April 12, 2012

Middle East News: World Press Roundup

NEWS: The Quartet urges an immediate resumption of negotiations and the delivery of pledged aid to the Palestinians. The US will be releasing $147 million in aid to the Palestinians, overriding congressional opposition. Palestinians reiterate their demand for a settlement freeze. Israel says it plans to send its own letter to Pres. Abbas. Palestinians say 3 have been injured in an attack by settlers near Nablus. Another Palestinian prisoner held by Israel begins a hunger strike. MK Tibi threatens a lawsuit against Amb. Oren for suggesting he supports suicide bombing. The Media Line looks at the role of women in the Israeli military. Israel deports a Palestinian man to Gaza even though he faces possible execution there for “collaboration.” The PA blames Hamas for the Palestinian financial crisis. COMMENTARY: Former Pres. Carter says it is vital the world doesn't give up on Middle East peace. The LA Times says Israel declaring Gunter Grass persona non grata because of a poem is the kind of reaction one would have expected from Iran. Anshel Pfeffer says Egypt's major military deployment in Sinai hasn't changed much. Daniel Gordis defends “Jewish tribalism” in Israel. Uri Savir says Israel's go it alone attitude on security won't work anymore. George Hishmeh says a newly released letter by David Ben-Gurion shows he anticipated the need to drive out Palestinians long before the 1948 war. Arron David Miller says it's extremely unlikely a second-term Pres. Obama would choose to heavily pressure Israel. Hanan Ashrawi says Palestinians in Jerusalem need freedom, not Israeli permits. Jerome Segal says Palestinians should pursue the creation of a new UN Special Committee on Palestine. Hussein Ibish says just because he supports peace with Israel based on ending the occupation and creating a Palestinian state doesn't make him a “Zionist.”

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Middle East mediators seek to revive peace talks

WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) - Middle East peace mediators on Wednesday criticized Israeli settlement building and called on donors to meet aid pledges to the Palestinians as they sought to revive moribund peace talks.

The so-called Quartet - the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States - said they stood behind their Sept. 23, 2011, call for the parties to reach a peace deal by the end of 2012, an objective that seems increasingly remote.

Clinton Overrules Republican Lawmaker's Hold on Palestinian Aid

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is allowing U.S. funds to flow to the West Bank and Gaza despite a hold by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a rare display of executive-branch authority that angered the key lawmaker concerned about protecting her congressional oversight role.

Palestinians spurn Netanyahu’s invitation to resume talks, demand settlement freeze

JERUSALEM — The Palestinians have spurned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest invitation to resume peace talks, insisting the Israelis freeze settlement construction first.

Netanyahu on Wednesday proposed to start direct talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, without any preconditions. The call followed an appeal from international mediators. Negotiations broke down in late 2010.

Israel plans letter to Abbas on potential peace deal

JERUSALEM, April 11 (Reuters) - Israel will submit a letter to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas outlining a position for a future peace deal, and proposing talks be held at a higher level than planned, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said on Wednesday.

The statement said Netanyahu would "propose raising the level of talks to hold them directly with Abbas", a suggestion Abbas has rejected in the past unless Israel stopped building settlements on West Bank land Palestinians seek for a state.

PA official: 3 injured in Nablus settler attack

NABLUS (Ma'an) -- Three people were injured by settlers on Thursday in the northern West Bank village of Yanun, a PA official said.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official who monitors settlement activities in the northern West Bank, told Ma'an that settlers threw rocks and physically assaulted villagers who were tending their land in Nablus.

Five villagers were arrested by Israeli forces and taken to an unknown destination, Daghlas said.

Hamas commander in solitary confinement goes on huger strike

RAMALLAH, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A Hamas commander who received the longest sentence from an Israeli court started a hunger strike Thursday, protesting against his solitary confinement, local sources said.

Abdullah Al-Barghouti, 41, told his lawyer about the strike and said he will end it when the Israeli Prison Service returns him to the regular rooms, said a statement by the Palestinian Prisoner's Club.

Al-Barghouti, head of Hamas' armed wing in the West Bank, also wanted his family members who lives in Jordan, to be granted permission to visit him regularly.

Israeli Arab MK threatens to file libel suit against envoy to U.S.

Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi submitted an official complaint to the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, following an article by Israel's envoy to the U.S. Michael Oren, according to which Tibi had retained his position as deputy Knesset speaker despite his support of suicide bombers.

