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Midday: Gaza Tensions Subsiding

Plus Peretz in winter, and more in the news

by
Marc Tracy
December 27, 2010
Martin Peretz.(New York)
Martin Peretz.(New York)

In case this wasn’t clear, The Scroll and Tablet Magazine are publishing on a light schedule this week. Which means: Mega-midday-roundup!

• Over the weekend, Hamas reconfirmed its commitment to a cease-fire in an effort to head off tensions in Gaza during the two-year anniversary of Cast Lead. [NYT]

• In another instance of WikiLeaks telling us for certain what we knew was almost certainly true, a newly released 2008 cable authored by then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice confirms that Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. [JTA]

• Columnist Avi Shafran points out that President Obama has done pretty much every basic thing that typical pro-Israel American Jews have asked of him. [Jewish Standard]

• Henry Kissinger puts his 1973 remark, “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” “in context.” [WP]

• A must-read profile of longtime New Republic maven, owner, and editor-in-chief (soon to be editor at large) Marty Peretz reports that his controversial blog, The Spine, will soon be discontinued. [NYMag]

• Aid groups argue that the Gaza blockade is inhibiting them, not Hamas. [WP]

• Popular distress is building in Iran is building over higher prices, a result of slashed subsidies, in turn partly a result of Western sanctions. [WP]

• Hitch on Kissinger. I could read a new one every week. [Slate]

• Dov Halbertal polemicizes against Israel’s mixing of synagogue and state. [Haaretz]

• Recent revelations that even the ostensibly non-Nazi German civil service actively furthered the Holocaust and other crimes have shaken Germany of late. [NYT]

• After the Carmel fire, some are rethinking the whole everyone-should-plant-a-tree-in-Israel thing. [WP]

• The Mavi Marmara was returned to Turkey. [NYT]

• Dan Kurzman, a Washington Post foreign correspondent and historian of World War Two and the Israeli War of Independence, died at 88. [NYT]

• The argument that Cliff Lee is, in effect, a Philadelphian Jew strikes me as somewhat specious. Then again, anything to rub it in Yankee fans’ faces. [Jewish Exponent]

Donate to the United Jewish Appeal! Edward G. (as in Goldenberg) Robinson says so.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.