eventually renamed itself) Macmillan (and that’s the old Macmillan that became part of Simon & Schuster in the 1980s, not the new Macmillan which was what the renamed Holtzbrinck group became a few years ago) and they also bought the Brentano’s bookstore chain.
I sold books to both Brentano’s and Doubleday in the 1970s and I don’t recall it ever being an issue that they had publisher ownership. Of course, that was before trade publishing consolidated into anything remotely resembling a Big Six.
After those two chains were sold in the 1980s (and I’m going to admit that I forget whether Walden which became Borders or Dalton which became Barnes & Noble bought each of them), in a period of two decades when publishers and book retailers grew enormously, the neatness of the division between the publisher’s role and the retailer’s was mostly respected. A number of retailers — notably B&N and Borders, but suppliers to the mass merchants as well — bought bargain books directly from packagers during that period, but joint ownership of significant publishing and retailing capabilities was, temporarily, suspended.
But Barnes & Noble was particularly aggressive at direct sourcing of book content and around the turn of the century announced the goal that 10% of their volume should come from directly-sourced product. To further that objective, in late 2002, B&N outbid several other companies (including at least one very large publisher) for the independent niche publisher, Sterling. Immediately, Borders stopped buying Sterling books and Barnes & Noble started stocking a lot more of them than they had in the past.
Meanwhile, the Internet was forcing everybody to rethink the paradigm. Even before the Kindle was launched in November, 2007, Amazon was encouraging authors to “publish” with them directly. All they could offer was the connection to the vast majority of online consumers — no print runs, no presence in any brick stores — but this could still be attractive and productive for some authors. My friend and client, David Houle, a futurist who blogs at Evolution Shift, published his “Shift Age” book with Amazon before Kindle and has sold thousands of copies, many of them at his own speeches. He’s very happy earning about $7 on every sale of a $17 book. No publisher was going to offer him as much as a third of that per copy.
As online sales grew, and then were further fueled by ebook sales starting in late 2007, it became increasingly obvious to many that publishers would have to start selling direct themselves. Some did. Harlequin has done so for years. F+W Media, one of the most aggressive publishers employing a vertical community strategy, announced a year ago that they would use Ingram to sell their books as well as those of their competitors to their direct audiences. Macmillan announced a similar plan for science fiction through Tor.com, although that idea has apparently never been implemented.
Part of what has discouraged the big publishers from selling direct is the threat of retaliation by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, both of which are much happier if the customer contact for big books is through them, thank you very much. Since both companies really exercise direct influence on many consumers, big publishers are inclined to respect their concerns.
To a certain extent.
And then we had the events of last week.
Amazon, which had previously established imprints for author-direct publishing and for translations of foreign works and had created a relationship with Houghton Harcourt to address their prior inability to get brick store distribution for books they owned, announced a new romance imprint called Montlake Romances. (Personally, I thought it was a bit strange that they announced it with just one book coming this Fall, rather than 10 books coming next week!) That put them squarely into the publishing business in a new way, and one could only imagine that the mystery shoe and thriller shoe and sci-fi shoe will be soon to drop.
In the same vein, Barnes & Noble has a program called Pub It! to enable authors to by-pass publishers and earn bigger royalties. They also still own Sterling, which gives them in-house the distribution capabilities that Amazon had to team with Houghton Harcourt to get. And with Sterling they also have the entire infrastructure in place to deal with authors and their care and feeding which could constitute competitive advantage when the gloves come off chasing brand-name authors.
So both of the giant retailers are looking more and more like publishers.
But it turns out the publishers were cooking something up too. On Friday, we learned about a new business called Bookish, which will be the “new digital destination for readers.” In its announcement release, Bookishpromises to use content and software tools to promote discussion and discovery around books and to answer the reader’s question: “what book should I read next?”
What was most eye-catching about Bookish was its backing by three of the Big Six: Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, who have apparently been planning this move for quite some time.
What was downplayed, but perhaps most significant, is that Bookish is trying to straddle the same fence that Google, and, to a lesser extent, Kobo are: being an ally of existing retailers while selling direct to consumers itself.
It really is impossible to speculate intelligently about Bookish’s potential for success. What they’re suggesting they’ll do is reminiscent of Copia and Goodreads and Library Thing, and none of them have yet replaced the marketing power of the brick store, a fact which is front and center in the minds of the trade publishers who depend on that merchandising.
