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The Palestinian Authority has until July 26 to come up with a plan on how it intends to pay salaries, without interruption, to more than 150,000 of its civil and military personnel. Otherwise, the employees may go on an open-ended general strike.
This was the warning the Union of Public Employees conveyed to the Palestinian Authority on Monday following a meeting of its board members to discuss the authority's financial crisis and its claim that it may not be able to pay salaries anymore.
MADRID (AFP) -- Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez told visiting President Mahmoud Abbas Tuesday that Madrid backs efforts to create an independent Palestinian state, the government said.
Abbas met with Jimenez and Spain's King Juan Carlos at the start of a two-day visit to the country aimed at drumming up support for United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state.
HEBRON (Ma’an) – Palestinian Authority premier Salam Fayyad said Tuesday that Hebron's old city sets an "example for human civilization in all ages, and an ideal for steadfastness and defiance."
Residents reject seggregation, 'judaisation,' and siege, and it "is time its people enjoy freedom and independence,” Fayyad said while inaugurating an international conference on historic cities.
The conference is part of the celebrations of the 15th anniversary of the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee. It is held in association with Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron.
RAMALLAH, West Bank, July 20 (Reuters) - Jailed leader Marwan Barghouti has called on Palestinians to stage mass rallies in September in support of a diplomatic bid to gain U.N. membership for a state of Palestine.
Barghouti, a figure widely respected among many Palestinians, said taking the statehood quest to the United Nations was part of a new strategy that would open the door to "peaceful, popular resistance".
GAZA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian observers believe that the Gaza Strip may witness more escalation of violence soon between Israel and Gaza militant groups following around one week of tit-for-tat escalation that the coastal enclave had witnessed between the two sides.
During this week, Israeli F-16 war jets carried out a series of intensive airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, which targeted smuggling tunnels underneath the borders between the enclave and Egypt, where three Palestinians were killed and 25 others, most of them civilians, were wounded.
The European Union on Tuesday expressed "great disappointment" in a tender issued by the Construction and Housing Ministry this week for the construction of 6,900 housing units, including some 300 units in the settlements of Beitar Illit and Karnei Shomron.
Maja Kocijancic, spokeswoman for the EU's foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, said that such acts go against the international community's ongoing efforts to form a peaceful solution which will maintain Israel's safety and the Palestinians' right for an independent state.
Nabil Amr calls on Palestinian leadership to delay statehood plan by a year out of fear it will harm relations with US and EU.
The Palestinian Authority leadership has climbed a very high tree with its plan to ask the UN to recognize a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines in September, Nabil Amr, member of the PLO Central Council and a former PA minister, said on Tuesday.
“The leadership does not have any guarantees that it would be able to climb down safely from the tree,” he cautioned, advising the PA to delay the statehood by another year.
Recent protests in Israel highlight the differences between the country's religious and secular Jewish communities.
Hundreds of right-wing Jews have taken part in demonstrations outside Israel's Supreme Court over the brief detention of two prominent rabbis in the last few weeks.
There were clashes with police on horseback on the nearby Jerusalem streets and several arrests were made.
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Pro-Israel leaders in the United States, Britain and Australia are warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp.
Budapest — On the boat sailing along the Danube River, Israeli and Palestinian peace activists seemed closer than ever. Sipping Hungarian wine on deck and sharing laughs, diplomats, prominent activists and journalists from both sides formed a close pact, joking over their own roles in what is widely known as the peace industry.
But while the industry remains vibrant, peace has never seemed further away.
GAZA CITY, Gaza - After marking its inaugural opening on Tuesday, the three-story mall in Gaza City now offers products running the gamut. The supermarket has nearly all possible commodities. Shoe stores with popular brand names, such as Nike, Adidas and Fox, sit next to clothing shops displaying window mannequins with hot miniskirts and vibrantly colored t-shirts.
The sound and the fury of Israel's anti-boycott law has not yet died down: Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party is reviving its push for a Knesset committee that will investigate ‘leftist organizations’; for the time being, the initiative to give the Knesset a veto right to reject candidates for the Supreme Court on the basis of their political views has been blocked, but it may well resurface.
