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When Waleed Issa walked into the Americans for Peace Now (APN) Washington, DC office on the first day of his summer internship in June, the 25-year-old Palestinian from the Dheisheh refugee camp south of Bethlehem was startled by what he saw.
“I never saw so much blue and white in my life,” he says. “Everywhere you look, there’s a Star of David and the colors of the Israeli flag. As a Palestinian, I thought to myself, ‘This is not good news. How am I going to work here for the next six weeks?’”
On one level, the questions shaking the Israeli political system this week are pragmatic: how many ultra-Orthodox men and Arab citizens should be drafted into the military or national service, over how many years and how should those who resist be penalized?
But the debate over these details masks a more fundamental and fractious one about evolving identity in this still-young state, where a “people’s army” has long been a defining principle, and about the growing cleavage among its tribes.
A deeply divided Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Thursday became the latest American church to shy away from divesting in companies that supply equipment to Israel to enforce its control in the occupied territories, after a passionate debate that stretched late into the evening and a vote that was nearly a tie.
An aide says the Palestinian leader wants more information from a Swiss lab before deciding whether to dig up the remains of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
Doctors at the lab say they found elevated levels of the radioactive agent polonium-210 on clothing reportedly worn by Arafat before his death in November 2004.
The lab says the findings don't prove Arafat was poisoned. Experts are divided over whether an autopsy, sought by Arafat's widow, could clear up a lingering mystery surrounding the cause of Arafat's death.
The nephew of Yasser Arafat said Thursday that the late president's body must be exhumed if necessary to determine the true cause of his death.
Nasser al-Qudwa, who heads the Yasser Arafat Foundation, met with President Mahmoud Abbas in Paris on Thursday and discussed new allegations that Arafat was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004.
The high levels of the radioactive poison polonium reportedly found on the belongings of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat indicate that the toxin was on them after his death, a senior counterterrorism analyst told The Jerusalem Post Thursday.
Dr. Ely Karmon, of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya’s Institute for Counterterrorism, is a specialist in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism.
A Palestinian prisoner convicted of transporting suicide bombers is in critical condition after a nearly three-month hunger strike, a rights group said Thursday.
Akram Rikhawi started fasting on April 12, just before 1,200 other prisoners began refusing food to demand better conditions.
Israeli authorities reached a deal with participants in the wider strike by mid-May, easing some restrictions. Rikhawi has continued to protest his detention by refusing to eat.
The bell clangs, the fight starts and the boxers come at each other. On one side is a 13-year-old Arab boy from northern Israel. His opponent comes from a Jewish town.
The Jewish fighter from the blue corner pushes his Arab adversary against the ropes before pummeling him with a barrage of punches.
Jews and Arabs have been fighting each other for decades, so boxing may seem like a strange way to build peace between the two — but that's what the Israel Boxing Association aims for.
The World Bank on Tuesday said it paid $22.3 million to the Palestinian Authority to help with a budget crisis.
The funds are from a trust paid into by the governments of Australia, France, Kuwait, Norway, and the UK, the World Bank said in a statement.
It noted that the aid was slated to support education, health care and other social services and for the economic reforms undertaken by the West Bank government.
The decision to award the construction of Israel’s newest communications satellite to a state-owned company has probably saved the life of the production line and was likely done to preserve independence for defense communications.
Palestinians are almost entirely dependent on electricity provided by Israel. In Gaza, a local power station provides some 40% percent of the Strip’s electricity. The Palestinians buy electricity in small levels from Egypt and Jordan, but this doesn’t change their dependence on Israel. As a result, the Palestine Electric Company, in cooperation with the Palestinian investment firm Padico, began roughly two years ago to make preparations to build a power station near Jenin.
Not long ago, a thick cloud of rumors settled on the new, much-talked-about IDF [Israel Defense Forces] acquisition of 20 F-35's, a fighter plane known as the Stealth produced by the American Lockheed Martin Company. There were rumors regarding production slowdowns and delays of the F-35, known as the “fifth generation fighter plane” (in contrast to the Israeli fourth-generation F-16's). The fear is that they will reach Israel very late — too late to serve the IDF in coping with future challenges.
