Netanyahu: No change in Palestinian position since 1993
(JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday in a Likud-Beiteinu alliance meeting that he sees “no real changes in the Palestinian position since 1993,” the year the Oslo Accords were signed.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, said Israel’s linking of its release of Palestinian prisoners to expanded construction in Judea and Samaria “is likely to bring about the termination” of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
But Netanyahu said, “If the Palestinians can’t even meet the agreements reached so far—we release prisoners but continue building—how can I be sure they will live up to the bigger issues, which their society is sure to find much more controversial?”
“If you want to lead—get up and make the hard decisions. That’s what I did and I expect the Palestinians to do the same,” Netanyahu said, according to i24news.
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Israeli-Palestinian conflict deal should have ‘minimal’ U.S. involvement, poll says
(JNS.org) Sixty-two percent of American respondents in a new Anti-Defamation League survey said an agreement to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “must be reached with minimal involvement from the U.S.”
In the same poll, 76 percent of respondents said Israel “can be counted on as a strong, loyal U.S. ally,” while 17 percent disagreed with that statement. Forty-eight percent said they sympathized with Israel when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to 16 percent who said they sympathize with the Palestinians.
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Temple Mount visits by Jews will lead to intifada, Arab MKs warn
(JNS.org) Arab Members of Knesset furiously protested the standardization of Jewish visitation rights to the Temple Mount at a session of the Israeli Knesset Committee for the Interior on Monday.
Deputy Minister for Religious Services Eli Ben-Dahan said during the meeting that he is seeking an agreement on the visitation rights with Israel’s chief rabbinate. But MKs Ahmad Tibi, Jamal Zahalka, and other Arab MKs who attended the meeting threatened dire consequences, including a new intifada, if any proposals on the issue would be agreed upon.
“There is no Temple Mount. There is only the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” shouted Zahalka, according to the Jerusalem Post. Tibi said another intifada “will break out again, also because of Al-Aqsa.”
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Claims Conference calls on Germany to return Nazi-looted art
(JNS.org) The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) has accused Germany of being morally complicit in the theft of 1,500 works of art discovered in a Munich apartment owned by the son of a wartime art dealer.
The collection, discovered at the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, could be worth more than $1.35 billion, the German news magazine Focus reported.
Gurlitt’s father was an art collector during the Nazi regime tasked with removing “degenerate” art from display around the country. The Claims Conference says the works were forcibly seized or extorted from Jewish art collectors.
“We demand the paintings be returned to their original owners. It cannot be, as in this case, that what amounts morally to the concealment of stolen goods continues,” said Claims Conference representative Ruediger Mahlo, Reuters reported.
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Israel’s wild pig population was originally from Europe, researchers say
(JNS.org) In a country where the two main religions, Judaism and Islam, both forbid its consumption, researchers say that Israel’s feral pig population was originally European, likely arriving with the Philistines more than 3,000 years ago.
A new study in the journal Scientific Reports that was based on the DNA of modern and ancient feral pigs, also known as boar, revealed that European emigrant pigs became prominent during the Iron Age, circa 900 BCE, eventually overtaking the entire pig population in what is known as Israel today. This differs from boar in nearby countries, which are all Middle Eastern.
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Preceding provided by JNS.org