But it will certainly accomplish one thing: giving the big publishers a direct path to the consumer. The hunch here is that if any one of these three big publishers had gone aggressively into direct sales, they would have risked serious retaliation from both of their two biggest customers: Amazon and Barnes & Noble. But it will be hard for them to retaliate against three publishers who, among them, deliver about half the biggest commercial books in the marketplace.
Let’s remember a year ago January when Amazon briefly sought to block agency terms for ebooks by removing buy buttons from Macmillan books when they briefly thought they could stop the plan from being implemented. As quickly as it became clear that the five publishers determined to implement agency would not be deterred from doing so, Amazon retreated. (In fact, they graciously joined Macmillan in compensating authors who might have lost sales during the brief period the buy buttons were inactive.)
And that brings up another important point about Bookish: what it says about the common interests among fierce adversaries, which the trade publishers certainly are. The times call for collaboration among competitors in trade publishing. It is a little bit nuts that several of them are building competing romance, mystery, and science-fiction “communities”, which only leaves the field wide open for a third party to be the biggest aggregator in each of the verticals and also allows much smaller competitors to look comparable on the web. But collaboration models have to withstand anti-trust concerns. Presumably three of the biggest publishers jointly investing in this web venture will.
Whether or not the Bookish team can invent the general book marketing future, or, through competition, spur Amazon and BN.com to be more creative about online merchandising, remains to be seen. But this past week certainly gave us further indications that the publishing value chain is being drastically reshaped and that the neat roles we’ve been used to for 100 years have less and less applicability to publishing’s future.
I chuckle when I think about a very smart person from a major house who was telling me just about a year ago, right after agency was implemented, “whew, now I think things can settle down for a while.” Actually, “things” are just getting moved over to the fast track so they can really change. Montlake and Bookish within a day of each other; Barry Eisler (who’s speaking at our “eBooks Go Global” show at BEA on May 25) and Amanda Hocking going in opposite directions within a week or so of each other a couple of months ago; these are significant events but they’re also signs of accelerating change.
Mike Shatzkin is Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company, Inc., a consulting company that also provides data management services to the publishing industry. The company also owns BaseballLibrary.com, the largest aggregation of narrative writing on baseball history.
Mike’s first job in publishing was as a sales clerk at the brand-new paperback department at Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue in 1962. Since then, he has authored five books and worked at virtually every step in the publishing value chain: editorial, production, sales, marketing and distribution. He served as Director of Marketing for The Two Continents Publishing Group in the 1970s and has been a consultant since 1979.
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February 23, 2011
VIEW FROM DUBAI – Protests and the Power of Ahmisa
by Vibhas Tattu
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it—always”. – Mahatma Gandhi.
The regime changes that are sweeping the Arab world are an excellent example of the principle of ‘ahimsa’ or non-violence at work. The ahimsa is at work not just in the hearts and minds of the protesters in Cairo or Tunisia, but also in the hearts and minds of Hosni Mubarak and his military commanders in Tahrir Square, who did not order attacks on the protesters. Ahimsa is at work in the hearts and minds of the two Libyan fighter pilots who defected their Mirage jets to Malta, refusing to bomb the protesters in Benghazi, as they had been ordered to. It is at work in the hearts and minds of the Libyan ambassadors to India and UK who quit in protest against the violence deployed to quell the uprising in Tripoli.
Ahimsa is not an esoteric or idealistic concept espoused by a ‘half naked Indian fakir’ but a force that has wrought the down fall of many oppressive regimes and even empires like the British Empire, the apartheid regime in South Africa, the communist rule in the Soviet Union, and now the latest wave of non-violent uprisings sweeping the Arab world. Ahimsa is not just a Hindu or Buddhist tenet alone – it is a universal principle that can shape bloodless revolutions while also being a code of ethics. What is to be celebrated here is not so much that dictators are being ousted as the fact that it’s being done with non-violent means. Celebrations are in order not simply for the down fall of oppressors, but the emergence of decency and human rights.
There is jubilation on the streets of Cairo and Tunis and the sentiment will soon be echoed in Benghazi and Tripoli and perhaps Manama (Bahrain). There are rumblings in Yemen, Morocco, flutters in Saudi Arabia. The ripples of this movement with its epicenter at Cairo have travelled as far as Beijing. News of the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China is trickling out. Who knows how far it will go?