In November 2004, a sad but very familiar scene played itself out: A sick, 75-year-old man who had been living in squalor for several years after an extremely difficult life -- including a near-death experience in the Libyan desert -- finally passed away. Doctors at the Percy hospital in France determined he died of natural causes: a stroke caused by an unidentified infection. As is so often the case, human life ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Israelis in particular and Jews in general love to complain about how much the world hates us, as if the hatred of others is what makes Israel legitimate.
It is time to move on, to take the victimhood out of the modern Jewish state, now approaching 65, and to live our lives without constantly having to explain ourselves to others, or to seek their approval.
A few months ago, after the IDF began a concrete wall between Metulla and Lebanon, an Israeli observation post spotted a group of men gathered on a rooftop just over the northern border.
A closer look identified one of the men as the commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in southern Lebanon.
Several of the other men were later identified as senior Hezbollah operatives, also from southern Lebanon.
Seriously, in between all the running, jumping, swimming and sprinting, the Olympic organisers can't spare one measly minute to remember 11 men murdered for daring to compete for their country?
You mean to tell me that there's no room for a brief interlude during Danny Boyle's opening extravaganza – not even when the rain is coming down from his fluffy fake clouds? Or during one of the minor events, the ones the organisers are practically giving away tickets to?
Yitzhak Shamir was the kind of person whom you didn’t remember was alive until learning that he was dead. The strange thing about many of the comments that followed the demise last week of Israel’s onetime prime minister was that he was portrayed as a relic – someone out of touch with the political temper in Israel today.
he tragedy of the Palestinians has hung like a black cloud over the Arab world for almost 65 years. It is inconceivable that a people should be corralled like animals in their own country by a dominant, nuclear-armed neighbor, backed, through thick and thin, by a superpower. Yet that is what Israelis have done to the Palestinians. Moreover, there has been systematic theft of Arab land in the Occupied Territories, as a way of imprisoning the luckless Palestinians still further.
It's a reassuring story, regularly repeated by defenders of Israeli policy: After the Six-Day War, Israel offered to give up the land it had just occupied in return for peace. But the Arabs said no, first quietly, then publicly at the Khartoum Summit. Alas, Israel was stuck with the occupied territories. In some versions of the story, Israel had virtually no choice but to start building settlements once the Arabs rejected diplomacy.
In mid-June, Israel's most trusted former collaborator, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Hassan Yousef, arrived at Ben-Gurion airport. Invited by Druze lawmaker Ayoob Kara (Likud ), Yousef, who now lives in the United States, has been speaking to various groups and committees.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/26449
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/26449
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/26449
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] https://www.americantaskforce.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1
[6] http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-palestinian-american-groups-swap-summer-interns/
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/world/middleeast/national-identity-at-heart-of-debate-on-israeli-military-service.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=middleeast
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/us/presbyterian-church-wont-divest-in-firms-aiding-occupation.html?ref=middleeast
[9] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/aide-palestinian-leader-wants-more-on-arafat-2410485.html
[10] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=501772
[11] http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=276447
[12] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/palestinian-hunger-striker-in-critical-condition-2410623.html
[13] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/boxing-connects-young-israeli-arabs-and-jews-2410544.html
[14] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=501393
[15] http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=35536
[16] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2012/07/jenin-caught-that-they-have-to-i.html
[17] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/security/01/07/fire-up-the-engines.html
[18] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/05/arafatuous?page=full
[19] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=276488
[20] http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=276454
[21] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/london-olympics-minutes-silence-munich-athletes
[22] http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2012/Jul-04/179563-in-death-yitzhak-shamir-is-triumphant.ashx#axzz1zl9txnT3
[23] http://arabnews.com/editorial-palestine-hostage-state
[24] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/05/no-israel-didn-t-offer-to-trade-the-west-bank-for-peace-in-1967.html
[25] http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-prodigal-son-too-good-to-be-true.premium-1.449205
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