…there have been no new construction tenders issued for the West Bank since President Barack Obama visited (in March)…
Yariv Oppenheimer, head of Peace Now
in light of the following:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has quietly halted new building projects in the occupied West Bank in what Reuters describes as “an apparent bid to help U.S. efforts to revive peace talks with the Palestinians.”
This is a restless and an ugly moment in Syria, by any measure, and a hazardous one.
+++++
art: photo of Free Syrian Army fighters by Abdalghne Karoof
The president of the United States stood…in Jerusalem, and with empathy and…bluntness that has been absent for so long we forgot it could exist, told Israelis: The occupation can’t go on. It’s destroying your own future. And besides that, Palestinians have “a right to … justice” and “to be a free people in their own land.” If you don’t think this is a breakthrough, you are letting naïve pessimism overcome realism. Yes, it’s true that one speech will be worth nothing if not followed by intense American diplomacy. That comment has become banal. A realistic assessment is that Obama’s visit, and the speech, were the opening act of an American diplomatic effort—a near perfect opening.
more.
…the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes—look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
President Obama
about which New York’s Jonathan Chait says
Obama [argued] for peace not merely as a strategic necessity for Israel but as a basic human right. This passage would have struck terror in Israeli hearts had Obama not preceded it with a lengthy affirmation of Zionism
and more.
…his first trip to the Jewish state since taking office…Obama will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian and Jordanian leaders during the tour…
more.
…nobody talked about Mali because Republicans haven’t yet figured out a way to use Mali to hurt Democrats. Republicans can no longer use Al Qaeda and and Afghanistan to hurt Democrats…so Al Qaeda and Afghanistan barely came up. It was all Israel and Iran…We literally no longer have Republican officeholders in Washington who have any larger interest than scoring points for themselves and their side…On foreign policy, the Republican Party was once dominated by isolationists, and later by realists and by interventionists—but now the party is dominated by Republicanists…America and its role in the world? Who cares!
more.
…unless they were injected with…a highly effective long-lasting contraceptive injection that comes with some troubling side effects, such as a decrease in bone density. Way more troubling, obviously, is that it seems officials were more or less trying to neuter Ethiopian women without their consent. About a third of the 120,000 Jews of Ethiopian origin who live in Israel were actually born there; the rest immigrated and, in the past decade, did so via transition camps, where the shots were reportedly “standard practice.”
more.
For the past week, the White House has dealt with investigations into the attack on...
Wall of sound.
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Lit Girl: Writer and Editor-in-Chief Uzoamaka Maduka of The American Reader...
zoe saldana on late night with jimmy fallon
My baby. #daughter #youngest #birthday #closeup
Dizzy Gillespie by Carl Van Vechten
Fabulous in Roberto Cavalli Fall/Winter 2013/14
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