UN Rights Body Launches Probe into Israeli Settlements
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Reuters
by Stephanie Nebehay - March 23, 2012 - 12:00am

GENEVA (Reuters) -- The United Nations launched an international investigation on Thursday into Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, with the United States isolated in voting against the initiative brought by the Palestinian Authority. The UN Human Rights Council condemned Israel's planned construction of new housing units for settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, saying they undermined the peace process and posed a threat to the two-state solution and the creation of a contiguous and independent Palestinian state.

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An Interview With Jeremy Ben-Ami on Settlements, Beinart, Obama, the Whole Nine Yards By Jeffrey Goldberg
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Atlantic
by Jeffrey Goldberg - (Interview) March 23, 2012 - 12:00am

In what seems to have become an annual tradition here at Goldblog, I interviewed Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and major domo of J Street, the left-leaning pro-Israel lobbying group, in advance of his organization's annual conference, which takes place in Washington this weekend.

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Settlement Boycotts Work
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Beast
by Peter Beinart - (Opinion) March 22, 2012 - 12:00am

My call for Zionist BDS (which, by the way, is not just a settlement boycott; it’s also reinvestment in democratic Israel) has elicited several critiques.

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Settlement Boycott Call Likely To Fall Flat
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jewish Daily Forward
by Nathan Guttman - (Opinion) March 22, 2012 - 12:00am

Washington — By most standards, SodaStream is a great Israeli success story. The company’s product, a home carbonating device for soft drinks, is sold by all major retailers in the United States. The company’s stock is traded in Nasdaq. But if a call to boycott products from Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank gains traction, SodaStream, with its manufacturing center in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, could become a target of protest.

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Beinart’s boycott plan deals a blow to peace bid
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)
by Steven Bayme - (Opinion) March 22, 2012 - 12:00am

NEW YORK (JTA) -- Far from charting a path toward peace for Israelis and Palestinians, Peter Beinart’s advice, “boycott the settlements to save Israel,” would make peace far less likely. Beinart’s boycott plan assumes that Jewish settlement on the West Bank is what is holding up a deal for a two-state solution. Therefore, his logic goes, branding the settlements as “nondemocratic Israel” and declaring economic war on their residents will somehow induce an Israeli pullback and the emergence of a Palestinian state at peace with its Jewish neighbor.

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Settlement policy will cause Israel to self-destruct
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
(Editorial) March 22, 2012 - 12:00am

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has devoted a great deal of effort to moving the Iranian nuclear program to the top of the international agenda. His emphasis on Tehran's threat to destroy the "Zionist entity" has contributed to increased pressure on Iran by the United States and Europe and the tightening of economic sanctions against it.

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Israel 'turning blind eye' to West Bank settlers' attacks on Palestinians
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Ian Traynor - March 21, 2012 - 12:00am

Jewish settlers in the West Bank are conducting a systematic and expanding campaign of violence against Palestinian farmers, families and children with the Israeli authorities turning a blind eye, according to confidential reports from senior European Union officials. In two reports to Brussels from EU heads of mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah, obtained by the Guardian, the officials found that settler violence against Palestinians has more than tripled in three years to total hundreds of incidents.

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UN: Settlers taking over Palestinian-owned springs
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jerusalem Post
by Tovah Lazaroff, Sharon Udasin - March 19, 2012 - 12:00am

Amid the sprawling olive groves that surround Ein Al Ariq – or Ein HaGvura – outside of Nablus, Jamal Daraghmeh recalled the days of the 1970s, when he and fellow community members used to come to the basin to collect water for their village drinking needs and livestock. “We [now] have access only after coordination for the olive harvest, once a year,” Daraghmeh, the mayor of nearby village al Luban al Sharqiya, told reporters during a United Nations field tour of the area last week. Information from the tour was embargoed until Monday.

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In the West Bank, Springs of Contention
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Media Line
by Arieh O'Sullivan - March 19, 2012 - 12:00am

Ein Ariq, West Bank -- A convoy of white United Nations jeeps pulls into the olive-tree laden valley below the Jewish community of Eli. They are greeted by Jamal Deragmeh, the mayor of the nearby Palestinian town of Lubban Al-Sharkiya, who points out the cement pool around the spring and complains. “If you weren’t here,” he says to the representative of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “The [Jewish] settlers would come and put a bullet in my head.”

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To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times
by Peter Beinart - (Opinion) March 18, 2012 - 12:00am

TO believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer. On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.

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