But I suspect the euphoria will be short-lived and will soon be replaced by the bitter economic realities, poverty and economic inequity, that fuelled the popular uprisings in the first place. Just as history is a witness to the power of ahimsa, it is also a witness that revolutions always bring hard ships in their wake. As long as there is dictator or a totalitarian regime in place, you can always abdicate your responsibilities and blame the regime for your problems. Once that is removed you have to face the next level of reality – that now you are in charge and must make things happen. Or to quote the Mahatma again: “You must be the change that you wish to see in the world”
Whatever governments emerge in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya, they will have to face very real and very serious socio-economic problems deeply rooted in their countries. To provide safety and food and jobs to the common man is not an easy task. Indeed this is a continuous task that nations with a long history of political freedom and democratic governance, continue to struggle with every day. It may take decades of hard work before the Arab world will achieve the goals and expectations unleashed through this movement. But at least the path is being cleared and the hard work can now begin in right earnest.
Vibhas Tattu hails from India and is a manufacturing engineer by profession. He has worked in India, USA and now in the United Arab Emirates. Vibhas is interested in Shakespeare, Indian music, poetry (English, Hindi and Marathi) and a new found love of writing.
Tattu has a bachelor’s degree in Production Engineering from the University of Bombay and Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Fellow.
He writes the View from Dubai column for Wild River Review.
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November 4, 2010
Dollar in Dire Straits?
by Vibhas Tattu
The Federal Reserve in Washington has sailed into the blue. As widely expected by many across the world, Fed Chairman Bernake announced a massive tranche of $ 600 billion dollar “bond purchases” ostensibly to boost the flagging US economy and create jobs. This exercise has many politically correct and euphemistic names and economic theories to support it. “Quantitative Easing” is the phrase being used in world media to describe this affair. Since the first installment of the QE was already done by the Fed in 2008 / 2009 to the tune of $ 1700 billion, this second round is being referred to as “QE2”. The QE2 is being hailed as the kiss that will breathe new life into the US economy. In practical terms what the Fed Reserve has actually done is simply create, literally out of thin air, a bank balance of $ 600 billion in its own current account. The economists call this as debt financing. When my current account bank balance goes up it is usually after I have worked quite hard for a month and my employers send my salary from their account to mine as a compensation for my work. In other words, I have EARNED the credit and now I can spend it. This is by and large the mechanism by which ALL individuals or organizations throughout the world create wealth and operate their finances (at least all legal ones) . Governments don’t always work that way. They are above it all, like God, and can create things out of thin air. God said “Let There Be Light” and there was light. On Wednesday morning, Bernake & Co said “ Let There Be Money” and lo presto $ 600 billion dollars became available for the dubious “bond purchases”.
It is well to dwell a bit on this event which is raising so much expectation within the US and causing so much consternation in the emerging economies like China, India and Brazil.
Let’s review the facts. Despite astronomical and unprecedented financial injections into the US economy (QE1 = $ 1700 billion), the US unemployment rate remains at its highest since 1984. Consumer spending in the US is at its lowest in many years. The economy, it is feared, will be “deflationary” or shrink. This QE2 injection is expected to reverse this deflation by making money available cheaply to banks for lending and in turn to boost consumer spending. But who said banks don’t have money to lend? All the top banks in the US have returned to profit and are flush with funds. The likes of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch turned in multibillion dollar profits for 2009 and multimillion dollar bonuses for their top exces. Even the black sheep of the banking community, Citibank, has shed all its fat and has returned to a modest profit. There are just no borrowers. It’s just that consumers and businesses don’t want to spend right now. So what will be the effect of this QE2 money? By most accounts, the huge infusion will cause the dollar to depreciate significantly and hence make US goods and services more competitive in the world market (now you know why China’s Commerce ministry is very upset with the QE2 - it makes their life difficult). Part of it will be invested within the US economy and generate fresh revenue streams and jobs. All this makes the QE2 sound like a wonderful thing for the American public, doesn’t it?