In an article published last week in the Foreign Policy magazine, titled "Israel's Resilient Democracy," Oren claimed that Israel's Arab citizens enjoyed equal rights, and that Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion emphasized that Arab citizens must be allowed to vote and be elected to the Knesset.

Israel’s Defense Establishment: Overmanned?

Israel is one of just a few countries that subjects its women to mandatory draft and has a female major-general sitting on the army’s general staff. Until recently, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the head of the parliamentary opposition were both women.

From appearances, it would seem that women have a respectable role in Israeli establishment. But appearances can be misleading.

Israel expels 'Palestinian collaborator' back to Gaza

Israel deported a Palestinian man to Gaza even though he faced almost certain execution there if caught by Hamas, which has charged him with spying for Israel, the man's lawyer said.

Details of the case emerged just days after Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza, hanged three Palestinian men, one of whom had been convicted of the identical charge – collaboration with Israel.

Palestinian Authority blames Gaza for deficit mess

Paying for the upkeep of the Gaza Strip while its political rival actively blocks revenues flowing back is taking its toll on the deficit-racked Palestinian Authority.

A barrage of mutual accusations in recent weeks has driven Hamas and Fatah ever further apart as stalled efforts at reconciliation and economic stagnation have jangled nerves on both sides.

Crippling power cuts in the small coastal enclave have only added to the acrimony and lifted the lid on often opaque Palestinian funding.

Don't Give Up on Mideast Peace

The current focus of leaders in Washington and Jerusalem on Iran has obscured the near-death of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and the inevitable catastrophe toward which Israel is now moving.

Israel's poetry critics

The people in Israel and Germany who are most outraged by Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass' latest work have one thing in common: They think it's ridiculous, and possibly anti-Semitic, for Grass to assert a moral equivalency between Israel and Iran. Yet by overreacting to Grass' criticism, Israeli officials are acting like, well, Iranians.

Egypt's army fills Sinai, but business runs as usual

Sinai, EGYPT - A bearded Bedouin approached a cab on the main street of Rafah, in Egypt. Right next to the taxi, at either end of the narrow street, were two armored personnel carriers and a squad of Egyptian army soldiers in full combat gear.

A Dose of Nuance: Peter Beinart's mis-identity crisis

Peter Beinart is right. The relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state is indeed in crisis. Beinart and his title are just wrong about what the crisis is. What we face, as his book accidentally demonstrates, is not The Crisis of Zionism, but a crisis of American Judaism.

The summer of 2012

Some time ago we saw in the brilliant television satire, Eretz Nehederet, Israelis giving up on all their summer plans, “because of that thing that will happen with Iran this summer.”

“Can I give you a delayed check for this summer?” says the customer.

“No, of course not,” says the shopkeeper.

“Don’t you know what will happen this summer? That thing with Iran.”

“Oh yes, I forgot it’s this summer!” he replies, and pays immediately.

The real Ben Gurion

There is no doubt that David Ben Gurion, who was born in 1886 in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, has correctly been recognised everywhere as the founder of Israel, created in 1948 by a UN resolution. But the issue that has recently been uncovered, touching off a damaging charge, emanates from the just revealed hard-line advocacy of Ben Gurion more than 10 years earlier on how to establish a firm Zionist foothold in Palestine where the majority of the population were then Arabs.

The Second-Term Illusion

It's 2013. Barack Obama has just been re-elected, the Democrats have retained their majority in the Senate. And the American president, freed from political constraints in a second term, decides to take on an issue that stymied him so badly in his first.

"Israeli-Palestinian peace is critically important to our national interests," Obama tells his new secretary of state (Kerry, Rice, Donilon -- take your pick). "If we don't move now, the two-state solution is dead."

"It means taking on Benjamin Netanyahu," the secretary responds.

Palestinians need freedom in Jerusalem, not Israeli permits

It is Easter in Jerusalem. Newspaper pictures show scenes of Christians from all over the world celebrating and commemorating this holy occasion, with processions, special services and prayers. While most come freely with passports and tourist visas, the indigenous Christian population, many of them coming from towns and villages within few kilometers of the Old City, require special permits to visit their holy sites. The majority of these Christians do not receive the necessary permits and so are prevented from participating in the Easter celebrations of Jerusalem.

No, Of Course I'm Not

Since the emergence of the one-state movement, I've been routinely described by the pro-Palestinian far right and ultra-left as a “Zionist,” and even a “traitor” and “collaborator,” because I remain committed to ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Of course, most of these people were, in the past, themselves supporters of a two state solution, so by their logic they were also once “traitors” and “collaborators.”

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