AFP reports: An announcement by a [Palestinian] lawmaker that he plans to join a pro-Palestinian flotilla seeking to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza caused outrage Monday among the country’s political class. Basel Ghattas, an Israeli MP with the Joint Arab List, sparked controversy after he announced he would join other parliamentarians and public figures from around the world in the latest attempt to reach Gaza by ship later this month.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, Israel will have to limit settlements to the major settlement blocs in the West Bank, Michael Oren offered last night, so as to restore the special relationship between the countries that Obama has broken.
This week saw two acts of terror committed within two historic Christian churches. While most Americans know about the Charleston tragedy unfolding on TV, another act of racist violence was taking place in the church of the multiplication, on the Sea of Galilee, the site of Jesus’s miracle of multiplying two fish and five loaves to feed 5,000 people
Oren Moverman, screenwriter for Love and Mercy, left Israel because it was an occupier. On Fresh Air, Terry Gross reinterprets that, he grew up in a house full of women and didn’t like the culture of the military.
After being repeatedly asked to name her father’s father (Edmund) at an Israeli checkpoint, writer Sarah Carr was confronted by a soldier: You want the bad news or the good news first? “Just a dickhead toying with someone he knows is powerless, or a dark commentary on his society?” she asks
“A win-win-win-win-win.” That’s how the New York Times characterizes a supposed diplomatic masterstroke by an obscure Israeli minister that emptied Assad’s chemical weapon stockpiles. More P.R. for the Netanyahu government.
Omar al-Bashir of Sudan gets out of South Africa despite ICC charges against him, and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton says it’s because African leaders see a double standard in ICC prosecutions, with Bush, Blair and Netanyahu having immunity
A story reported last week by Inside Higher Education read like a McCarthyist nightmare: A Brazilian university administrator urgently requested “names of Israeli students and teachers” in order to comply with a request from “pro-Palestinian groups”. But anybody who could take the time for a little internet research could easily find out there was a somewhat different story.
Jeffrey Goldberg falsely tied Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and fabricated a moral case for invading Iraq, Ken Silverstein writes at the Observer, seeking to give Goldberg a “pundit reckoning” for this disastrous judgment, no his career has soared
Zavi Kang Engles writes: As a Korean-American concerned about the influence of the United States on other countries, I’ve begun to wonder something — do Korean people have more in common with Israelis, as the official story would have us believe, or with Palestinians?