In fact what is most likely to happen is not so goody goody. A lot of the foreign reserves held by China ($ 1200 billion), India ($ 260 billion) and the rest of the world are in US Dollar currency. What the QE2 will do is reduce the value of these reserves (due to a depreciated dollar). This is unpalatable and will result in these emerging economies moving away from the dollar in the long run and cause a further erosion in the dollar value. The fact is that the US is no longer a net producer but rather a net consumer on the world scene. It is a fundamental truth of economics that unless your production of wealth keeps pace with your consumption of wealth, within reasonable limits, you are likely to end up as a sub-prime risk; and we all know how sub primes end up don’t we? By QE2 the US is increasing its long term chances of ending up as a sub-prime risk for itself and the world. Even in the short term the QE2 could well have very negative results. US funds are already flowing in large measure to foreign shores and it is feared by many that at least part of the QE2 funds will find their way to China and India and not be invested in the US at all. It is not very difficult to believe that the recent surge in market valuations in India are partly because the markets have already factored in the availability of the cheap QE2 money. At the Government level this sudden money flow could trigger what is being called as a “currency war” which threatens to escalate tensions between nations. Also the extent of the fund flows outside the US will restrict job creation within the US. So is the QE2 good at all? Probably not.
In the long run, a nation’s economy must be largely, if not wholly, self sufficient. The operative word being “self”. The reason America rose to prominence in the 20th century was due to its innovations as well as its domestic consumption. The reason why China and India are rising to prominence in the 21st century are also due to their own domestic innovations and consumption. As such if the US is facing hardships, it should look within to spur growth, and not try to spend its way out of it by debt financing. Already the fiscal deficit of the US is a matter of concern the world over. Continued US government excesses in the form of QE2 will dethrone the dollar from its position as the currency of choice. QE2, in the long run, will only hasten the exit of the dollar from the world stage. Austerity measures like the ones UK’s Government is taking are what are needed to save to US economy and the world economy at large.
The Fed’s desire to appear to take bold and concrete steps to stave off economic woes is laudable but sometimes no action is the best action. At the risk of sounding brutal, I would like to turn Marie Antoinette’s famous coinage on its head and say to Bernake & Co “If they don’t have cake, let them eat bread instead”. A little austerity never hurt anyone.
Vibhas Tattu hails from India and is a manufacturing engineer by profession. He has worked in India, USA and now in the United Arab Emirates. Vibhas is interested in Shakespeare, Indian music, poetry (English, Hindi and Marathi) and a new found love of writing.
Tattu has a bachelor’s degree in Production Engineering from the University of Bombay and Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Fellow.
EMAIL: vibhas1@gmail.com
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October 5, 2010
Ecuador – Was It A Coup or Not?
The Fate of President Rafael Correa
by Angie Brenner
 Rafael Correa – December, 2007
Last week’s attempted coup d’état and violence toward Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa by a group of government policeman protesting pay reductions was shocking, yet perhaps not so surprising. Consider this: Prior to Correa’s election in 2006, Ecuador went through eight presidents in ten years.
Elected to a second term in office, Correa, Ecuador’s popular, leftist president, has given Ecuador a sense of stability. A trained economist, he has brought hope to his fellow Ecuadorians by increasing spending on healthcare and standing up against the big oil companies that have dictated the country’s future for decades. He has also steered Ecuador clear of a recession, and the country projects a 2.5 percent growth in 2010.
On September 30, a gun battle broke out in Quito’s central square, the Plaza Grande. Correa was tear-gassed, doused with water, held captive by his own police at a Quito hospital for half a day, and then rescued. His response was to loosen his tie and open his shirt to show that he wasn’t wearing a bullet-proof vest.
He then taunted his foes: “If you want to kill the president, here he is. Kill him, if you want to. Kill him if you are brave enough.”
Later, from the balcony of Carondelet Palace , Correa once again showed his public he was not planning a change of address any time soon. He would lead his country according to the rules of its constitution and they had elected him to do just that. To those involved in the violence, which struck other Ecuadorian cities including Cuenca and Quayaquil, Correa promised ”no pardon or forgiveness.”
The video I watched of Correa on the palace balcony brought back my almost surreal memory of a day nearly three years before when I stood on the verysame balcony with Wild River Review Editor in Chief, Joy Stocke, an entourage of politicos, reporters, interpreters, guards, and one Nobel Prize winner.
However, the circumstances were vastly different.
In December 2007, Stocke and I were invited to Ecuador by Ivonne Baki, current president of the Andean Parliament, to join a week-long delegation of business people and politicians hosting Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi banker and economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for creating a successful micro-credit lending business and founding Grameen Bank.
