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Israel's Supreme Court on Friday delayed by at least three weeks the scheduled evacuation of an unauthorized West Bank settlement outpost that has become a symbol of settler defiance.
The court said it has scheduled another hearing for the state to argue its case against the evacuation on Aug. 21, after previously ordering the Migron outpost be dismantled by Aug. 1.
Like other communities sucked into Syria's widening civil war, the Yarmouk neighborhood in Damascus has seen death and destruction. Soldiers and snipers have gunned down demonstrators. Some protesters have taken up arms to fight back.
But there's one key difference: Most of Yarmouk's residents are not Syrian citizens. They are Palestinian refugees.
Most Palestinian factions have remained in Syria, with the exception of Hamas whose leaders have relocated, officials in Syria said Thursday.
Most Hamas leaders have fled Syria despite the movement's insistence that it was not seeking to move its politburo from Damascus. Only some local Hamas leaders in refugee camps remain, local officials told Ma'an.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah and Islamic Jihad stayed in Syria amid the bloody 16-month uprising against President Bashar Assad, the officials say.
The cash-strapped Palestinian self-rule government is finding it harder each month to stay afloat, its finance minister said in an interview Thursday.
The Palestinian Authority is struggling with its worst financial crisis in years, in part because key donor countries, including the U.S. and some Arab states, have so far not sent aid they promised for 2012.
Gaza Islamist leader Ismail Haniyeh met Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi on Thursday in an official visit that signalled a big shift in Cairo's stance toward the Hamas movement after the election of a Muslim Brotherhood head of state in Egypt.
A Palestinian official said the head of Egyptian intelligence had promised measures to increase the flow of fuel supplied by Qatar to Gaza via Egypt and needed to ease the small Palestinian territory's power shortages. The sides had also discussed increasing the flow of Palestinians across the border.
U.S. President Barak Obama's chief adviser on counter-terrorism, John O. Brennan, was in Israel to hold talks on the recent terror attack against Israelis in Bulgaria and the threat of al-Qaida involvement in the Syrian crisis, Ha'aretz daily reported on Thursday.
The talks were held on Wednesday between Brennan and head of Israel's National Security Council (NSC), Brig.-Gen. (ret) Yaakov Amidror, Eitan Ben-David, head of NSC Counter-Terrorism Bureau, and senior officials of the Mossad, the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Branch.
Popular uprisings in the Middle East could not reach the West Bank because of Israel, the head of the Hamas-dominated Palestinian parliament said Thursday.
"If there was no Israeli occupation in the West Bank, the uprising would have been possible," said Aziz al-Dewik, the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC)'s speaker, who was released recently from an Israeli prison.
Al-Dewik accused the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), led by rival Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas, of "establishing a repressive regime with the help of Israel."
An investigative committee has recommended that high-ranking officers be questioned over the use of force against protesters in Ramallah.
President Mahmoud Abbas ordered an investigation after police cracked down on protesters who opposed a visit by Israel's vice premier to Ramallah for talks with the president on June 30, and again used force to shut down a protest on July 1 against police brutality.
President Barack Obama will sign a bill to strengthen US-Israeli military cooperation on Friday on the eve of a visit to Israel by his Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney.
Obama will seek to stress his commitment to Israel's security for American Jewish voters at a White House ceremony that appeared timed to upstage Romney, who has accused the president of undermining US-Israeli ties.
Congress passed the legislation, the US-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act, with broad support from Obama's Democrats and Republicans last week.
Israel's Defense Ministry said Thursday it would not allow five female students from Gaza to go to university in the West Bank, rights groups said.
In May, Israel's Supreme Court ordered the ministry to reconsider its refusal to allow the students to travel to the West Bank, after Israel admitted there were no individual security concerns about any of the students.
An adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited the memorial at the German Nazi death camp of Auschwitz to pay respect to camp victims on Friday.
Ziad al-Bandak, who advises Abbas on Religious affairs, visited prisoner blocs, gas chambers and a crematorium in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex that the Germans built and operated in southern Poland during their World War II occupation of the country.
Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the camp from 1940-45.
