Arab states and Israel plan to attend a rare round of talks next week on efforts to free the world of nuclear weapons but Iran has yet to say whether it will take part, diplomats said on Wednesday.
The Arab League will ask the United Nations to grant full member status to the Palestinian Authority.
An organization of which I think very highly e-mailed a poorly worded headline this week. “Arab Mobs Attack Israel on All Fronts,” screamed the subject line of a May 15 e-mail alert from The Israel Project. The attached story reported how “tens of thousands of Arab protesters marking Palestinian Nakba Day (the day of the catastrophe) have marched on Israel, from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.”
If a single phrase could capture the sentiment that motivated thousands of Arabs to try to cross Israel’s borders on Sunday to “retake Palestine” from the Jews, it would be this: Yes, we can. That can-do attitude had toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and threatened dictators from Tripoli to Damascus. So why not apply it toward Israel? If Arab leaders weren’t willing to send their armies to storm the Zionist state, the Arab protesters figured, well then, they’d just do it themselves.
In an elegant limestone building in a Jerusalem neighborhood that before 1948 was home to the city’s Palestinian elite, a group of Jewish and Arab Israeli academics recently tried to untangle one of Israel’s most complex and charged questions: the status of its Arab minority. “The discussion here is so important because we are trying to see if this is a zero-sum game or if it’s possible to find the way to coexistence,” said Anita Shapira, the Israeli historian and former dean of Tel Aviv University who presided over the symposium on the topic organized by the Israel Democracy Institute.
A group of leading Israelis, including former heads of the country\’s secret services and the military, will put forth a peace initiative, The New York Times reported. The authors of the two-page Israeli Peace Initiative hope the document, which they are calling a direct response to the Arab Peace Initiative offered by the Arab League in 2002 and revived in 2007, will generate popular support in Israel and influence the Israeli government, according to the Times.
The United States has frozen weapons shipments to Lebanon\’s military following the collapse of the Arab country\’s government in January. The arms freeze had been approved recently by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, but it was not announced publicly so as not to interfere with the formation of a new government, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The latest conflicts in the Arab world would eventually lead to the collapse of Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday.
Two Jewish teens from Safed have been indicted for setting fire to two cars owned by Arab students. The teens were indicted Thursday for torching the cars as revenge for the murder of five members of the Fogel family in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Itamar. They deny the allegations.
Some 1,500 Israeli Arabs protested in Lod on Tuesday against government policies which affect Israel\’s Arab sector, launching the events of Land Day, to be marked on Wednesday. The protesters were demonstrating against the government demolition of the houses of the Abu Eid family, which left some 50 family members, 30 of them children, without a home.
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