Mr. Yunus – and the rest of us – were invited to the presidential palace one afternoon where President Correa honored him and pledged government money for micro-lending projects throughout Ecuador.
My head was spinning as I sat in the palace room with its gold brocaded walls, formally dressed guards and politicians. Then, Mr. Yunus graciously gave his talk, one we would hear repeated from dining hall to stadium across the country during the week that followed.
Later, we filed up stairways and outside onto the palace balcony. Correa and Yunus stood center front, Stocke and I sood at the rail to the right of them. Below in the city square a crowd had gathered, some in colorful skirts of the Andean Highlands. Guards on horeseback filed past holding their standards, followed by a marching band playing the national anthem: “The worthy sons of the soil….”
As the crowd cheered, it was so easy on that warm December day in Quito to stand a few feet from the president of Ecuador and believe in a bright future for him and his country.
Last week on that balcony, Corred raised his fist in defiance of those who struck against him, holding on to a tentative peace.
 From the Balcony of Carondelet Palace in the Plaza Grande, Quito, Ecuador
Angie Brenner is the West Coast Editor for Wild River Review.
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September 2, 2010
Long Road to the Promised Land – Middle East Peace Talks Obama Style
 Hosni Mubarak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama, Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah II, Photo Courtesy of the New York Times by Gunter David
Presumably they serve good food at the White House. That is where the-face-to-face talks between Israel and the Palestinians began once again with a dinner on Wednesday evening. I don’t know the menu, but hopefully it started the negotiators on the right course.
Guests of President Obama included Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, and King Abdullah of Jordan and Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt, whose countries have peace treaties with Israel. The latter two symbolize that peace between Israel and the Arabs is possible, but they won’t participate in negotiations.
Marring the new peace talks was a fatal shooting of four Israeli soldiers on the West Bank the day before.
Other problems hindering previous talks include the fact that Abbas governs the West Bank only, while the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million inhabitants are controlled by Hamas, the terrorist organization with a history of firing rockets into Israel. Abbas has not been strong enough in the past, and there are no indications that his status has changed.
On the Israeli side, the major problem is the settlers. Some half-a-million Israelis live in the Palestinian West Bank, so called as it is on the west bank of the river Jordan. Among them are some 130,000 ultra orthodox, who believe that G-d promised the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean to the Jewish people. It was the land where kings David and Solomon ruled, where the 12 tribes of Israel settled following the exodus from Egypt. To any suggestion that they give up the land, they respond with the equivalent of “Hell no, we won’t go.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu, who essentially supports the settlers, under pressure from the U.S. imposed a moratorium on the construction of new settlements. It ends on Sept. 26. Construction of several hundred new homes by Israelis in East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want to establish their capital, is a key issue.
Abbas has threatened to withdraw from the negotiations unless Netanyahu extends the moratorium.
But what will such an extension solve? Won’t it only be a postponement of what appears to be a problem that cannot be resolved? Religious faith dominates on both sides, along with Zionist and Palestinian nationalism.
And then there are the other long-standing issues: the future of Jerusalem, borders of the Palestinian state, and the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, many of which are now in Israel.
There is a history of failed peace talks between the parties. The Nobel peace prize awarded to both sides some years ago underlines the irony of the past.
Will Israel and the Palestinians ever live side-by-side in peace? Consider the following, which Naomi Chazan, a former member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, wrote in January, 2008, after what had been considered successful peace negotiations in Annapolis:
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come full circle. The successful completion of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations following Annapolis, may, finally, complete the process that began with the adoption of the Partition Plan 60 years ago. Truth be told, no better alternative exists.”
Nothing has changed
Gunter David and his parents fled Germany, their native country, as soon as Adolph Hitler rose to power. They settled in Tel Aviv, in what was then Palestine, where Gunter grew up. He subsequently moved to the U.S., where he worked on major newspapers for 25 years. The Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize. He has returned to Israel numerous times, as a newsman and to visit family and friends, and covered the Yom Kippur War in 1973. His second career was as a family therapist and addiction counselor. Dalia, his wife of 57 years, is also from Israel.
