In 2011, US primacy in the Middle East died ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jerusalem Post by Barry Rubin - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am This is the end... Of our elaborate plans, the end, Of everything that stands.... No safety or surprise.... There’s danger on the edge of town.... And all the children are insane.... The West is the best.... But you will never follow me.” – “This is the End,” The Doors » Read more

Defining Jews, Defining a Nation: Can Genetics Save Israel? ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Atlantic by Jeff Wheelwright - (Analysis) March 14, 2012 - 12:00am Herzliya, a broad-beached ocean-side resort 10 miles north of Tel Aviv, is booming with construction -- big hotels going up on the bluffs and expensive new bungalows on the bougainvillea-laden streets. Herzliya was named for Theodor Herzl, the 19th-century Zionist visionary whose dream to see the Jewish people resettled in their homeland triumphantly came to pass. » Read more

Palestinian Transformations ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Dar Al-Hayat by Elias Harfoush - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am The times are different for Gaza, and they are different for Hamas. And just as the recent confrontation in the Gaza Strip represented a new test of the ability of Israel’s offensives to inflict human casualties and material damage among the ranks of the Palestinians, as if we needed further Palestinian bloodshed to discover this, it also represented a test for the Islamist movement and for its courageous hesitation to move forward in taking the risk of such a costly confrontation. » Read more

The dangers of the situation in Gaza ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Asharq Alawsat by Emad El Din Adeeb - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am Amidst our preoccupation with the situations in Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Tunisia, the danger of the situation in Gaza seems to have slipped from our memory, even though the current scenario forewarns that a military explosion is likely to start in Gaza and end in southern Lebanon. » Read more

A Fine Line on Title VI ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jewish Daily Forward (Editorial) March 19, 2012 - 12:00am Do Jewish students deserve the same federal civil rights protections as African Americans, women and the disabled in the nation’s schools and universities? The official answer now is in the affirmative, and in principle, that seems only just and fair. After years of lobbying, Jewish groups led by the Zionist Organization of America managed to persuade the Obama administration to extend Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to cover members of religious groups on the basis of shared ethnic characteristics. » Read more

Migron Is Symbol of Broken Promise ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jewish Daily Forward by Nathan Jeffay - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am Jerusalem — To almost every country in the world, all of Israel’s settlements on the occupied West Bank are officially illegal. Israel rejects this view but does consider one group of settlements illegal under its own laws. Yet, less than a handful of these unauthorized outposts have been evacuated since June 2004, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised President George W. Bush to remove them. Of those that were evacuated, most were repopulated within days. » Read more

Netanyahu's contempt for the Holocaust ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz by Avner Cohen - (Opinion) March 19, 2012 - 12:00am In October 2006, Haaretz's weekend magazine asked a number of cultural figures to describe how they would feel if Tel Aviv were to be wiped off the map. This was in response to one of the Israeli anxiety attacks over the non-existent Iranian atom bomb and the declarations made by the Iranian president in that vein. I was surprised that serious people were prepared at all to relate to such a weird and nihilistic question but I was even more surprised that the Haaretz editorial staff had initiated the project. » Read more

Israel is fighting a losing battle over victimhood ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz by Akiva Eldar - (Opinion) March 19, 2012 - 12:00am With regard to A.B. Yehoshua's extraordinary remark - that he had "never heard the Jews analyze the Holocaust as a Jewish failure, which was not anticipated" - I can only wonder where the renowned author was when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waved the "Auschwitz letters"? Yehoshua didn't hear that Netanyahu said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new version of Adolf Hitler? He didn't know that Netanyahu had promised that he would not, under any circumstances, allow Iran to carry out a second Holocaust? » Read more

Iran, Israel and the nuclear diversion ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Los Angeles Times by Sarah Chayes, Amir Soltani - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am The Middle East showdown over Iran's apparent effort to obtain nuclear weapons capability is not entirely about nuclear arms, nor even about regional security. The dispute is, at heart, about power, and preserving it. It's about the governments of two religiously defined nations using nuclear brinkmanship to distract from the legitimate grievances and explosive restiveness of their own populations. » Read more

To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times by Peter Beinart - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am TO believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer. On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all. » Read more