Balfour Declaration to visit Israel
(JNS.org) The historic Balfour Declaration will, for the first time, leave Britain and be presented to the Israeli public, Israel Hayom reported.
Lord Arthur James Balfour’s declaration, made in November 1917, was the Zionist movement’s watershed diplomatic achievement, marking the first time that the idea of the need for a national home for the Jewish people in Israel was recognized by an international power.
The document will be put on display at the reopening of Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, in two year’s time following renovations to the building.
Israeli Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser announced Sunday that following lengthy negotiations he had received in recent days a principle agreement from the directors of the British National Library to loan the document to Israel on a limited basis, based on conditions to be determined by the library to ensure that the paper is preserved.
*
Israelis overwhelmingly proud of their country
(JNS.org) Israelis are overwhelmingly proud of their country and view it as a good place to live their lives in, a new poll conducted by New Wave Research and commissioned by Israel Hayom ahead of Israel Independence Day shows.
According to the survey, which used a representative sample of 500 Israeli Jews who are 18 or older, 74.6 percent of Israel’s Jewish population is “very proud” to be Israeli; this figure represents a 5 percentage point increase compared with a similar poll last year, a difference that is statistically significant (the sampling error is +/- 4.5 percent).
The poll shows that the proportion of those who are not proud of being Israeli has also gone up, from 5.1 percent to 6.2 percent. Overall, almost 92 percent of respondents said they were very proud or somewhat proud to be Israeli. Women respondents expressed more pride in their national identity than men did (77.2 percent versus 71.9 percent), and the younger generation is the proudest, with 90.5 percent of those between 18 to 24 saying they are “very proud” to be Israeli.
Responses among high-income earners and those with average salaries were virtually identical when it comes to their level of pride (about 80 percent in both groups considered themselves proud to be Israelis); even when broken down according to geography, the responses did not deviate by any significant amount.
As was the case last year, more than 74 percent think Israel is a good place to live in, although there has been a slight uptick in the percentage of people who disagree.
*
Murderer of 7 Israeli schoolgirls wins support
(JNS.org) A total of 110 members of Jordan’s Parliament have signed a petition calling for the release of Ahmad Musa Mustafa Daqamseh, a Jordanian soldier who murdered seven Israeli schoolgirls on an “Isle of Peace” field trip to the Israeli border town of Naharayim in 1997.
“Along with the other six families, we intend to fight this,” Shlomo Bedayev, father of Shiri, one of the victims, told Ynet.
“I expected him to rot in jail, but I can’t count on the Jordanian court and authorities to promote justice. We turned to governmental sources in the past, but it didn’t really help,” said another parent, Nurit Fatihi, who lost her daughter Sivan, according to Ynet.
The families and administrators of the AMIT Shachar School in Beit Shemesh, where the seven girls attended, plan to hold a protest outside the Jordanian Embassy.
The attack came a few years after peace was signed between Israel and Jordan in 1994. Jordan’s late King Hussein, who was previously scheduled to visit Israel, made an unprecedented move to visit each of the family’s homes following the attack. Daqamseh was sentenced to life in prison for the murders by a Jordanian military tribunal.
But Daqamseh’s popularity has grown in Jordan in recent years. Hussein Mjali, a former Jordanian minister, previously referred to Daqamseh as a “hero” and added, “If a Jew killed Arabs they would have built a monument in his honor.”
Despite the petition, the release of Daqamseh is highly unlikely, according to a Jordanian source cited by Ynet. The source said, “The king is at the head of the pardoning process” and would never consider a pardon for that particular case. The source also noted that Jordan’s Ambassador to Israel attended a memorial service for the schoolgirls last year.
*
Turkey shuns normalization with Israel despite Gaza flotilla apology
(JNS.org) Despite the Israeli apology for the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, Turkey said it objects to meeting Israeli diplomats at the upcoming Mediterranean Dialogue group, an annual forum between NATO and seven Mediterranean countries in which Israel was supposed to have participated for the first time since 2008.