ALL ARTICLES BY GUNTER DAVID:
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August 12, 2010
Publishing and Bookstores: Learning Some Things in Sao Paolo
by Michael Shatzkin
(Editor’s Note: Mike Shatzkin’s weekly blog, The Shatzkin Files, sheds light on the world of publishing, where books are headed, and by extension how we’ll read content in the very new future.)
I was struck when I visited Australia three years ago at how the protection of thousands of miles of ocean had kept their book trade looking like ours did three decades ago. Prices of books were very high in stores and there were lots of stores and lots of independent stores. But the biggest moat in the world couldn’t keep the forces of digital change at bay forever. All of the forces of online bookselling, discounting, and ebooks are now hitting Oz, and booksellers are feeling a dramatic impact. When an old publishing salt brought two Australian booksellers in to visit me last May and I was pretty apocalyptic describing what they should expect, they didn’t disagree with me. They were feeling it.
So a purely anecdotal report of the difficulties of one specialist independent in Australia resonates, even though I generally don’t put much truck in one person’s opinion about one entity’s fate.
This week I am in Brazil. My new friend Ricardo Costa, who runs Publish News, a local operation reminiscent of our Publishers Lunch (and who has been translating a post from The Shatzkin Files into Portuguese for his audience weekly for several months) gathered a group of publishers and a bookseller to join me for dinner on Monday night so I could learn a bit about the state of the Brazilian book trade. Because they were not joining us to be put on the record, I’m keeping my dinner companions anonymous.
For many reasons, the situation on the ground in Brazil is much more like Australia three years ago than it is like the US today. There has been very little take up of ebooks. One major reason for that is that there is a paucity of devices. Brazil charges punitive taxes on electronics assembled outside the country, which all ereaders are. The only device that got any play in the market previously was the Cool-er Reader, and that company has gone bust. One of our dinner companions is a bookstore owner (a small but very important chain) that started selling a new ereader yesterday. This e-ink device with no wifi or 3G, requiring (like Sony) that you import to your computer and then transfer to the device, will sell for the equivalent of just under $400. That’s about triple what Kindle is charging US consumers for its new wifi-enabled device.
I got to handle the device. It’s smaller and lighter than a Kindle, with touch-screen capability and a built-in dictionary, and a more solid feel. But at its high price and without the direct connectivity to enable acquiring new books directly into the machine, it is no more than a step on the path to widespread ebook uptake.
Discounting through online resellers has entered the market. (The retailer in the crowd, which has a very successful web operation, refuses to discount his online sales below his store prices. “That would be telling my customers not to visit my stores!”) My dinner companions were concerned about the effects of the discounting. The online resellers get books from publishers totally on consignment (no inventory carrying cost) and are selling at very deep discounts. This inevitably will have negative consequences for brick-and-mortar stores.
As one of my dinner companions, who runs a large publisher, said, “we want to know what happens in the US because it is what will happen in Brazil five or ten years later.” Both he and the bookstore owner could see that the future for stores will get increasingly difficult.
The entire table agreed that retail price maintenance, such as exists in France and Germany but which is almost universally sneered at by the Americans and British, would be a boon to the entire book trade.
One of the party, a children’s book publisher, reported that Mexico had just introduced retail price maintenance. As a result, her company was renegotiating all their terms with retailers and wholesalers in Mexico to take discounts down. And, at the same time, they will be lowering the prices of their books. From her perspective, the prices to the consumer will remain pretty much the same as they were with discounting, her take will remain pretty much the same as it was with the lower prices and lower discounts, and the effective margin to the retailers will also be pretty much unchanged. But the market will be more stable and less subject to control by the biggest players who can afford to be the most aggressive discounters.
This is not the picture that is painted by most powers-that-be and economic experts in the US and the UK.
One thing that became abundantly clear here in Brazil is that epub conversion in smaller languages is going to be a bottleneck. Most of the ebooks available in this market are PDFs because the market is too small to encourage publishers to invest in the conversions. Of course, PDFs don’t deliver nearly as attractive a reading experience. But there aren’t the same resources available for epub conversions in Portuguese that there are in English (and, presumably, in Spanish or French). That is going to slow down adoption of ereading in many parts of the world and, furthermore, tilt those who do use ebooks to read in English rather than their local language so they can get the benefits of reflowed delivery. I’ve seen ebooks as a potential boon to publishers in smaller languages, enabling them to reach a scattered diaspora, but it isn’t going be as effective if putting Welsh or Danish into epub is expensive.
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