Netanyahu says no Palestinian state if he forms next government
(JNS.org) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday that he would not establish a Palestinian state if his Likud party forms the next Israeli government, reversing the support for a two-state solution that he expressed in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University.
“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel,” Netanyahu told the NRG news website.
“The left has buried its head in the sand time after time and ignores this, but we (Likud) are realistic and understand,” he added.
Also on Monday, the Zionist Union alliance’s Tzipi Livni said she would forgo a previous agreement to rotate the position of prime minister with Isaac Herzog if their party—a merger between the Herzog-led Labor party and the Livni-led Hatnuah party—forms the next Israeli government. Instead, only Herzog would be the prime minister.
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Michael Douglas reveals son’s encounter with anti-Semitism in Europe
(JNS.org) Actor Michael Douglas, whose father and fellow actor Kirk Douglas is Jewish, revealed in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that his 14-year-old son with actress Catherine Zeta-Jones has experienced an anti-Semitic attack in Europe.
“Last summer our family went to Southern Europe on holiday. During our stay at a hotel, our son Dylan went to the swimming pool. A short time later he came running back to the room, upset. A man at the pool had started hurling insults at him,” Douglas wrote.
“My first instinct was to ask, ‘Were you misbehaving?’ ‘No,’ Dylan told me through his tears. I stared at him. And suddenly I had an awful realization of what might have caused the man’s outrage: Dylan was wearing a Star of David,” he wrote.
Douglas wrote that anti-Semitism tends to grow wherever the economy is struggling. That trend, “an irrational and misplaced hatred of Israel,” and a growth in the European Muslim population have led to the current manifestations of anti-Semitism taking place across Europe, the actor argued.
“If we confront anti-Semitism whenever we see it, if we combat it individually and as a society, and use whatever platform we have to denounce it, we can stop the spread of this madness,” Douglas wrote.
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Natalie Portman signs petition to end child poverty in Israel
(JNS.org) Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman signed a petition against child poverty in Israel while she was on a visit to the Jewish state.
The petition, which was started by teenagers from the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed (“working and studying youth”) movement, has received more than 12,000 other signatures. It calls for Israeli children of low economic means to receive three meals a day in school, for the cancellation of school tuition for families in need, to allow children to borrow textbooks at no cost, and for the Israeli government to fund all medical medications and dental procedures for children until the age of 19. These demands’ total cost is projected to be about $2.25 billion.
“When I heard about the ‘Million Kids’ petition, I immediately realized that I should support this important initiative to end poverty among children,” Portman said.
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Reform rabbinical authority appoints openly gay president
(JNS.org) Rabbi Denise Eger, the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in Los Angeles, is being installed Monday as the first openly gay president of the the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform movement’s rabbinical authority in the U.S.
Eger, 55, follows the footsteps of Rabbi Toba Spitzer, a gay clergywoman who was chosen to lead the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association in 2007.
“It really shows an arc of LGBT civil rights,” Eger told the Associated Press. “I smile a lot—with a smile of incredulousness.”
“It’s about human rights and human dignity,” she added. “If you can be a rabbi, if you can be a person of faith, if you can serve a community as their pastor, and you can have the opportunity to begin to reconcile all of those issues, it speaks volumes.”
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