November, 8th 2010

Middle East News: World Press Roundup

No resolution is imminent in the Rachel Corrie civil trial. Israelis show less interest in military service. Pres. Abbas says Palestinians will decide their future. Israeli police and Bedouins clash at a mosque demolition. The PA says Israel raided thousands of Palestinian homes in October. Stressed-out Gazans suffer from emotional trauma. Israeli artists boycott settlement theaters. Anger at Israel flares during Jordan's election campaign. PLO and Egyptian officials stress the need to end Israeli settlement activity. Israel's wanted list in the West Bank is down to almost zero. Thomas Friedman warns Israelis they are losing American support. VP Biden stresses US support for Israel and opposition to unilateral moves. A Nazareth imam is charged with incitement to terrorism. PLO officials say they will ask the US to recognize a Palestinian state if talks fail. An Israeli filmmaker discovers her Palestinian forebears. Raghida Dergham predicts Pres. Obama will now focus on domestic policies. The Arab News says Israeli officials should be subject to possible arrest in the UK and Rami Khouri says Israel is right to fear international scrutiny. The undertaker (“gravedigger”), an article about Jeffery Feltman, appeared in the Syrian Daily Tishreen.

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For Family of Slain Activist, No End in Sight for Case

HAIFA, Israel — Seven years after an American student, Rachel Corrie, was killed in Gaza by an Israeli military bulldozer she tried to block, becoming a global symbol of the Palestinian struggle, her parents and her older sister sit in an Israeli court in this northern city with two hopes: to confront the men who ran over her and to prove that the army investigation into her death was flawed.

Israel confronts flagging interest in military service

TEL HASHOMER, ISRAEL - Since Israel's founding, the military here has served not just as a defender against outside threats, but as the glue that brings together a patchwork nation of immigrants.

Now, the Israel Defense Forces' position as the country's most venerated institution appears to be slipping. While service is compulsory for most young men and women, a growing minority is avoiding conscription, leaving planners to worry the military won't have the troops it says it needs.

Abbas: We will have final word

Palestinians will have the final word if negotiations with Israel fail, President Mahmoud Abbas said Sunday.

Speaking at the first Sir Bani Yas Forum on Peace and Global Security in Abu Dhabi, Abbas said Palestinians had complied with a number of international resolutions, while Israel had not complied with any. "We met our obligations, but you [Israel] did not, and so we will be discharged from obligations."

Israeli police, Bedouin clash at mosque demolition

Israeli police on Sunday arrested five people protesting the demolition of a mosque in the Bedouin city of Rahat in southern Israel.

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said the protestors had thrown rocks at the police, who were providing security for civil authority workers who were taking down the structure.

The mosque had been built without the necessary permission, and was earmarked for demolition under a court order.

According to Rosenfeld, Rahat inhabitants had rejected compromise proposals to build the mosque in another location.

PA: Israel raided thousands of homes in October

The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Detainees' Affairs said Israeli forces detained 403 Palestinians and raided 2148 homes across the West Bank during October.

In a report released Saturday, the ministry said Israeli soldiers intimidated and assaulted residents, destroying the contents of homes during the raids.

Of those detained, 95 percent had been assaulted in front of their families and were beaten en route to detention centers in Israeli military jeeps.

Stressed out Gazans need therapists, pop pills

JABALYA, Gaza Strip, Nov 8 (Reuters) - If ever there was a little corner of the world where trauma therapists hanging out their shingle should do a boom business, it has to be Gaza.
Take, for example, Samira, a 43-year-old schoolteacher and mother of five who lived too close to a Hamas security complex bombed repeatedly during Israel's December 2008-January 2009 cross-border offensive.

Israel artists boycott new theater in settlement

JERUSALEM — An artists' boycott of a $11 million performing arts center opening Monday in the Jewish settlement of Ariel is giving a new twist to a pressing question — where should Israel's permanent borders run?

Leading Israeli playwrights, actors and artists say they will not cross the "Green Line" — Israel's frontier before it captured the West Bank in 1967 — to perform in the new theater in Ariel, an Israeli enclave of 19,000 people. The artists wrote in a letter explaining the boycott that Ariel was built in the heart of a war-won land to prevent creation of a Palestinian state.

Anger at Israel flares in Jordan election campaign

Frustration with the interminable deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is bleeding over into Jordan, where bitterness at Israel is flowing more freely than ever during campaigning for this week's parliamentary elections.

Behind the anger expressed by candidates and voters lies U.S. ally Jordan's greatest fear: that if peacemaking collapses, Israel will try to force it to take in the residents of the West Bank and stand as the Palestinian state. Recent talk by right-wing Israelis about the "Jordanian option" has only fueled the belief here that this is Israel's ultimate plan.

