February 6, 2012

Middle East News: World Press Roundup

NEWS: Hamas and Fatah sign an agreement that will apparently allow Pres. Abbas to also serve as PM, although it's not clear when this would take effect. Human Rights Watch says Israel's policies are denying thousands of Palestinians residency rights. PM Netanyahu will address the AIPAC conference next month. The last remaining member of Hamas' politburo leaves Damascus. In Israel, chatter about a possible attack on Iran grows, but Pres. Obama says he doesn't believe Israel has made any such decision. Palestinian villagers escort a stranded Israeli soldier to safety. The PLO will submit a list of proposed world heritage sites to UNESCO. An Israeli pro-peace group is banned from leading tours of occupied Hebron. COMMENTARY: Akiva Eldar says Israel could broker a nuclear-free Middle East, but it won't. Eliezer Yaari says Palestinian MKs are maintaining a shameful silence on violence in Syria. Susan Hattis Rolef says Israeli students should visit Hebron, and Jeff Barak says they need to see both sides of the story there. Amir Ofek denies Israel mistreats Palestinian children. Ben White says Israel won't allow equality for its Palestinian citizens. Tim Llewellyn memorializes the late Palestinian journalist Tewfik Mishlawi. David Ignatius says US officials are genuinely worried about a potential Israeli attack against Iran. Stuart Littlewood says Palestinians need higher caliber leaders. Azriel Bermant looks at Pres. Peres' new book about David Ben-Gurion. Ha'aretz says Palestinian citizens are not enemies of the state. Elyte Baykun says it is pointless for Palestinians to negotiate with an Israeli government that continues seizing land for settlements.

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Abbas to head unity government as factions sign agreement

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- President Abbas and Hamas chief Khalid Mashaal penned an agreement in Qatar on Monday which will see the Fatah leader head a unity government.

The agreement stipulates that the current President will head an interim government to prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections.

It also included agreements on reforming the Palestinian National Council and activating the PLO for the next elections, Palestine TV said.

Israel 'denied residency to thousands of Palestinians'

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- Israeli policies have arbitrarily denied thousands of Palestinians the right to live in or travel to and from the West Bank and Gaza, an international rights group said Sunday.

“Israel’s control over the population registry has significantly reduced the registered Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, probably by hundreds of thousands of people,” the report by Human Rights Watch said.

Israeli premier to visit US to address lobby

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office says he will visit the U.S. next month for the annual conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby.

A statement by Netanyahu's office Sunday said the prime minister would speak at the conference.

It was not immediately clear if Netanyahu would meet U.S. President Obama during his visit.

The visit comes at a time of deadlock in Israel-Palestinian talks and growing international concern that Israel could soon launch an attack on Iran's nuclear program.

Final member of Damascus-based Hamas politburo leaves Syria

A senior member of the Hamas movement politburo, Imad el-Alami, previously based in Syria, returned to the Gaza Strip on Sunday.

Hamas sources said he was the last remaining member of the movement's Damascus-based politburo to leave Syria.

Hamas decided to leave Syria in order not to be seen as endorsing the regime of President Bashar Assad in his bloody crackdown against his own people.

When Talk of War Transcends Idle Chatter

JERUSALEM — Israelis like to say that when it comes to military and security operations, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know. But the intense and increasingly public debate about whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities is challenging that piece of conventional wisdom.

The standard view has been that successful attacks rely on secrecy and surprise, so the more talk there is about an operation, the less likely it will occur.

No Israeli Decision on Iran Attack, Obama Says

President Obama said Sunday that he did not believe Israel had made a decision on whether to attack Iran to disrupt its nuclear program and that diplomacy remained the “preferred solution” to resolving the standoff over what Western leaders believe is Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Palestinian aids Israeli soldier left behind in raid

JERUSALEM, Feb 3 (Reuters) - An Israeli soldier stranded after a raid in occupied territory was escorted to safety by a Palestinian man in the same village the troops had targeted, witnesses and media reports said.

The Israeli military said Friday a batallion commander had been suspended from duties for the soldier having been abandoned on enemy turf in the raid this week, an infraction which Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz saw as a "serious incident".

PA to submit Israeli sites to World Heritage List

Failure to make progress during the latest round of talks between the Palestinians and Israel led the Palestinian leadership to examine new ways in which to gain recognition in the international arena.

One such effort is focused on submitting nominations of heritage sites – both on Palestinian and Israeli territory – for inscription on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

The Palestinian Authority was admitted as a full member of UNESCO in October 2011, which enables it to make bids for historic monuments and locations to be classified as World Heritage Sites.

