Today’s Zaman reports: Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has said Turkey would not be opposed to a possible autonomous Kurdish region in Syria following the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, if all groups in the country can agree on it.

Davutoğlu’s comments came as he spoke to reporters aboard a plane carrying a Turkish delegation to Myanmar on Thursday. Stating that Turkey is not against the improvement of Kurds’ rights in Syria, the foreign minister recalled that he had met with leaders of the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC) during a visit he paid to Arbil.

“I told them, the leader of the SNC chairs the council as a Syrian Kurd. And you [KNC] are sitting here as Syrian Kurds. Sit down and come to terms. What we oppose is the threat of terrorism and the possibility of one of you claiming possession of somewhere. Elections should be held in Syria; a parliament should be formed that includes Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs. You can come together and say we will grant autonomy [to the Kurds]. This is up to you. We would not oppose that,” Davutoğlu said.

Turkey announced it strongly opposes the presence of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Syria’s northern cities along the Turkish border following the withdrawal of Assad’s forces from predominantly Kurdish-populated areas to fight opposition forces in Damascus and Aleppo. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan earlier warned that Turkey will intervene if “terrorist formations” emerge along its border.

The Jerusalem Post reports: Early Monday morning, Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Oren tweeted the following: “Iranian backed terrorists again struck at our Southern border today killing 15 Egyptian guards and attempting to massacre Israeli civilians Terrorists also shelled Israeli farms and towns along the border.”

By the afternoon though, Oren took the tweet off his Twitter feed. Why? No explanation was given although senior IDF officers said later in the day that Iran did not play a role in the attack and was not a known supporter of the known perpetrators.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this clear in his briefing to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee when he said that the attack was carried out by a group somehow affiliated with al-Qaida.

According to intelligence obtained by the IDF, the attackers were global jihad-affiliated operatives – mostly Beduin residents of the Sinai Peninsula.

What connects them, Israeli intelligence believes, is a shared Salafi ideology. The source of funding for the groups operating in the Sinai is is unclear but is understood to not come from Iran or Hezbollah.

By Monday evening, Oren tweeted again, this time accusing “global jihad, a group closely affiliated with al-Qaida.”

So what prompted Oren to immediately tweet that Iran was involved? Also unclear although it might just be the general atmosphere in the Israeli government these days.

Another example of how Iran finds its way into Israel’s other fronts even when it is not connected was provided later in the day by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who toured the scene of the attack and declared: “Israel can only rely on itself… and will continue to do so,” a statement he has made a number of times in recent weeks in reference to his pending decision on a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Of course if Israel really was so self-reliant it wouldn’t need to squeeze the U.S. Congress every year in order to extract billions of US tax dollars for military aid. Neither does Israel need to be completely self-reliant in the defense of its border with Egypt. The Egyptians have just conducted their biggest military operation in Sinai since 1973, launching airstrikes on suspected militants in the border area.

Haaretz reports: The British ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould said on Thursday that anyone who cares about Israel, should be concerned about the erosion of international support for the country.

Speaking on Channel 10 news on Thursday evening, Gould said, “Israelis might wake up in 10 years time and find out that suddenly the international community has changed, and that patience for continuing the status quo has reduced.”

“Support for Israel is starting to erode and that’s not about these people on the fringe who are shouting loudly and calling for boycotts and all the rest of it. The interesting category are those members of parliament in the middle, and in that group I see a shift.”

“The problem is not hasbara. The center ground, the majority, the British public may not be expert but they are not stupid and they see a stream of announcement about new building in settlements, they read stories about what’s going on in the West Bank, they read about restrictions in Gaza. The substance of what’s going wrong is really what’s driving this,” he said.

He also said that there is “growing concern” in the U.K. over the lack of progress towards peace with the Palestinians.

Asked about the BBC Olympics website naming Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine on its Olympics website, he said it was not his place to comment on the actions of the organization.

“It would be wrong for me to try and either explain their actions, for that you should speak to the BBC. But what I would say is this, that Israel is now seen as the Goliath and it’s the Palestinians who are seen as the David,” he said.

Last month, the Prime Minister’s Office was informed that Israel’s page on the BBC’s Olympic website included no reference to the country’s capital city. The raised eyebrows in Netanyahu’s bureau were soon supplanted by genuine anger when staffers noticed that on the page devoted to Palestine on the BBC site, East Jerusalem is listed as its capital city.

