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JERUSALEM — At least one rocket fired from the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt struck the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat overnight, causing alarm but no injuries, police officials said on Thursday.
Residents reported hearing several explosions shortly after midnight, and bomb-disposal experts located one rocket that fell in an open area close to buildings in a residential neighborhood.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli police and border officers swiftly evicted a group of Jewish settlers from a contested house in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron on Wednesday on the orders of the minister of defense, officials said. At the same time, however, the Israeli government signaled strong support for more Jewish settlement in areas captured in the 1967 war.
JERUSALEM — When Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat stares out at his city, the one-time venture capitalist sees fresh opportunity: He believes he can turn Jerusalem into one of the world’s leading tourist destinations, on par with New York, Paris and London.
In a city known as much for its religious strife as its religious sites, this will be no simple task. But Barkat, sounding very much like the businessman he once was, says he has a product that’s easy to market. He confidently predicts he can nearly triple the number of visitors over the next decade.
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- The Palestinian presidency on Wednesday condemned Israel's issuing of tenders for hundreds of new settler homes near Bethlehem.
Israel's Housing Ministry published tenders on Tuesday for 827 new houses in illegal settlement Har Homa, between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- The condition of a woman arrested over her critical writings about President Mahmoud Abbas is deteriorating in isolation, a member of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said Tuesday.
Ismat Abdul Khaliq was seen by doctors late Tuesday before being returned to her cell, said Nihad Abu Ghosh, a member of the syndicate. He said the prosecution is refusing to let her see visitors.
BERLIN (Reuters) -- Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass has attacked Israel as a threat to world peace and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran, in a poem that led one German newspaper to brand him "the eternal anti-Semite."
Grass, 84, a seasoned campaigner for left-wing causes and a critic of Western military interventions such as Iraq, also condemned German arms sales to Israel in his poem "What must be said", published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily on Wednesday.
Israel has asked the United States for assistance estimated at $700 million in order to produce more Iron Dome and Magic Wand missile and rocket defense batteries, sources told Ynet on Wednesday.
The Iron Dome is designed to intercept rockets fired from a relatively short range, while the Magic Wand intercepts missiles fired from a range of at least 70km, including cruise missiles and missiles with ballistic warheads such as the Squd, Shihab and Sejil.
In a move likely to be condemned by the international community, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said that his government planned to transform three West Bank Jewish outposts – Bruchin, Rehalim and Sansana – into new settlements.
All three communities were created on state land over a decade ago, Rehalim in 1991, Sansana in 1997 and Bruchin in 1999, but were never authorized as settlements by the government.
The government last authorized a settlement, Negahot, in 1999.
Occupied Jerusalem, Asharq Al-Awsat – A well-informed source within the Hamas movement informed Asharq Al-Awsat that the internal elections for the Hamas Shura Council and Political Bureau are expected to take place within the next two weeks. The source revealed that in the first phase, members of local Consultative Councils are selected, who in turn vote for the Hamas Shura Council, which ultimately elects the movement’s administrative leadership, the Hamas Political Bureau.
UNITED NATIONS — The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor said Wednesday the war crimes tribunal would allow the Palestinians to sign up if the U.N. General Assembly approves a resolution recognizing Palestine as a non-member observer state.
Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo ruled Tuesday that only internationally recognized states can join the court, and therefore the Palestinian Authority’s bid for membership could not be accepted.
The settlers have been investing special efforts of late to persuade the Israeli public to make its way to numerous tourism sites on the other side of the Green Line. Internet sites of regional councils in the territories and advertisements placed by various nonprofit groups are replete with stories about the wonders of gourmet restaurants, boutique wineries, farms producing high-quality cheeses, and especially the many springs in the region.
Another attempt by the settlers to bend the law in the West Bank to their extremist ideology failed on Wednesday, with the evacuation of the so-called Machpela House. The eviction came after Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that delaying the execution of the Civil Administration's eviction order could ignite the area, in addition to constituting contempt of court and undermining the authority of the military commander and the defense minister. This was an important reminder that the West Bank is not the settlers' state.