In addition, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Saturday that Turkey would not send an envoy to Israel as part of a recent move to normalize ties before Israel lifts its naval blockade on the Gaza Strip.
Erdoğan reiterated that Israel must lift the blockade before there can be full restoration of diplomatic ties, Israel Hayom reported Sunday, citing the Turkish newspaper Zaman.
According to the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the 12th and current secretary-general of NATO, planned to invite the foreign ministers from Mediterranean countries including Israel and six Arab states, but Turkey has objected, arguing that “it wasn’t the right time” for such a meeting.
“The general-secretary was planning to invite the foreign ministers of the Mediterranean Dialogue countries on the sidelines of the NATO foreign ministers meeting scheduled for April 23, but Turkey objected to the idea,” a Western diplomatic source told Hürriyet on the condition of anonymity.
A Turkish official told Hurriyet, “At this stage, such a meeting would not be useful.”
*
Salam Fayyad quits Palestinian government
(JNS.org) Salam Fayyad has resigned his position as Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, adding uncertainty to the future of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Upon taking office in 2007, Fayyad, who holds a PhD in economics from the University of Texas and is a former economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), received praise from some Western and Israeli leaders for his transparency as compared with other Palestinian leaders, well as the economic and security development he oversaw in the West Bank.
Fayyad’s tenure, however, was also marked by the PA’s unilateral statehood bids the last two years at the United Nations and the PA’s continued payments of salaries to Palestinian terrorists serving in Israeli prisons, an issue that has recently ignited a heated debate over foreign aid to the PA in Norway. Fayyad in December 2012 called for Palestinians to stop buying Israeli products, and in November 2012 called on the international community to “force Israel to stop its aggression” during Operation Pillar of Defense, the Israeli army’s response to barrages of Hamas rockets being fired on Israel, according to Palestinian Media Watch.
Over the past few years, the PA has been crippled by economic problems as international aid has dried up due to the global economic crisis. This led to massive street protests in the West Bank and calls for Fayyad’s ouster. At the same time, many leaders from the Palestinian Fatah Party, which controls the PA, dislike Fayyad because of his close ties with the West and Israel.
Adding to the PA’s financial woes, Israel also withheld tax transfers related the Palestinians’ unilateral bid for statehood in the United Nations late last year. But Israel recently began resuming regular tax transfers.
Fayyad’s resignation also comes as U.S. President Barack Obama begins a new push for peace talks.
“The U.S. has worked very hard,” a Western diplomat speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the New York Times. “[U.S. Secretary of State] Kerry asked him to stay. There’s been a lot of messaging from the Western community about how much we value Fayyad’s work.”
*
Pamela Geller gets two speaking engagements
(JNS.org) Pamela Geller, an activist and author who focuses on radical Islam, secured April 14 speaking engagements at synagogues in New York and New Jersey following the cancelation of her previously scheduled talk at Great Neck Synagogue on Long Island.
“Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky of the Chabad, Great Neck and Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg of Congregation Beth-El in Edison, New Jersey have both invited me to speak at their synagogues on Sunday—the same day I was scheduled to speak at the Great Neck Synagogue on Long Island until that synagogue caved to a leftist/Islamic supremacist smear and intimidation campaign,” Geller wrote April 11 on her blog, Atlas Shrugs.
Critics of Geller, co-founder of watchdog organizations including the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, say she promotes Islamophobia, but Geller says she is not anti-Islamic and only opposes “political Islam.”
Great Neck Synagogue said it canceled Geller’s talk, “The Imposition of Sharia in America,” due to legal and security concerns.
“As the notoriety and media exposure of the planned program this Sunday have increased, so has the legal liability and potential security exposure of our institution and its member families,” the synagogue’s board wrote in an email to members, The Jewish Week reported.
Geller wrote on her blog that the cancelation “was particularly craven and cowardly, as it sends the message that if leftists and Muslims defame those they hate loudly enough and for a long enough time, they will succeed in getting them silenced.”