In response, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign press and public affairs adviser Mark Regev sent a letter of protest to the director of the BBC’s bureau in Israel, Paul Danahar. In the letter, a copy of which reached Haaretz, Regev writes that he is “dismayed by the BBC’s decision to discriminate against Israel on the BBC’s Olympic website.”

Following Regev’s letter, the BBC altered Israel’s page on the website such that under the heading “Seat of government,” the following sentence appears: “Jerusalem, though most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.”

GlobalPost reports: The second half of July has exposed Israelis to a new and horrifying phenomenon: desperate but mainstream citizens choosing, again and again, to end it all through fire.

So far, there have been seven attempts in the last two weeks, and numerous threats. One man is dead, another clings to life.

The first one came on July 14 at a large Tel Aviv rally commemorating the first anniversary of the Israeli Occupy movement. Moshe Silman, a badly indebted Haifa resident entangled in what the daily newspaper Ha’aretz called “a bureaucratic nightmare,” distributed flyers to a few people around him, doused himself with lighter fluid and struck a match.

He was burned over 90 percent of his body. The social justice movement, of which he was a part, waited out the eight-day vigil in shocked silence until he died.

The idea of a man ostentatiously setting himself aflame is so alien here that many Israelis, and it would appear their entire government, have found themselves helpless and unsure how to react. [Continue reading…]

Is there a difference between Israeli tourists viewing the conflict in Syria through binoculars and Americans following the same events on the internet? Sometimes maybe not, but largely I would say there is a significant difference.

For Israelis the spectacle of regional violence is self-affirming.

It reinforces the idea that Israel is justifiably obsessed with its own security because it is surrounded by a ‘dangerous neighborhood.’

It confirms Ehud Barak’s racist notion that Israel is a villa in a jungle and that tranquility inside this villa can only be afforded by high walls.

It defines neighbors on the basis of their otherness and legitimizes indifference in preference to empathy.

It denies the common ground of human existence and suggests that the miserable plight of those who live literally a stone’s throw outside Israel need not impinge on the good life inside the Jewish state.

The Associated Press reports: The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.

The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.

It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched.

In a separate episode, according to another two former U.S. officials, a CIA officer in Israel came home to find the food in the refrigerator had been rearranged. In all the cases, the U.S. government believes Israel’s security services were responsible.

Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.

In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency’s Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel. [Continue reading…]

Readers of the New York Times may mistakenly get the impression that the Obama administration has confirmed Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Wednesday’s attack on Israeli tourists was conducted by Hezbollah.

American officials on Thursday identified the suicide bomber responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli vacationers here as a member of a Hezbollah cell that was operating in Bulgaria and looking for such targets, corroborating Israel’s assertions and making the bombing a new source of tension with Iran.

That’s what I’d call a slimy piece of journalism. The key word in this sentence is “identified” and the Times reporters and editors are I believe quite consciously using this word in a way that is intended to deceive readers.

In a further indication that deception is the name of the game here, the Times uses two headlines — one online the other in print: “Hezbollah Is Blamed for Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria” and “Bus Bombing Is Attributed To Hezbollah.” Note that neither headline indicates who is doing the blaming or attribution.

Suppose someone goes missing and there are suspicions that they might have been abducted and perhaps murdered. A few days later a body is found. News reports say that the body has been “identified” and it is indeed the missing person. Everyone understands that “identified” is unequivocal. It’s not the same as the police saying that this appears to be the missing person and they are continuing their investigation in order to establish whether that is the case. If the body has been identified, then the identity is no longer in question.

Consider, for instance, today’s news of the shooting in Colorado. Early reports said that a gunman had opened fire in a movie theater killing twelve people. The gunman has now been identified. His name is James Eagan Holmes and he is 24 years old. Imagine the reaction of press reporters if a police spokesman had said: “We’ve identified the gunman. We’re now trying to find out his name.”

So, back to the report on the Bulgaria bombing. Citing an unnamed American official we are told about the “current American intelligence assessment” of the bombing. “Current intelligence assessment” is a fancy way of saying, this is currently our best guess about who did it and why, based on the limited amount of information we now have.

