Israel

Haaretz reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet decided unanimously on Sunday to extend the Citizenship Law restricting the “family reunification” of Israeli citizens with certain foreign partners for an additional year. The law denies entry or living permits to partners who are considered a security threat, among them Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, [...]

Joseph Dana writes: During President Barack Obama’s final hour in Israel on March 22, he was able to broker an unlikely apology from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his counterpart in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past several years, diplomatic relations soured between the two traditional allies over Israel’s stubborn refusal to apologise [...]

Ben Hayes writes: Regardless of where you stand on Israel-Palestine, things have surely gone awry in Brussels for the EU to be providing generous R&D (research and development) subsidies to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the state-owned manufacturer of Israeli ‘drones’ and other ‘battlefield solutions’. Some of the grants are for IAI to adapt its killer [...]

Reuters reports: Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Sunday an attack on a Syrian arms complex showed Israel was serious about preventing the flow of heavy weapons into Lebanon, appearing to acknowledge for the first time that Israel carried out the strike. Israel has maintained official silence over Wednesday’s raid, which Syria said targeted a [...]

Outside Israel, Shlomi Eldar is best known as the TV broadcaster who spoke to Gaza doctor, Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, moments after al-Aish’s three daughters had been killed in an Israeli strike during Operation Cast Lead in 2009. In an interview with Haaretz, Eldar says: A few days after the end of Operation Pillar of Defense [...]

Max Blumenthal writes: The story of the Israeli elections is not, as was expected, the dominance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud-Beiteinu coalition with former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. Instead, it is the unlikely triumph of Yair Lapid, a media celebrity who managed to secure nineteen seats in the next Knesset, making [...]

Patrick Martin reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earned the right in Tuesday’s Israeli election to be asked to try to form the country’s next government, but whether he will succeed or not is up to a neophyte politician named Yair Lapid, whose party’s second-place finish has stunned the country. Riding a wave of protest over [...]

“[I]f Israel, a small state in an inhospitable region, becomes more of a pariah — one that alienates even the affections of the U.S., its last steadfast friend — it won’t survive. Iran poses a short-term threat to Israel’s survival; Israel’s own behavior poses a long-term one.” That’s a paragraph from Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest column [...]

At Electronic Intifada, David Sheen describes the latest rally and also provides background on Israel’s racist ringleaders.

Jonathan Freedland writes: In a week when the dead number 60,000 in Syria – a figure considered an underestimate by the UN body that produced it – it can seem like displacement activity to speak of any other topic in the region. It is Syria, surely, that matters most, a slaughter whose scale shames a [...]