More in ‘Palestine’

Over the past 15 years, the political conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs has been reframed as a religious war in which leaders from Yasser Arafat to Hassan Nasrallah to Osama bin Laden have appealed to the authority of the Quran to support their goal of eliminating the State of Israel. The authority of ...

• The Israeli Air Force revealed new pilotless drones (the size of Boeing 737s) that have a long enough range to be operational against, say, Iran. [NYT]
• The French and Spanish foreign ministers are the most prominent supporters of an initiative that would see the European Union recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months. Israel ...

Sorry for the consecutive Herzliya Conference posts. But it is fairly big news: Defense Minister Ehud Barak stated that, should there continue to be only one country on the land where Israel and the Palestinian territories currently are (and should most of the Palestinians remain disenfranchised), then a state of “apartheid” would exist. That is ...

• The Spanish foreign minister announced his country will press for Palestinian statehood when it takes over the E.U. presidency on January 1st. [JTA]
• A Chabad-sponsored menorah at an entrance to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park has prompted a heated discussion on the legality of religious displays on city property. [NYT]
• Newsweek’s ace investigative reporter Michael ...

In the classic 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, a judge rules that one Mr. Kris Kringle is legally Santa Claus, based on the fact that the U.S. Postal Service forwarded him Santa’s mail. One wonders (well, not really, but indulge us) whether the search-engine behemoth Google could impose similar binding authority on Palestinian and ...

• Ever since settlers’ arson last Friday of a West Bank mosque, fears that the Palestinian cause could now take on a more religious tinge and that the conflict could suddenly turn more violent have abounded. [NYT]
• Having demanded most of it all at once, Western negotiators scoffed at Iran’s proposal to trade little bits ...

This morning, shortly after President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, a newly released report found that even Israelis—who are thought of as more skeptical of Obama’s peace-making capabilities than most—have a generally favorable view of the president and his promise of bringing greater amity to the globe. The poll, conducted for ...

Hey, remember a couple of weeks ago when the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said that in the absence of negotiations with the Israelis, the Palestinians would just go ahead and declare statehood unilaterally? Well, not so much. Yesterday, a delegation of Americans from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs met in Ramallah with ...

A top priority for Sweden during its current possession of the European Union’s rotating six-month presidency was to get the association’s 26 other member states to sign a proposal to split Jerusalem into the capitals, respectively, of Israel and a future Palestinian state. Additionally, the Swedish document explicitly called for said Palestinian state to be ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Michael Weiss profiles Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a Western-trained technocrat whose apolitical leadership “provides what seems to be Palestinians’ best hope for a more functional future.” Book critic Adam Kirsch reviews a biography of Vilna ghetto hero and later-life Israeli poet Abba Kovner, who “found an alternative to helplessness” by ...