Readers need to get all the way to paragraph eight before they are told that the bomber’s name and nationality are unknown. Neither can any information be provided revealing what types of intelligence led analysts to conclude that the bomber was a member of Hezbollah.

In other words, a report which began by saying that the bomber had been identified does not in the end establish whether the current American intelligence assessment is based on any hard evidence whatsoever!

While the New York Times claims that the bomber has been identified as belonging to Hezbollah, what they should be reporting is that unnamed U.S. officials claim that this is the case but have yet to provide any information backing up this claim.

At this time, the Bulgaria bomber’s identity remains unknown. For as long as that is the case it is probably premature for anyone to assert what his motive was or what organization, if any, he might have been affiliated with.

Ian Black writes: On a ridge high above the Golan plateau, the telltale antennae and golfball radomes of an Israeli surveillance station point north-east towards Damascus. In the valley below, minefields, barbed wire fences and a blue UN flag mark the frontline between the two most powerful armies in the Middle East. Behind it is a country in the throes of civil war.

Round the clock, from its perch on Mount Avital, the Israeli army’s unit 8200 eavesdrops on Syria, a former bastion of stability that is now crumbling along with other old certainties about the region. It is simple enough, say, to monitor the communications of an armoured division or track a MiG fighter squadron, but far harder to understand the calculations going on in Bashar al-Assad’s head. “Tanks are the easiest thing to follow,” says a veteran intelligence officer in Tel Aviv.

Ora Peretz lives in a kibbutz founded when Israel conquered the Golan Heights in 1967 and runs a cafe selling cherries, coffee and cold drinks. “We see terrible things on TV about what is happening in Syria,” she said, as a group of tourists peered across no-man’s land at the ruins of Quneitra. “But it’s quiet here. People say Assad might try to do something desperate. But I know we are ready if he does.”

The potential fallout from a disintegrating Syria is not Israel’s only worry. Last month’s election victory for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and jitters about unrest in Jordan have raised troubling questions about the country’s peace treaties with two of its immediate neighbours. In Lebanon, the third neighbour, Hezbollah – armed by Iran and Syria – is seen as a permanent challenge to Israel’s regional dominance. Israel’s once close relations with Turkey are in ruins.

Official discourse in Israel frowns on the romantic phrase “the Arab spring“. The reference point is more Tehran 1979 than Berlin 1989. In government offices the preferred terms are “awakening” or plain “unrest”.

Politicians do use a seasonal metaphor, but a far chillier one. “For us it is an Islamist winter,” says Ronnie Bar-On, chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee. A colour photograph of Auschwitz above his desk is a bleak reminder of what still makes many Israelis tick.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud prime minister, likes to describe the Middle East as a “tough neighbourhood”. Ehud Barak, his defence minister, once compared Israel to a “villa in the jungle” – a phrase that smacked of colonialism and racism. In recent months both have warned of the danger of Iran going nuclear and hinted at a pre-emptive attack to stop it – and maintain Israel’s atomic supremacy. But developments closer to home are deeply unsettling. Israel’s relations with the Arab world and its strategic position in the Middle East have reached “a new low”, in the words of Itamar Rabinovich, a leading historian of the Middle East and a former ambassador to the US. [Continue reading…]

Karl Vick writes: In the absence of firm evidence, the strongest argument for Iranian involvement in the bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists at a Bulgarian airport is this: The blast came 18 years to the day after the car bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, an attack Argentine authorities traced to Iran and Hizballah, the proxy force it established in Lebanon.

Arguing against Iranian involvement: The Bulgaria bombing actually occurred.

Despite its notorious reputation as a state sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran has not been much in the terror business for more than a decade. And its recent efforts to return to operational form have been less than impressive. The world was incredulous that a terror mastermind of Tehran’s renown could be traced by a bank transfer to the effort of a Corpus Christi car salesman to enlist a Mexican drug gang to bomb the Saudi ambassador at a Washington restaurant. Since then, Iranian agents have been tracked and arrested plotting in Georgia, Azerbaijan, India, Cyprus, Kenya and Thailand, where things did not go well at all. There, a Thai prostitute’s cell phone would produce a photo of the plotters posing with girls in their arms and water pipes at their sides a week before the bomb they were making blew the roof off their Bangkok apartment. One of the suspects lost a leg when the explosives he was carrying fell at his feet and exploded, not far from where he’d chucked another charge at a taxi after the driver refused to pick him up.