PLO official: Egypt, Palestinians stress to halt Jewish settlement

RAMALLAH, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Palestinian leadership and Egypt have agreed that any initiative to push forward peace talks between Palestinians and Israel should base on halting Jewish settlement in the occupied lands, a Palestinian official said Monday.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization ( PLO) official, denied reports that Egypt's recent efforts could ignore the Palestinian demand on settlement freeze in the West Bank.

Egypt "wants a solution to all final-status issues, and not to seek a partial one," Abed Rabbo told Voice of Palestine Radio.

West Bank most-wanted terrorist list has dwindled to almost nil

There is not a single security suspect being sought by Israel in the northern West Bank for the first time since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. In the southern West Bank, there are only a few names on the security establishment's wanted list. The situation is a reflection of both the improved security situation in the West Bank and the increasing cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces.

Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel

[First in a series. In part, a journal of a speaking tour hosted by J Street on the West Coast, and in part, reasons why I threw out my prepared remarks before I even got there.]

Ahead of a New Orleans address to the General Assembly [GA] of the Jewish Federations of North America, sources quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as having said that there is fundamental support for Israel within the United States.

"We may have lost Thomas Friedman, but I don't think we lost America," Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

Biden: US opposes unilateral moves

US Vice President Joe Biden backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, shortly after meeting with him in New Orleans, Louisiana, but reminded him of the need to advance the peace process with the Palestinians.

Addressing an audience of thousands of Jews, Biden called on Israel and the Palestinians to avoid any unilateral moves, and stressed that although the United States was committed to Israel's security and would do all it could to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon – peace between Israel and its neighbors must be guaranteed in the long run.

Nazareth imam charged with incitement to terrorism

Cleared for publication: An indictment has been filed with the Nazareth Magistrate's Court against Nazem Mahmoud Salim Sahfe, 45, Imam of the Shihab Al-Din Mosque in Nazareth, who allegedly used his sermons to promote radical global jihad messages and to call upon his deciples to hurt non-Muslims.

The imam was arrested after one of the murderers of cab driver Yefim Weinstein, who was murdered in 2009, said he was motivated to commit the crime by Sahfe's sermons. Sahfe is being charged with incitement to violence and support of a terrorist organization.

Erekat: PA will ask US to recognize state if talks fail

The Palestinian Authority plans to ask the US to recognize a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in the event that "Netanyahu and the Israelis decide to choose settlements over peace," Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said in an interview with Army Radio aired on Monday.

"If the Americans can't do that," added Erekat, "we may turn to the UN Security Council."

Erekat stated that while the Security Council cannot legally declare a Palestinian state, its permanent members can call on other nations to individually recognize a Palestinian state.

My family, the enemy

Back when peace did not seem such an impossibility, it was fashionable to cast the Middle East conflict as a family feud. Jews and Arabs were held to be if not brothers then long-lost cousins – the descendants, of Isaac and Ishmael, perhaps, or of Jacob and Esau – who would one day end their estrangement in an embrace. After the collapse of the Oslo peace process, a second intifada and a lethal military offensive in Gaza, you don't hear that kind of talk so much these days.

Dispatches From New Orleans on the JFNA General Assembly

Vice President Joe Biden reaffirmed the Obama administration’s support for Israel in an address to the opening plenary of the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America. At a convention marked by its focus on defending Israel, Biden spoke at length about his personal ties to the Jewish state and its leaders, and emphasized the administration’s support for JFNA’s newly announced efforts to combat what it calls the delegitimization of Israel.

After the Midterm Elections: A Different Man in the White House!

New York-Domestic affairs, and especially the economy, will remain the prime concern of US President Barack Obama, who suffered a historic defeat at the midterm elections this week. And US public opinion will remain angry, seeking change and demanding that their government take every measure that would place “America first”.

UK and Israel

During his recent visit to Israel, British Foreign Secretary William Hague believed the stalled Palestinian-Israeli negotiations would top the agenda. But Tel Aviv was more concerned with what Britain planned to do about the prospect of Israeli officials being arrested in Britain to face war crimes charges brought by pro-Palestinian campaigners.

Israel is right to be concerned

We can learn much from the Israeli government’s decision this week to suspend a special strategic dialog with the United Kingdom because of concerns that Israeli officials could be arrested and indicted with crimes against humanity in the UK, according to a British law that provides for “universal jurisdiction” in such cases, i.e., a suspect of any country can be charged, detained and tried in a British court even if the alleged crimes occurred in a third country and did not include British citizens among the victims.

The Undertaker

Jeffery Feltman deserves to be called an undertaker. He has excelled in this profession ever since he was a US Ambassador in Lebanon and he has gotten better at it since he became an Assistant to Secretary Hilary Clinton. ‘Undertaker’ in this sense doesn’t refer to a humanitarian mission to bury dead people, but rather a dirty profession of killing innocent people and burying them alive. In politics an undertaker is a man who imitates the spider in setting traps for its victim. As many people know, Lebanon makes an ideal environment for spiders.

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