The rabbis of Chabad of Great Neck and Beth-El in Edison, however, “are standing up for the freedom of speech and the defense of the Jewish people” by hosting Geller, she wrote.
“They’re saying no to thuggery and pressure tactics,” Geller wrote. “Above all, they’re standing up for the truth.”
*
Palestinians cold to Obama’s economic track for peace
(JNS.org) Responding to the Obama administration’s plans to supplement its diplomatic efforts in the Middle East with an economic initiative, Palestinians are not buying what the U.S. is selling, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the newspaper, the Obama administration initiative—whose partners will include the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corp., the U.S. Agency for International Development, and private U.S. companies—plans to combine U.S. investment in economic improvements for the Palestinians with “a focus on allowing greater freedom of movement by Palestinians throughout the West Bank and an easing of Israeli restrictions on business.” Additionally, the administration is “betting that economic improvements will encourage Palestinians to view peace talks positively,” the report said.
“Economic growth will help us be able to provide… greater confidence about moving forward [in the peace process],” Secretary of State John Kerry said during his visit to Israel this week. “This is not in lieu of, or an alternative to, the political track.”
Palestinians, however, so far are skeptical about the proposed economic track. Saad Khatib, the former secretary-general of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, called the plan a “Band-Aid solution on a cancer.”
“If we really want Palestinians to believe this is assistance that is aimed at improving their life, then it has to be coupled with a political will to ensure that they will benefit from it,” Khatib said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Additionally, a Palestinian official close to the negotiations told the Wall Street Journal, “John Kerry can say whatever he wants. There is no optimism Netanyahu is going to do anything.”
*
Canada’s FM calls for listing Hezbollah as terrorist
(JNS.org) Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird is calling on the 27-member European Union to join
Canada in recognizing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
“Hezbollah… killed over 300 soldiers and civilians with the 1983 suicide bombings of the U.S. and French barracks in Beirut. In 1985, it hijacked Trans World Airlines Flight 847, killing a U.S. serviceman and dumping his body on the tarmac, and then holding the other passengers hostage for two weeks. In 2011, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon indicted Hezbollah members for their involvement in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri… There are strong indications that Hezbollah was behind the July 2012 bombing of a tourist bus in Burgas, Bulgaria, killing one Bulgarian and five Israelis,” Baird wrote in an April 11 column for the National Post.
So far among Western nations, only Canada, the U.S. and the Netherlands have designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and France recently expressed the intent to join those countries. Additionally, Bahrain this week became the first Arab nation to blacklist Hezbollah.
Baird also highlighted that Hezbollah has been known for assisting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, under which nearly 70,000 people have been killed during the country’s civil war. “It is time for the EU to stand up with its allies and designate Hezbollah for what it is, and thereby remind the world that terrorism will not be tolerated, neither at home nor abroad,” Baird wrote.
*
Hamas accused of failing to investigate executions
(JNS.org) Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Gaza’s Hamas government failed to fully investigate an incident that occurred during the latest conflict between Israel and Gaza in November 2012, in which seven Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel were executed and the body of one was dragged through the street by a motorcycle.
Although a military court convicted the men, Hamas’s “inability or unwillingness to investigate the brazen murders of seven men makes a mockery of its claims that it’s upholding the rule of law in Gaza,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director of the New York-based HRW, a George Soros-funded group that has often been critical of Israel.
“Even before the killings, the abuses the men suffered made the criminal justice system a travesty, regardless of their guilt or innocence,” HRW said in a statement, the BBC reported.
Hamas spokesman Ihab al-Ghusain said Thursday that there was an official inquiry after the incident, but HRW also quoted a Hamas leader, Mahmud Zahar, who justified the killings, saying, “We will not allow one collaborator to be in Gaza, and let human rights groups say whatever they want. A human has rights if they have honor and not if they are a traitor.”
*
Preceding provided by JNS.org