“All signs point towards Iran,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said two hours after Wednesday’s attack, though those signs remain entirely circumstantial, and the circumstances girdle the globe. Consider, for instance, that the bomb that exploded in the Iranians’ Bangkok flat was the “sticky” kind, attached to a magnet that Thai officials said the conspirators planned to affix to the passing car of an Israeli diplomat. That’s what Iranian agents managed to do a day earlier in New Delhi, injuring the wife of a defense attaché as she went to pick up her kids at school. Significantly, sticky is the kind of bombs that Israeli agents have used in Tehran, where at least three Iranian nuclear specialists have been killed in covert operations that Western intelligence sources have told TIME are, in fact, conducted by the Mossad.

Still, like the anniversary of the Buenos Aires attack, which killed 85 people, what actually links Iran to the Bulgaria bombing is supposition. “It’s very hard to say. Right now we have no clues, no information,” a senior Israeli intelligence official tells TIME. “By process of elimination, we exclude Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They aren’t capable of such an operation so far away [from the Palestinian territories]. There’s also Al Qaeda, but they’re preoccupied with other arenas at the moment. Low chance.

“So it leaves us with the probability of Hizballah alone, or Iran alone, or a joint operation. Which makes sense.”

As an indication of the rip-roaring speed of speculation, the Times of Israel and Bulgarian media have already published photographs and the name of the suspect — a Swedish citizen and former Guantanamo detainee. But Carol Rosenberg from the Miami Herald says that Swedish security services and foreign ministry both say Mehdi Ghezali is not the bomber.

In an interview on MSNBC, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren claimed that Israel has hard evidence about who is behind the bombing, but when pressed on whether they know the identity of the bomber he hedged. They know for sure who did it, but they don’t know exactly who did it.

Hezbollah has denied any involvement in the attack, which begs the question: if they are lying, why would they have seemingly implicated themselves by timing the attack on the anniversary of the Buenos Aires bombing? The choice of that date might seem much more attractive to some entity — identity as yet unknown — that wants this to look like a Hezbollah operation.

Haaretz reports: No less than four times in the past ten days, senior officials in the IDF’s Northern Command briefed representatives of the Israeli and foreign press.

The IDF’s Northern Command gave its fourth press briefing in ten days on Thursday. The many meetings, as well as the identical messages that emerge from them, do not appear to be coincidental.

The commander of the IDF’s 91st Division, Brigardier-General Hertzi Halevy, who met Thursday with reporters near the border, had some of the harshest words.

Should another Lebanon war break out, Halevy told the reporters, a week before the sixth anniversary of the second Lebanon war, it would require the IDF to enter Lebanese territory with a mighty force, and bring about the destruction of many villages.

“Lebanon will sustain greater damage than that done during the second Lebanon war,” he said.

“The response will need to be sharper, harder, and in some ways very violent. After the Goldstone Report, people in the international community and in Israel thought that battle in a densely populated area could be carried out in a nicer way.It cannot be nice. Without the use of great force, we will find it difficult to achieve our aim, and the enemy should also know that. ”

Halevy’s threats are nothing new. For four years now, Israel is threatening to torch Lebanon should Hezbollah create a cross-border provocation. In October 2008, the Northern Command chief at the time, Gadi Eizenkot, presented what he called the “Dahiya doctrine.”

In the next confrontation, Eizenkot said at the time, Israel will expand the destruction capability it showed when it bombed Dahiya, the Shiite quarter in Beirut.

“In every village from which shots were fired toward Israel, we will impose disproportional force and cause great damage and destruction. As far as we’re concerned, these are military bases,” Eizenkot said in 2008.

The significance of Halevy’s comments, then, lies not in their content but in their timing. Given the assessments that Israel is likely to attack Iranian nuclear facilities in the coming months ¬ and the possibility that the ramifications of the civil war underway in Syria (for instance, the possible transfer of chemical weapons from the Assad regime to Hezbollah) could lead to an escalation in Lebanon, Israel is sending a clear signal to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The message is this: Sit quietly, this issue is too big for you to get involved in. If you dare harm us, in the name of defending the honor of Syria or Iran, you will pay a steep price that Lebanon will not be able to withstand.

