On Sunday, Israel’s Cabinet is set to advance a controversial bill that if passed by the Knesset would enshrine into law Israel’s status as a Jewish state.
Israel cannot protect its Jewish and democratic character without peace, former President Shimon Peres said at a memorial for Yitzhak Rabin.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he will seek a law that would officially make Israel the national state of the Jewish people.
Secretary of State John Kerry broke from a visit to Italy on Wednesday to try to salvage Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, even as Arab leaders declared they would never meet Israel\’s core demand to be recognised as a Jewish state.
The Arab League announced on Wednesday its full backing of a Palestinian refusal to meet Israel\’s demand to be recognized as a Jewish state, a condition Jerusalem says it requires for peace.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, in an interview quoted in The New York Times, repeated his objection to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.
“The Vote,” the best show in town, opened at 7:45 p.m. on Nov. 29 and, after 23 acts, closed down 60 minutes later. During that one hour, speakers, actors, musicians, singers and dancers commemorated the day, 65 years ago, when the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.
Hagai Amir, the brother of the man who assassinated late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, said he was proud of his own role in the murder plot after he was freed from prison on Friday.
President Barack Obama, aiming to head off any premature Israeli strike on Iran, sought to assure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday that the United States would always \”have Israel\’s back\” but said there was still time for diplomacy.
As if their own fraught history and the prospect of a nuclear Iran weren’t enough, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu will bring to their meeting on Monday each nation’s vexing and at times self-contradictory relationship with war.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.