Palestinian Arab citizens are a sizable minority in Israel who make up 20 percent of the country’s population. They experience institutionalized discrimination in their daily lives much like the African-American community before and during the U.S. civil rights movement. But consistent, trustworthy information about the problems and specific concerns of this community is in short supply.
The current right-wing government of Israel wants to negotiate with the Palestinians for their independent state as much as China wants to negotiate with Taiwan for its independent state. I have very little faith that this Israeli government will negotiate in earnest with the Palestinians. Netanyahu wants to negotiate for the sake of negotiation.
Canada’s defeat in elections for a temporary seat in the UN Security Council has implications that reach beyond being an upset for Stephen Harper’s conservative government in Ottawa. It reinforces how far most UN members are from supporting other nations that unconditionally accept Israeli behavior in the Middle East. It also, ironically, lends some support to Ottawa’s longstanding opposition to increasing the number of permanent Security Council members.
With a key Arab League meeting delayed until Friday, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is scrambling to keep one-month-old direct Israeli- Palestinian peace talks alive.
Essentially, Palestinian President Abbas has been invited by the U.S. to either negotiate without a leg to stand on or accept a face-saving endorsement that changes nothing on the ground.
It appears that to Sen. Barbara Boxer and other Congressional Democrats blaming the Palestinians for the possible collapse of peace talks is of greater importance than the actual success of the negotiations.
Apparently it’s obvious to everyone but Israel and the United States that the Middle-East can’t take the first step to becoming a nuclear-weapons-free zone until Israel acknowledges its own program.
Iran doesn’t understand how its caginess about its nuclear program compares with Israel’s deceptions about its full-blown nuclear-weapons program.
Published less than two months after Israeli commandos boarded an international aid flotilla bound for Gaza and killed nine activists, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara is, in the words of editor Moustafa Bayoumi, “the first book about the attack,” but “will likely not be the last.” This collection of some four dozen essays from eyewitnesses and “activists, novelists, academics, analysts, journalists, and poets,” serves many purposes. Some essays are expressions of simple outrage. Others probe more deeply into Israel’s broader political strategy in the region and its human costs for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Author and Harvard scholar Sarah Roy’s essay offers a detailed and rigorous accounting of Gaza’s humanitarian and economic woes, while well-known academic and blogger Juan Cole’s excellent contribution emphasizes the deeper problem of Palestinian statelessness, the political fact of which the Gaza blockade and even the Israeli occupation itself are merely symptomatic.
Widespread reports that members of IDF abuse Palestinian youths makes you wonder just what childrearing practices they’re a product of.