Since Lebanon has only recently finished recovering from the damages it sustained in the Second Lebanon War, this threat seems to be significant. The Dahiya doctrine, the 2012 version: The coming weeks will tell if Israel’s threatening statements were received on the Lebanese side of the border.

Israel does no more than pay lip service to the two-state solution as it steadily appropriates more and more Palestinian land, writes Akiva Eldar.

In my vision of peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government. . . . If we get a guarantee of demilitarization, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, we are ready to agree to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state.

—Benjamin Netanyahu, June 14, 2009

Seemingly, it was a historic moment. The prime minister of Israel and leader of the Likud Party publicly embraced the two-state solution. A short while into his second term in office, ten days after the newly inaugurated president of the United States promised in Cairo to “personally pursue this outcome,” Netanyahu declared an about-face, shifting from the traditional course he and his political camp had once pursued.

Thus, more than ninety years after the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, it appeared the successors of the founders of Zionism were moving toward a historic compromise to resolve the conflict embedded in that intentionally vague statement. It is the conflict between “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

Now it appeared that this dispute, which for decades had split Israeli society into rival political camps, could be resolved. Forty-two years after the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, formerly held by Jordan and Egypt, a right-wing prime minister declared his willingness to return these territories to the people living in them, as well as his consent for the establishment of a new, independent state of Palestine.

But almost immediately, other voices emerged questioning whether this solution—dividing the land into two independent, coexisting states—was still feasible; whether the “window of opportunity” that might have been available in the past had already closed for good; whether the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank had reached a point of no return, creating a new situation that did not allow for any partition; and whether the division of political powers within Israeli society had changed, making the dramatic move impossible. As Robert Serry, UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, put it:

If the parties do not grasp the current opportunity, they should realize the implication is not merely slowing progress toward a two-state solution. Instead, we could be moving down the path toward a one-state reality, which would also move us further away from regional peace.

This article focuses on the Israeli side of this equation in part because the Palestinian leadership, as far back as 1988, made a strategic decision favoring the two-state solution, presented in the Algiers declaration of the Palestinian National Council. The Arab League, for its part, voted in favor of a peace initiative that would recognize the state of Israel and set the terms for a comprehensive Middle East settlement. Meanwhile, various bodies of the international community reasserted partition of the land as their formal policy. But Israel, which signed the Oslo accords nearly two decades ago, has been moving in a different direction. And Netanyahu’s stirring words of June 2009 now ring hollow.

Israel never overtly spurned a two-state solution involving land partition and a Palestinian state. But it never acknowledged that West Bank developments had rendered such a solution impossible. Facing a default reality in which a one-state solution seemed the only option, Israel chose a third way—the continuation of the status quo. This unspoken strategic decision has dictated its polices and tactics for the past decade, simultaneously safeguarding political negotiations as a framework for the future and tightening Israel’s control over the West Bank. In essence, a “peace process” that allegedly is meant to bring the occupation to an end and achieve a two-state solution has become a mechanism to perpetuate the conflict and preserve the status quo. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: A belief that every Palestinian child is a potential terrorist may be leading to a “spiral of injustice” and breaches of international law in Israel’s treatment of child detainees in military custody, a delegation of eminent British lawyers has concluded in an independent report backed by the Foreign Office.

The nine-strong delegation, led by the former high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley and including the UK’s former attorney-general Lady Scotland, found that “undisputed facts” pointed to at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It was also in breach of the fourth Geneva convention in transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons, the delegation said.

Its report, Children in Military Custody, released on Tuesday, was based on a visit to Israel and the West Bank last September funded and facilitated by the Foreign Office and the British consulate in Jerusalem.

It makes 40 specific recommendations concerning the treatment of Palestinian child detainees.

The issue has come under increasing scrutiny by human rights organisations and visiting delegations over the past year. In January the Guardian highlighted the use of solitary confinement in a report on the experiences of children under the military justice system.

The Independent adds: Last night the Foreign Office, which backed the report, said it would be taking up the claims with the Israeli authorities:

“The UK government has had long-standing concerns about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, and as a result decided to fund this independent report. While recognising that some positive recent steps have been made by the Israeli authorities, we share many of the report’s concerns, and will continue to lobby for further improvements.”

