On 24 October 2009 – in what looked at the time to be an attempt to push Hamas to sign a reconciliation document being brokered by Egypt — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) issued the required presidential decree calling for presidential and legislative council elections on 24 January 2010 — that is, today. A [...]
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Filed under: Palestine & Palestinians
With thanks to Joseph Dana for his post on his blog here, it is possible to see the Youtube video by Yisrael Putermam of yesterday’s demonstration of Israelis supporting not only evicted Palestinians but also democracy, freedom of expression, and other human rights in Sheikh Jarrah: In the information posted on the Youtube site alongside [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, International Humanitarian Law, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians
“One of US President Barack Obama’s most publicized and internationally applauded first acts upon coming into office was his executive order to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay within a year”, as Sara Kuepfer Thakkar wrote in an analysis for the Zurich-based ISN Security Watch, but “The deadline for closing Guantanamo, which expires [...]
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Filed under: Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, Torture, USA
This is technological innovation, which we would wish to encourage — adopted by a new team of media advisers working for the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah — showing (on Youtube!) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) receiving U.S. Special Envoy George Mitchell not very long ago in the Muqata’a presidential headquarters in Ramallah: Now that [...]
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Filed under: Blogging, Middle East Peace Process, Negotiators and negotiations, Palestine & Palestinians, USA
Last Friday afternoon, Israeli police arrested 17 Israeli anti-occupation demonstrators who had crossed the Green Line and assembled in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where over the last year three families have been thrown out of homes built for them in the early 1950s by the the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians, United Nations, United Nations Agencies and Programmes
Food for thought: Today, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, in her remarks to the press after her meeting at the State Department in Washington D.C. with the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Catherine Ashton, that: “Together, we have a population of 800 million, a $27 trillion economy, a zone of peace, [...]
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Filed under: Donors, European Union, Quartet, USA
During yesterday’s annual reception for the foreign press in Israel hosted by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO), which is part of the Prime Minister’s Office (and, as part of the event, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu gave a press conference, see our earlier post on this site), a note posted on Twitter by the [...]
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Filed under: Israel, Journalism and Journalists
In a report just published prominently on the Ma’an News Agency website, Jared Malsin — the editor of Ma’an’s English-language website, who was deported/left voluntarily to the United States from Israel’s Ben Gurion airport yesterday — explained that he thought the document he signed the previous day was part of his lawyer’s legal move to [...]
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Filed under: Israel, Journalism and Journalists
Israel’s former Foreign Minister and Vice Prime Minister Tzipi Livni once said (during the Annapolis process of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) that Israel was not going to just withdraw from the West Bank and throw the keys over The Wall… Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said more or less the same thing, during his office’s [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians
As Jared Malsin must have landed in the U.S. by now, and maybe just clearing immigration and customs, there have been only a few new revelations about his deportation — but none from Ma’an News Agency itself, which hasn’t updated its statement since this morning. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post this afternoon, [...]
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Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Israel, Journalism and Journalists