March 19th

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

Close encounters of the unwanted kind ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz by Avi Issacharoff - March 19, 2012 - 12:00am "At the demonstration today in Kafr a-Dik, I noticed looks and finger-pointing from the shabab (nickname for young Palestinians ) that made me feel some uncomfortable" wrote an Israeli leftist activist recently, referring to a West Bank protest last month. "There was some 'accidental' touching, and some incidents in which people called me a 'slut'...it was a very unpleasant experience," the activist wrote to her friends at Anarchists Against the Wall, which holds pro-Palestinian protests at Kafr a-Dik and other places in the West Bank. » Read more

Israeli textbooks foster hate, says author ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The National by Vita Bekker - March 19, 2012 - 12:00am TEL AVIV // One asserts that Israel's Palestinian citizens shun modernisation and are building houses illegally. Another alleges the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank steals water from Israel. And elsewhere, that Palestinians have been a "terrifying demographic problem" for Israel. Such statements are part of mainstream schoolbooks in Israel that teach an "anti-Palestinian" approach in a bid to prepare Jewish children to be aggressive towards Palestinians once they serve in the army, according to a new book. » Read more

UN: Settlers taking over Palestinian-owned springs ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jerusalem Post by Tovah Lazaroff, Sharon Udasin - March 19, 2012 - 12:00am Amid the sprawling olive groves that surround Ein Al Ariq – or Ein HaGvura – outside of Nablus, Jamal Daraghmeh recalled the days of the 1970s, when he and fellow community members used to come to the basin to collect water for their village drinking needs and livestock. “We [now] have access only after coordination for the olive harvest, once a year,” Daraghmeh, the mayor of nearby village al Luban al Sharqiya, told reporters during a United Nations field tour of the area last week. Information from the tour was embargoed until Monday. » Read more

Israeli official: Iranian military experts operating in Gaza, Sinai ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz by Avi Issacharoff - March 19, 2012 - 12:00am Iranian military experts are active in the Gaza Strip and in Sinai, according to a high-ranking official in Jerusalem. The official said the Iranians entered the areas via Sudan and Egypt, and added that some of the rocket-launching systems in Gaza were manufactured under Iranian supervision. The senior source also claimed that Islamic Jihad continued to fire rockets at Israel even after the recent cease-fire was announced because the Iranians pressured that organization, and the popular resistance groups, to continue acting against Israel. » Read more