Israel/ Palestine

CNN reports on a handful of militant women in Gaza who have joined the radical al-Nasir Salahuddin Brigades and gained training as guerrillas. The women explicitly mentioned the model of women in the Israeli military as among their sources of inspiration. These groups are more militant than Hamas, which is the most important party-militia in […]

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that ‘ The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of […]

CNN reports on racist letters emanating from ultra-orthodox rabbis or their wives in Israel. Thirty wives of rabbis called on Jewish-Israeli women not to marry Palestinian-Israeli men, alleging that they would universally be subjected to physical abuse. The incident follows an earlier one in which rabbis urged Jewish-Israelis not to rent to Palestinian-Israelis (can you […]

The Palestine Authority roundly rejected on Monday the suggestion by Israeli Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu that an ‘interim agreement’ between Israel and the PA might be achievable even though the moment was not propitious for a comprehensive peace settlement. Three big issues appear to stand in the way of progress. The first is the Israeli […]

Distribution of the Druze communities in the Levant.. For more on the Druze religion see this link.

The some 50,000 Christians in the West Bank continue to labor under Israeli military occupation this Christmas, though somewhat improved tourism and prosperity have lessened the penury in which they labored in 2005, at the end of the Palestinian uprising or Intifada. Christian Arabs in Israel proper continue to be second-class citizens. In Nazareth (the […]