The Quartet – the US, Russia, the EU, and the U.N. – this week announced that it hasn’t yet found the way to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. And according to Haaretz, Israeli and Palestinian sources concur that intensive US efforts to create an agreed outline for renewed negotiations have failed.
Not many in the Middle East care about the plight of Christians.They are marginalized on both sides of the Arab-Israeli line.
But regardless of the reasons, the numbers of Christians have dwindled over the years, in part because Christians can more easily emigrate to Western - predominantly Christian – nations.
In Jordan, one of the Arab countries where Christians feel safest, a coalition including Muslim and Christian clergymen, politicians and journalists are launching a campaign to convince Christians to stay.
If the goal of the new Israeli law banning boycotts was actually to prevent boycotts... things aren't exactly going according to plan.
The board of Americans for Peace Now has unanimously endorsed a boycott of products made in the settlements.
Why? Well, it has nothing to do with the settlements. The group says it's boycotting settlement products in order to protest the anti-boycott law.
Here's the statement from APN's president and CEO Debra DeLee:
Confirming what was exclusively reported by Asharq al-Awsat last Friday, the Syrian regime announced the day before yesterday its formal recognition of the Palestinian state. It comes as one of the last Arab states to grant this recognition, and state number 118 internationally. So why has the Syrian regime recognized the Palestinian state now?
No one should be surprised by the Israeli Knesset's decision to suspend Palestinian Member of Parliament Haneen Zoabi due to her participation in last year's bloody Gaza Flotilla.
The Knesset Ethics Committee, which investigated her flotilla participation, is punishing Zoabi for exercising her legitimate right of political activism. Essentially, it is silencing an Arab member for representing her constituency. The bigger picture reveals that it is trying to wipe out any Arab presence in the Israeli government.
The Israeli parliament’s vote last week making it a crime to support any boycott of Israel, including products from Israeli settlements in occupied Arab lands, has rightly generated considerable debate about what this means for Israel, Zionism and Israelis.
Following President Barack Obama's May 19 speech on the Middle East at the Department of State, The New York Review of Books (NYRB) published a letter that had been presented to the president this past January by a number of prominent, former, senior, U.S. government officials. The signatories to the letter urged the president to present to the parties in the Israel-Palestine conflict clear parameters to frame negotiations for a two-state peace agreement, and it suggested six key components for such a framework.
The creation of the Quartet by US President George W. Bush was a unique and interesting attempt to develop an effective international mechanism that is not subject to the problematic rules of the game of the United Nations. The new forum was supposed to expand America's wingspan without the burden of the Security Council and the nearly-200 members of the General Assembly.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/20218
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/20218
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/20218
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] http://www.americantaskforce.org/atfp_sixth_annual_gala
[6] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/07/palestinian-territories-financial-crisis-causing-public-concern.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BabylonBeyond+%28Babylon+%26+Beyond+Blog%29
[7] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=406767
[8] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=406721
[9] http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/barghouti-urges-palestinian-march-to-back-un-bid/
[10] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-07/20/c_13995935.htm
[11] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4097672,00.html
[12] http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=230151
[13] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14168618
[14] http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/07/19/3088599/pro-israel-leaders-watch-warily-as-murdoch-defends-empire
[15] http://forward.com/articles/139986/
[16] http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/478898
[17] http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/the-glue-holding-netanyahu-s-coalition-hatred-for-liberal-values-1.374220
[18] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=230112
[19] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=230114
[20] http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/article/2011/07/19/3088617/americans-for-peace-now-well-boycott-the-anti-boycott-law-by-boycotting-settlement-products
[21] http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=25954
[22] http://gulfnews.com/opinions/editorials/more-evidence-of-israeli-racism-1.840380
[23] http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2011/Jul-20/It-sure-looks-and-smells-like-apartheid.ashx#axzz1Se406HqA
[24] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-siegman/elliott-abrams-complaint_b_901816.html
[25] http://www.bitterlemons.org/inside.php?id=116
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