March 27th

Palestinian Authority faces economic woes, public anger as statehood efforts lag ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Washington Post by Karin Brulliard - March 26, 2012 - 12:00am RAMALLAH, West Bank — Even as attempts to end the Israeli occupation have idled in recent years, Palestinians and their international backers have hailed the West Bank’s expanding economy as one critical step on the path to statehood. Now the Palestinian Authority is mired in financial crisis, and there is a growing sentiment here that economic development efforts intended to lay the groundwork for independence have backfired. » Read more

It could happen ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Bitterlemons by Yossi Alpher - (Opinion) March 27, 2012 - 12:00am Two primary actors that are not candidates for dismantling the PA are Israel and the United States. True, Israel knowingly endangers the PA when it withholds monthly tax and excise transfers--as it did several months ago and as several Israeli government ministers are threatening once again. But most Israeli officials understand they need the PA nearly as much as Palestinians do. » Read more

Without a remedy, it is possible ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Bitterlemons by Ghassan Khatib - (Opinion) March 26, 2012 - 12:00am Despite the many statements and various discussions about the possibility that the Palestinian Authority would dissolve itself, the real chance of this happening is almost nil. What is a serious possibility, however, is that the Palestinian Authority would collapse--not as a desired or planned event, but as the result of difficult economic and political obstacles facing the Palestinian people and their leadership. » Read more

Israel: Ties to U.N. Rights Council Cut ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Associated Press March 27, 2012 - 12:00am Israel suspended its working relations with the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday and will prevent a United Nations team from entering Israel or the West Bank for a planned investigation of Jewish settlements, the Foreign Ministry said. Israel accuses the council of having an anti-Israel bias. Israeli leaders were angered by the council’s adoption of a resolution last week that condemned settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and by its plans for a fact-finding mission to investigate the settlements.

Justices Decline to Say if Jerusalem-Born Americans Can Claim Israeli Birthplace ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times by John H. Cushman - March 26, 2012 - 12:00am WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a lower court to decide whether Congress has the authority to allow Americans born in Jerusalem to claim Israel as their birthplace on their passports. The decision postpones resolution of a long-running dispute between Congress and the executive branch over the power to set foreign policy, in this case the highly fraught issue of whether to formally recognize Israel’s claim that Jerusalem is its capital. » Read more

Draw the Line: How Israel Erases Itself ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Beast by Gershom Gorenberg - (Opinion) March 26, 2012 - 12:00am One day in the late 1980s, my wife and I visited a staffer at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for an off-the-record conversation. The walls of his office were decorated with large maps produced, he mentioned, by the CIA. One showed the West Bank, with the border between it and Israel precisely depicted. Our careful journalistic distance from the interviewee evaporated. We shamelessly begged him for a copy, which he politely gave us. » Read more

Israelis Fear Blame For US-Iran War ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Al-Monitor by Barbara Slavin - (Opinion) March 27, 2012 - 12:00am A thread of anxiety ran through a conference of liberal American Jews and Israelis Sunday [March 25]. The worry: that Israel would bear the blame for any military confrontation between the United States and Iran. Retired brigadier general Shlomo Brom, a former director of strategic planning for the Israeli Defense Forces General Staff, told an audience at the J-Street convention that he had participated in talks with the George W. Bush administration before it attacked Iraq in 2003. » Read more

A settlement boycott can work ATFP World Press Roundup Article from NOW Lebanon by Hussein Ibish - (Opinion) March 27, 2012 - 12:00am Peter Beinart’s recent call in the New York Times for Jewish Americans to boycott Israeli settlement goods has been met with angry responses from many Jewish Americans. This includes some who are opposed to the settler movement. The most important of these objections hold that a boycott cannot work because Jewish Americans won’t go along with such a program and there isn’t much to boycott anyway. Both arguments hold little water. » Read more

March 26th

Show, Don't Tell: Why the Apartheid Analogy Falls Flat ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Beast by Hussein Ibish - (Opinion) March 26, 2012 - 12:00am A series of recent articles have pointlessly debated whether or not Israel can accurately be described as “an apartheid state.” But the problem with the apartheid analogy is less its inaccuracy, and more that, however emotionally appealing some people may find it, it’s just not useful in ending the occupation and advancing the Palestinian cause. » Read more

Israel's Moral Peril ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Alan Wolfe - (Opinion) March 25, 2012 - 12:00am In the past few years, a trickle of dissent with respect to Israel has turned into a running stream. Books, articles, and Web sites critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, its acquiescence in the messianic designs of its settlers, its foreign-policy decisions on Gaza, Iran, and much more, and the increasing influence of the ultra-Orthodox over the character of its domestic life have begun to appear in significant numbers in America. Some, but not all, of these efforts, moreover, come from writers unused to being in the critical camp. » Read more