Nir Barkat: Better to let peace deal collapse on Jerusalem than to make ‘bad deal’
(JNS.org) With renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations underway, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat warned against Israeli concessions relating to his city.
“If the deal collapses because it hinges on the Jerusalem issue, so be it. It is better not to make any deal than to agree to a bad deal,” Barkat told Israel Hayom in an interview published Friday.
The next round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations will take place Aug. 14 in Jerusalem.
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U.S. Air Force chief makes under-the-radar visit to Israel
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III concluded a week-long secret visit to Israel on Thursday as a guest of Israel Air Force (IAF) Commander Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, the Israeli website Walla News reported Friday.
According to the report, the visit was made secretly at the request of the U.S., in light of regional tensions and the current discourse in Israel on the possibility of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The visit was Welsh’s first visit to Israel as the head of the U.S. Air Force. The Israel Defense Forces reportedly saw the visit, which included “opening new channels of communication,” as very constructive, and agreed to increase the frequency of such visits.
During his stay, Welsh visited IAF flight squadrons and met with pilots and senior officers, according to the report. The most important part of his trip was said to be his meetings with Eshel. The report said the IDF had refused to reveal what the two spoke about during their meetings, although it was speculated that they discussed the IDF’s current dilemmas, the instability of regimes in the region and Iran’s continued nuclear work.
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Jackie Robinson statue in Brooklyn spray-painted with ‘Heil Hitler,’ swastika
(JNS.org) The words “Heil Hitler” and a swastika, in addition to other racist graffiti, were found spray-painted on the base of the Jackie Robinson statue outside of the Minor League Baseball stadium of the Brooklyn Cyclones on Wednesday.
Robinson was Major League Baseball’s first black player, breaking the sport’s color barrier on April 15, 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“The defacement of a public statue with words and symbols of hate is an act of intimidation that affects our entire community,” said Etzion Neuer, Acting New York Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League. “It is that much worse that the attack targeted the statue of Jackie Robinson, an iconic sports legend and an African-American hero who helped to integrate Major League Baseball.”
The Cyclones, an affiliate of the New York Mets, said in a statement, “It is both heartbreaking and deeply disturbing that this statue, which is a symbol of equality and tolerance, has been defaced in such an offensive and hateful way.”
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Hezbollah ambushes Israeli soldiers on border, Lebanese media reports
(JNS.org) Lebanese media reports suggest that Hezbollah was behind the explosion that injured four Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border on Wednesday.
Calling it an “ambush,” Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper, which is sympathetic to Hezbollah, describes how Israeli commandos crossed into Lebanese territory and were hit by an “explosive device containing four smaller devices filled with ball bearings.”
“Exactly 20 seconds later, a similar device was detonated. The two explosions had a blast radius of about 15 meters, enough to hit everything and everyone that moved within the blast zone,”Al-Akhbar reported.
“For the enemy, the obvious conclusion will be that the Resistance remains ready and vigilant, fully prepared to face any Israeli incursion,” the Lebanese newspaper added.
The Lebanese army said the Israeli soldiers were wounded 400 meters inside of Lebanese territory. Israel has not indicated whether or not its soldiers were in Lebanon.
Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said the soldiers were on a routine mission and inadvertently activated a land mine, Ynet reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also commented on the incident, but did not provide any details.
“Our soldiers defend us and our borders, which is what they were doing last night. We will continue to react to defend Israel’s borders,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying by Army Radio.
Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody month-long war in the summer of 2006 after a Hezbollah guerillas crossed the border and attacked an Israeli patrol.
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NY Times bureau chief corrects pre-1967 lines error
(JNS.org) New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren printed a correction on Thursday to an earlier version of an article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that she acknowledged incorrectly described United States policy on Jewish communities located beyond the pre-1967 lines.
The original article stated that the U.S. “along with most of the world, considers these settlements illegal, and some of them sit in the heart of the area imagined as a future Palestinian state.”
Steven Rosen, a former top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and current director of the Washington Project of the Middle East Forum, wrote in a 2012 analysis of U.S. policy that, “Successive U.S. administrations have deplored settlement activity as an obstacle to peace, but no American president—except Jimmy Carter—has taken the view that building Jewish homes in Jerusalem constitutes a violation of the Geneva conventions,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Rudoren wrote a separate article describing Palestinian rock throwing as a “hobby” and a “rite of passage.”
“The article could have added another chart: the names of Israelis who have been killed or permanently maimed by rock throwers,” wrote Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., in a New York Times response letter to the editor responding to Rudoren’s article.
The article “romanticized and heroized the Palestinian perpetrators,” wrote Ricki Hollander the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
“It is [Palestinian rock throwers]—not the Israeli dead and injured—who are presented [by Rudoren’s article] as the victims, ‘provoked by the situation,’ forced into this type of ‘futile’ hobby, only to be arrested and incarcerated by fierce, powerful Israeli soldiers,” Hollander wrote.
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Allegations of anti-Semitism in trial of Russian Jew sentenced to seven years in prison
(JNS.org) Russia’s Kremlin human rights council plans to review the case of Russian-Jewish teacher Ilya Farber, who in a Russian regional court last week was sentenced for the second time to seven years in a maximum security penal colony on bribery charges.
The Russian Jewish Congress, which has been raising money to assist Farber’s family, has criticized a phrase made by the prosecutor during Farber’s first trial in 2012— “Can a person with the last name Farber truly help a village for free?”—as evidence for anti-Semitic undertones in the case.
Farber had worked as a teacher and later the director of the village cultural house in Moshenka, in the Tver region in Central Russia, where he was accused of accepting a bribe worth about $13,000 from a construction firm renovating the cultural house in return for officially marking the work as complete.
The prosecutor’s remark during the first trial isn’t typical, because Russian legal officials are usually “very careful with what they say,” Matvey Chlenov, deputy executive for the Russian Jewish Congress, told JNS.org. “What we most dislike currently is that this prosecutor was not punished, even though the first sentence was annulled by the Russian Federal court,” he said.
“Farber received a very cruel sentence, even though the alleged bribe sum was only several thousands of dollars. And still he got seven years of hard labor… We would like the sentence to be reviewed [a second time],” Chlenov added.
The National Conference on Soviet Jewry has also been closely monitoring the Farber case. “We join with our partner the Russian Jewish Congress in expressing concern at the prosecutor’s statement questioning Mr. Farber’s background,” Mark Levin, the organization’s executive director, told JNS.org.
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Preceding provided by JNS.org