The recent conversion of Palestinian Christians to Islam has sparked tensions between Hamas, the Islamist group ruling the Gaza Strip, and the Christian minority here. Both publicly traded barbs for the first time since Hamas took over Gaza Strip from its rival, Fatah, after the 2006 parliamentary elections.
The Kalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the West Bank is best known as a flashpoint between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces. Images of masked youths throwing rocks by the painted concrete wall here are ubiquitous.
Protesters gathered at Kalandia again last week, but their focus wasn't Israeli soldiers: It was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The one thing almost all observers agree on is that progress towards realizing a two-state solution is on indefinite hold for the foreseeable future. This means we are facing an open-ended interregnum that all parties can use to seriously debate their options and to act unilaterally to either promote or obstruct peace.
On the eve of his visit to Israel, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate for U.S. President spoke to Haaretz about Iran, Syria and Benjamin Netanyahu, but declined to comment on his opponent, U.S. President Barack Obama, adhering to the American political tradition of refraining from criticism of the president while "on foreign soil." In the same vein, he begged off commenting on Israel's settlement policy, saying it would demonstrate his "distance" from the president's policy.
There are situations – the best – win-win, where both sides get something they want out of a deal. Then there is the win-lose situation where you think you have won, but in fact are destined to pay a heavy price, sort of like winning second prize in a lottery that sends you a resort in Albania for a month.
Under normal circumstances, the rash of suicides and attempted suicides by veteran Israelis unable to cope with their financial problems would be a powerful catalyst for change.
After being privileged last year to go on a Taglit-Birthright trip with 40 students from Johns Hopkins University, last month I traveled with 12 other student leaders to Israel and the West Bank with J Street U. Since then I’ve been reflecting a great deal on these two very different experiences.
No, Dani Dayan, the status quo in the West Bank cannot continue.
Today’s New York Times features an op-ed by Dani Dayan, the head of the Yesha Council (the group that represents settlers and their interests).
"The Bureaucracy of Occupation: The Permit Regime in the West Bank 2000–2006," by Yael Berda, allows us to peek “over the shoulder of the military bureaucrat,” as Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, put it. Berda, a practicing lawyer, specializes in administrative and constitutional law and is a research student at Princeton University.
Professor Shaul Ladany has a busy schedule to keep these days but lays down one important condition before agreeing to speak to CNN.
"Every morning I roll up the carpet and do my exercises," he explains.
EVEN if an Israeli government were determined to remove Jewish settlements in the West Bank in order to make way for a Palestinian state, it would now be exceptionally hard to remove Jews living in the settlement of Kiryat Arba and in the nearby ancient city of Hebron, which has sites that are holy both to Jews and Muslims.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/26817
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/26817
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/26817
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] https://www.americantaskforce.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1
[6] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/israels-top-court-delays-evacuation-of-settlement-2423094.html
[7] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/palestinians-in-syria-get-pulled-into-civil-war-2422844.html
[8] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=507848
[9] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/palestinian-cash-crisis-getting-worse-minister-2422615.html
[10] http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/in-shift-by-egypt-president-meets-hamas-leader/
[11] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-07/27/c_131741483.htm
[12] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-07/26/c_131741368.htm
[13] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=507861
[14] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=507897
[15] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=507745
[16] http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/adviser-to-palestinian-president-abbas-visits-auschwitz-memorial-1.454102
[17] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/gaza-christians-and-hamas-at-odd.html
[18] http://app1.kuhf.org/articles/npr1343340319-Latest-Target-For-Palestinians-Protest-Their-Leader.html
[19] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/26/debate-aversion-therapy.html
[20] http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/what-romney-said-highlights-from-haaretz-s-interview-with-obama-s-adversary.premium-1.454095
[21] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=279122
[22] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=279081
[23] http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/07/25/3101741/birthrights-triumphs-and-flaws
[24] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/26/give-palestinian-third-parties-a-chance.html
[25] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/26/lara-friedman-responds-to-dani-dayan.html
[26] http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/probing-the-bureaucracy-of-occupation.premium-1.453805
[27] http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/27/sport/olympics-2012-munich-shaul-ladany-survivor/
[28] http://www.economist.com/node/21559663
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