This week, Alpher discusses what Olmert's conviction for receiving bribes means for the peace process; why Netanyahu refuses to release veteran terrorist prisoners who are Arab citizens of Israel; how this issue jibes with a new Israel Foreign Ministry document that appears to find legal justification for Avigdor Lieberman's proposal to transfer Arab-populated parts of Israel to Palestinian sovereignty under a two-state redrawing of borders.
Unlike Israel's unilateral insistence on the 'Jewish state', Israeli and Palestinian leaders need to find a recognition formula that reconciles two opposing national narratives.
By now everyone has realized that there’s a new issue on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations agenda that’s not going away: The demand that the Palestinians not only recognize Israel - something they have done repeatedly, starting in 1993 - but that they recognize Israel as "a Jewish state," or some similar wording. No such “recognition-plus” demand was made of Egypt or Jordan, nor was it mentioned in the Oslo agreement or subsequent Israeli-Palestinian documents. It made a brief appearance in the Annapolis talks of 2007, but only as a marginal issue. Only In 2009 did it truly come into play, courtesy of Benjamin Netanyahu.
--APN's Lara Friedman explains the mindset behind the Israeli and Palestinian narratives and suggests how to unravel the apparent Gordian knot of the demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.*
--The number of days it took 150 Dutch workers to duplicate the most famous parts of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's palace in the Israeli city of Kfar Saba. Tanks and actors to arrive soon.**
--David Landau, former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, writes why Israelis don't need to sympathize with striking Foreign Ministry employees over their low wages.**
--Haaretz's Bradley Burston writes about the irony of the right-wing funded film meant to convince Jewish Americans to be right-wing.**
Americans for Peace Now, The American Task Force on Palestine and J Street U GWU present Lara Friedman (Director of Policy and Government Relations, Americans for Peace Now) and Hussein Ibish (Senior Fellow, The American Task Force on Palestine) were hosted by J Street U at George Washington University for a talk on the current status of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
See below for photos and tweets from the event:
-- Said Labor MK Stav Shaffir, who leads the fight against transfers tax money to the World Zionist Organization's settlement arm and forced a postponement of the vote.**