While the legal team said it was in no position to prove the truth of the claims of cruelty made repeatedly by Palestinian children, but denied by the Israeli authorities – which offered unprecedented access to the delegation – it pointed to the disparity in the law.

Israeli children must have access to a lawyer within 48 hours and cannot be imprisoned under the age of 14. But Palestinian children as young as 12 are jailed and can be kept for three months without legal representation. Between 500 and 700 are jailed each year.

Haaretz reports: Israeli culture is no less toxic than fanatic Islam, and the country’s discriminatory attitude toward Mizrahi Jews and Arabs qualifies it for the title of “most racist state,” prominent Israeli author Sami Michael said on Monday.

“Israel can claim the title of most racist state in the developed world,” Michael, who heads the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said at the opening of an international conference of the Association for Israel Studies at Haifa University.

“More than 60 years after the establishment of the Israeli state, the rift between European and Mizrahi Jewry has not mended. It is reflected in racism and social gaps,” the author said.

“To this day people from Arab states are underrepresented in the state’s central institutions, especially academic and cultural ones,” he said.

The racism is encouraged by cabinet members and MKs, and fueled by increasing religious extremism in the country, he said.

Michael also criticized the social inequalities in Israel and what he characterized as the failure of the left to adequately contend with these issues.

“Israel is in danger unless its leadership understands it isn’t located in Europe’s tranquil north but in the Middle East’s seething center,” said Michael. “We may lose everything. Israel could be a transient construct, like the First and Second Temples.”

Michael said Israeli children are trained to hate the other.

“Israeli culture is no less poisoned than the fanatic Islamic factions,” he said.

“From kindergarten to old age we feed our children hatred, suspicion and disgust toward the stranger and the other, and especially toward the Arabs,” he said.

He called the occupation “disaster incarnate” for Israel.

Joseph Dana writes: Israel’s famed airport security has just become tighter. American tourists have recently reported that their personal emails have been targeted by Israeli officials upon arrival in the country.

Strict and unapologetic airport security is closely associated with Israel’s international image, despite the fact that such caution borders on the absurd when it comes to foreigners of Palestinian origin or those suspected of Palestine-related activism. In the post-September 11 environment of security paranoia, the Israeli model is among the most stringent. It is a model some in the United States wish to emulate.

The dark side to this security, which includes racial profiling and in most cases a complete disregard of civil rights, is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. This past April, with much international fanfare, Israel deported a number of European activists who attempted to travel to the occupied West Bank through Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. Their experience of detainment, interrogation and deportation symbolised Israel’s approach to maintaining control of the West Bank. The treatment that some tourists receive at Tel Aviv’s airport is deeply connected to Israel’s infrastructure of occupation.

Israel’s image as a small country surrounded by enemies has been carefully designed to rationalise its extensive programme of racial profiling. From West Bank checkpoints to queues outside of bus stations in Tel Aviv, anyone with even indicators of anything associated with Palestinians is subjected to interrogation by the security apparatus.

Last week, security officials deported Sandra Tamari, an American of Palestinian origin, after eight hours of questioning. Ms Tamari was targeted because of her involvement with Palestinian solidarity organisations that support the global campaign to boycott Israel. In the course of hours of questioning, officials demanded that Ms Tamari open her personal email account for review. [Continue reading…]

Uri Avnery writes: “We shall not be a normal people, until we have Jewish whores and Jewish thieves in the Land of Israel,” our national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, said some 80 years ago.

This dream has come true. We have Jewish murderers, Jewish robbers and Jewish whores (though most prostitutes in Israel are imported by international slave traders from Eastern Europe through the Sinai border).

But Bialik was too unambitious. He should have added: We shall not become a normal people until we have Jewish Neo-Nazis and Jewish concentration camps.

The central news item nowadays in all our electronic and print media is the terrible danger of “illegal” African migrants.

African refugees and job seekers are drawn to Israel for several reasons, none of which is an ardent belief in Zionism. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Fifty international aid groups and United Nations agencies issued a joint appeal on Thursday calling on Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by Hamas Islamists.

“For over five years in Gaza, more than 1.6 million people have been under blockade in violation of international law. More than half of these people are children. We the undersigned say with one voice: ‘end the blockade now,'” the petition said.

Amongst the signatories were Amnesty International, Save the Children, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and five other U.N. bodies.