PRESS ROOM

274 Article

• Obama: halt to new Israeli settlements is in America’s security interests

  29 May 2009, by Chris McGreal, Rory McCarthy

  Increasingly fractious relations between the US and Israel hit a low unseen in nearly two decades yesterday after the Jewish state rejected President Obama’s demand for an end to settlement construction in the West Bank, and the president responded by suggesting that Israeli intransigence endangers America’s security.
  The dispute, which blew in during the open hours before Obama met the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, reflects the depth of the shift in US policy away from accommodating (…)

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• IAEA urges nuclear inspections in Israel

  19 September 2009, by Sylvia Westall

  Arab states in the UN nuclear assembly on Friday won narrow approval of a resolution urging Israel to put all its atomic sites under UN inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel deplored the measure for singling it out while many of its neighbors remained hostile to its existence, and said it would not cooperate with it.
  The non-binding resolution, which passed for the first time in 18 years of attempts thanks to more developing-nation votes, voiced concern about (…)

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• Sinking the Goldstone Report

  18 September 2009, by Nadia Hijab

  Timing is everything.
  On Monday, the United States assumed its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council — the one the Bush administration had cold-shouldered, then boycotted. The U.S. representative declared in Obamaesque tones, "Make no mistake: The United States will not look the other way in the face of serious human rights abuses."
  And on Tuesday, Justice Richard Goldstone and his team submitted the report of their fact-finding mission into violations of international human (…)

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• Goldstone Report Finds Israeli Military Guilty of War Crimes in Gaza

  16 September 2009, by Juan R. I. Cole

  The Independent reports that a United Nations fact-finding inquiry has found that Israel committed war crimes during its attack on Gaza last winter, as did the Palestinian Hamas. The lion’s share of blame in the report, however, falls on Israeli forces, which stand accused of planning out a disproportionate use of force, the punishing of a civilian population, and reckless disregard for civilian lives— all of which are war crimes in international law. The report suggests that some Israeli (…)

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• Ethiopian students affair shows prevalent racism in Israel

  4 September 2009, by Gideon Levy

  All of a sudden, we can say "racism." A shock wave has struck complacent Israeli society. A few dozen Ethiopian children were not accepted to religious schools in Petah Tikva. That is truly terrible, everyone tsked-tsked at the heart-rending picture of Aschalo Sama, a boy without a school. Even President Shimon Peres expressed shock. Everyone is permitted to be shocked; it is politically correct.
  Oh, how beautiful we are, how enlightened we seem to ourselves. Look how we fight racism, (…)

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• Arabs to strike against ’wave of racism’

  2 September 2009, by Roee Nahmias

  The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee announced on Wednesday that it will hold a general strike next month in protest of the government’s policies.
  In the meeting, held in Nazareth, it was decided that the strike will take place on the same day that the events of October 2000, which left 13 Israeli-Arabs dead, are commemorated. The one-day strike will include all sectors in Arab towns. This is a relatively serious move, since it has been a few years since the last general strike in the (…)

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• Obama’s Peace Plan

  5 September 2009, by Haitham Sabbah

  A draft of the Obama peace plan, which is expected to be released at the UN Assembly meeting in New York, or at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, has surfaced.
  The International Middle East Media Center’s website leaked the alleged draft of Obama’s peace plan given to them by Palestinian Legislator Hasan Khreisha. Khreisha added that the draft has been widely distributed among Palestinian and Arab leaders and the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, recently discussed the plan during his visit (…)

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• Israeli plan for settlement building angers US

  4 September 2009, by Steven Gutkin

  Israel said Friday it will construct hundreds of new housing units in West Bank settlements before any slowdown in building, an announcement that drew harsh criticism from Washington, which demands a complete settlement freeze as a prelude to renewing Mideast peace talks.
  Israeli officials painted the move as a concession to the U.S. demand because it might bring a temporary halt to other construction. But since it would also mean building the new units and finishing some 2,500 others now (…)

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• In Village, Palestinians See Model for Their Cause

  28 August 2009, by Ethan Bronner

  Every Friday for the past four and a half years, several hundred demonstrators — Palestinian villagers, foreign volunteers and Israeli activists — have walked in unison to the Israeli barrier separating this tiny village from the burgeoning settlement of Modiin Illit, part of which is built on the village’s land. One hundred feet away, Israeli soldiers watch and wait.
  The protesters chant and shout and, inevitably, a few throw stones. Then just as inevitably, the soldiers open fire with (…)

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• Tutu to Haaretz: Arabs paying the price of the Holocaust

  28 August 2009, by Akiva Eldar

  "The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns," Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa told Haaretz Thursday.
  Commenting on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in Germany Thursday that the lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel should always defend itself, Tutu noted that "in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human (…)

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