Pro-Peace Group Barred From Leading Hebron Tours

Tel Aviv — A year ago, Israel’s Education Ministry launched a program to encourage schools to visit Jewish sites in the occupied West Bank town of Hebron, drawing fire from doves who charged the ministry with bringing politics into school trips. The doves’ effort to stop the program failed.

Having failed to beat them, a dovish group of army veterans sought recently to join them. But on January 28, the police informed the Hebrew University High School that members of the dovish organization Breaking the Silence would be barred from joining its students on their Hebron tour the next day.

Israel can clear Mideast of nukes, it just won't

Palestinians are being regularly and illegally barred from reaching Dead Sea beaches in the occupied West Bank, according to a Supreme Court petition filed by Israel's leading civil rights organisation.

The Association of Civil Rights (Acri) in Israel is challenging what it says is the frequently imposed ban by the military on Palestinians seeking to swim or relax at beaches in the northern Dead Sea. The salt-saturated sea is the only open water accessible to Palestinians from the otherwise landlocked West Bank.

Syria crisis reveals hypocrisy of Israel's Arab MKs

More than 300 people were murdered in Syria by their own government over the weekend, killed by tank, cannon and mortar fire. Their homes were destroyed and hundreds still remain buried under the ruins. There's a long trail of blood behind these numbers, flickering pictures of small children being thrown from windows and video taken with a cellphone of a man walking, a shot being heard and the man falling to the ground.

Students should visit Hebron

Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s March 2011 decision to initiate a program whereby students from national and national- religious schools visit Hebron and its environs, exposing the students to the historical connection of the Jewish people to “the Land of the Patriarchs,” was without doubt a legitimate one.

Reality Check: Visit both sides of Hebron

One of my regrets, despite having lived in Israel for more than quarter of a century, is never having visited Hebron. I can still remember the lessons in heder about the Cave of the Patriarchs, which the Bible relates was bought by Abraham for 400 shekels as a burial place for his wife, Sarah, and where the religious believe Abraham himself, and his son and grandson, Isaac and Jacob, alongside their wives (except for Jacob’s second wife Rachel) are also buried.

Israel does not mistreat detained Palestinian children

Your special report looks at allegations that Israel's military justice system mistreats Palestinian children who have been arrested for throwing stones.

"Many are exhausted from sleep deprivation. Day after day they are fettered to the chair, then returned to solitary confinement. In the end, many sign confessions that they later say were coerced," you state. But you omit the horrific nature of the atrocities that minors, some as young as 12, can be arrested for.

Equality for Palestinians? Israel won't have it

The presence of a few Palestinian members in the Knesset (MKs) is often touted as a sign of Israel's robust democracy. Yet elected representatives of the Palestinian community inside Israel face growing harassment by the state, by fellow MKs and the media.

On Monday, the trial of MK Said Naffaa, from the Balad party, opened in Nazareth. Naffaa is charged with "travelling illegally to an enemy state, assisting in organising a visit to an enemy state, and being in contact with a foreign agent" – all relating to a trip he made to Syria as part of a Druze delegation in 2007.

Tewfik Mishlawi obituary

Tewfik Mishlawi, who has died aged 76, was a father-figure and guru to at least three generations of journalists who went to the Middle East. They live in eternal gratitude to him and his daily digest of translation from the local and regional Arabic press and his analytical explorations of what was going on.

Is Israel preparing to attack Iran?

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran militarily over the next few months.

Urgently Palestinians need leaders of high caliber

Did anyone know? Did Western media care?

No. Not until reports appeared that Jewish community leaders cancelled a meeting with him after intervention by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Office and Israel's embassy in London, and Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi condemned the move as “seeking to suppress and manipulate Jewish public opinion.”

It was also typical of Netanyahu's “persistent efforts” to prevent dialogue, she said, according to the Palestinian Ma'an news agency.

David Ben-Gurion's legacy, through Shimon Peres' eyes

Ben-Gurion: A Political Life
by Shimon Peres, with David Landau
Schocken Books, 224 pages, $25.95

Israeli Arabs are citizens, not enemies of the state

"As a community," Shin Bet security service chief Yoram Cohen said this week, "Arab Israelis are not a target of Shin Bet. They are not a fifth column and we do not view them as such." He also presented data which showed that Israeli Arabs were involved in three attacks during the past year, adding that "the number of those involved in terrorism is not large. We arrested 20-30 Israeli Arabs during the past year, compared to 2,000 Palestinians in Judea and Samaria."

What would you do?

Israel is blaming the Palestinians for putting "preconditions" on peace talks by insisting on a settlement freeze before returning to direct negotiations. They say that Palestinians have negotiated for the past twenty years without this condition, so why demand it now?

But the PLO says that is precisely the point. They have been negotiating in good faith with the Israelis for the past 20 years without first insisting on a settlement freeze and look where it has gotten them.

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