In June, Norman Finkelstein will mark 30 years of criticizing Israel. He remembers the exact day - the beginning of the Lebanon war, which ended his indifference to the Middle East's troubles. He'll have a new book coming out - "Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End" - that focuses on Jewish public figures who represent, in his view, the narrative of beautiful Israel that's coming to an end. He is sure to make a lot of people mad again.
After 130 years of Zionist activism, 64 years of statehood, 45 years of occupation, more than 20 years of failed negotiations with the PLO and seven years of disengagement; after seven wars, two intifadas, the rise of Hamas and the specter of anti-Semitic Islamist sentiment sweeping the region, many Israelis have come to the conclusion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simply intractable.
When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu waved copies of the 1944 exchange of letters between the World Jewish Congress and the Roosevelt State Department and said the United States rejected Jewish pleas to bomb Auschwitz, he was drawing a parallel between the Islamists who rule Iran and the Nazis who controlled Germany seven decades ago.
He wanted to leave no doubt about his willingness to attack Iranian nuclear facilities because he is convinced that country is building weapons to carry out its threat to wipe the Jewish state off the map, and he doesn’t care what anyone says.
NEW YORK (JTA) -- As Christians and Jews gather during their respective Easter and Passover holidays, we should recall all that Jews and liberal Protestants in America share and have accomplished together. But pride in the past should not blind us to the danger that this relationship could be derailed by pernicious responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict within certain churches.
Last week Tzipi Livni proved of one of my pet theories of Middle Eastern politics— the more attractive and familiar a public figure is to foreign elites, the thinner their support back home. One of Newsweek's 150 most powerful women in the world was just trounced in Kadima's primaries by Shaul Mofaz, a gray, inarticulate, lifelong soldier (whose media advisors are now working to reshape him into a smiling crusader for social justice). Now it's his turn to try and snag the crucial centrist bloc, one quarter of the Israeli electorate, that wanders from one party to another, looking for a home.
Good morning to the elected leader of Kadima, and congratulations on the impressive victory — notwithstanding your party bieng in its death-throes and irrelevant, a party that should never have risen at all, a party that must die as soon as possible and maybe will do so after the coming national elections.
Peter Beinart's book The Crisis of Zionism has started debates about various things, including whether it's too late for a two-state solution. Beinart's view is that it's not quite too late but is so close to that as to warrant drastic measures--like a boycott of products made in West Bank settlements (or "Zionist BDS," as distinguished from full-on BDS).
My view is if anything more pessimistic. But apparently I should cheer up: After I last expressed that pessimism, fellow Atlantic contributor Zvika Krieger explained that it rests on confusion.
"What Must Be Said" was the title Gunter Grass gave his controversial poem in which he labeled Israel a threat to world peace because of its nuclear arsenal. This was his first mistake: It did not have to be said because it has already been said by many others, in Israel as well.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/24187
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/24187
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/24187
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] https://www.americantaskforce.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/world/middleeast/rocket-from-sinai-lands-near-eilat-israel.html?_r=2&ref=middleeast
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/world/middleeast/israeli-police-evict-jewish-settlers-from-hebron-house.html?ref=middleeast
[8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/ap-interview-jerusalem-mayor-sees-vast-potential-in-tourism/2012/04/05/gIQAVgdkwS_story.html
[9] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=474028
[10] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=473986
[11] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=474135
[12] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4212656,00.html
[13] http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=264892
[14] http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=1&id=29128
[15] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/ap-interview-prosecutor-says-palestinians-could-join-icc-as-a-un-nonmember-observer-state/2012/04/04/gIQA1NDxvS_story.html
[16] http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/springwater-flows-in-the-west-bank-but-who-controls-it-1.422687
[17] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/netanyahu-did-the-right-thing-by-clearing-hebron-outpost-1.422668
[18] http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/focus-u-s-a/norman-finkelstein-bids-farewell-to-israel-bashing-1.422684
[19] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=264853
[20] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=264851
[21] http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/04/03/3092526/op-ed-oppose-church-divestment-from-israel
[22] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/04/the-sort-of-leader.html
[23] http://www.al-monitor.com/cms/contents/articles/politics/2012/04/kadima----where-are-you-headed.html
[24] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/the-two-state-solution-on-its-deathbed/255473/
[25] http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/gunter-grass-poem-is-more-pathetic-than-anti-semitic-1.422674