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Nearly three decades after Israel began airlifting Ethiopia’s ancient Jewish community out of the Horn of Africa, Israel’s rabbis are now working to phase out the community’s white-turbaned clergy, the kessoch, whose unusual religious practices are at odds with the rabbinate’s Orthodox Judaism.

The effort has added to the sense of discrimination felt by Israel’s 120,000 Ethiopian citizens. These sentiments boiled over this month after a group of landlords in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi refused to accept them as tenants, prompting a large rally planned for Wednesday across from Israel’s parliament.

“We are just like all the other Jews. We don’t have any other religion,” said Kess Semai Elias, 42.

Descendants of the lost Israelite tribe of Dan, according to Jewish lore, Ethiopian Jews spent millennia isolated from the rest of the Jewish world. In most Jewish communities, the priesthood of the Bible was replaced by rabbis who emphasized text study and prayer. Ethiopia’s Jewish kessoch continued the traditions of Biblical-era priests, sacrificing animals and collecting the first fruits of the harvest.

The two traditions diverged so much that the first trickle of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to Israel were asked to undergo a quickened conversion ceremony to appease rabbis who were dubious about their religious pedigree.

When Israeli clandestine operations rescued large groups of Ethiopian Jews from war and famine in the 1980s and early 1990s, a rabbinic consensus was reached and the newcomers did not have to convert – except for a group known as the Falash Mura, whose ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity generations before.

The 58 kessoch who arrived in Israel in those early days maintained their leadership role in the Ethiopian Jewish community, and in 1992 successfully lobbied the Israeli government to grant them salaries and status similar to those of government rabbis. But as the aging clergy began ordaining a new generation of kessoch over the past decade, and those new leaders also wanted recognition, Israel’s rabbinate objected.

After public demonstrations and a brief hunger strike, the newly ordained kessoch struck a bittersweet deal last month with Israel’s ministry of religious services.

The ministry would finally implement a 2010 government resolution to recognize 13 of them and give them state salaries. But Israel’s state rabbis made it very clear to the new kessoch: They would be the last.

“It’s for the best,” said Rabbi Yosef Hadana, 63, of the Israeli rabbinate.

Himself the son of a respected kess, Hadana long ago traded the shash, the white turban of his father’s tradition, for the black suit and fedora of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

“After 2,500 years of isolation from the nation of Israel, we have returned. Now we need to find a way to be one people,” Rabbi Hadana said.

Hadana says he holds great respect for the kessoch. They were the ones who once spun tales of Jerusalem’s splendor at evening storytelling sessions, keeping alive the Ethiopian Jews’ religious tradition. But anyone in Israel who wants to continue that tradition, he said, must get rabbinic training. Streamlining their religious practice can help integrate Ethiopian immigrants into Israeli society, he said.

Ethiopian-Israelis have long struggled in Israel, with literacy rates relatively low, the culture gap wide and rates of poverty and domestic violence well above the national average.

Many of the older generation work menial jobs, men as security guards and women as cleaners. Their children, most of whom grew up in Israel’s Orthodox Jewish religious schools, speak fluent Hebrew, serve in the army alongside native Israelis and are increasingly studying engineering and sciences in Israel’s universities. Despite these gains, the younger generation is still struggling compared to other Israelis.

The immigrants have also long complained of discrimination. In the late 90s it was discovered that Israel’s health services were throwing out Ethiopian-Israelis’ blood donations over fears of diseases contracted in Africa.

This is not the first time in history that Ethiopian Jews have been asked to reform. Jacques Faitlovitch, one of the first Jewish outsiders to meet the community, told the kessoch in 1904 they would have to stop antiquated paschal sacrifices if they wanted acceptance in the wider Jewish world.

Polish-born Faitlovitch also pushed them to stop Judaism’s last existing monastic tradition. Ethiopia’s last Jewish monk spent his final days in Israel, secluded in a synagogue annex and preparing his own food for reasons of purity. He died about 10 years ago.

Other traditions, like priestly tithes and huts for menstruating women, were also given up upon moving to Israel.

Still, the kessoch, easily recognized by their ceremonial fly-swatting tassels and rainbow-colored sunbrellas, are not ready to be relegated to history. First-generation Ethiopian immigrants still call on them to adjudicate family conflicts, lead funeral prayers, and slaughter meat according to tradition.

Israel only recently allowed kessoch into butcheries to slaughter their own animals – even though it is not considered kosher by rabbinic standards.

But the rabbis still put their foot down when it comes to marriage. To be legal, weddings must be presided by state-recognized rabbis and include mainstream Jewish practices, like exchanging rings and stomping on a glass.

Despite the country’s secular majority, its Orthodox rabbis strictly govern Jewish weddings. Israel does not recognize civil marriages, intermarriages or marriages performed by rabbis from the more liberal Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism – unless they took place abroad.

Israeli rabbis have now agreed to train the 13 new kessoch to perform marriages the mainstream Jewish way. Nevertheless, for most of the kessoch, the prohibition on marrying is such a slap in the face that they cannot bear to show up at the weddings of their own community members.

Instead, they perform their own pirate wedding ceremonies for the newlyweds a few days later – a modest reenactment of the weeklong marriage celebrations they used to hold back in Africa.

At one nighttime ceremony in seaside Ashkelon, women in embroidered cotton robes bounced their shoulders to African beats. Family and friends greeted the couple with the toot of a golden horn. Honey beer flowed from a steel kettle, and an army of men scooped curried lamb – slaughtered by the presiding kess – onto flat injera bread.

Newly ordained Kess Abiyu Azariya, 44, pushed his way to the head of the dance floor. Wearing a white turban and shawl, he recited wedding blessings in the ancient Ethiopian tongue, Geez. “I am singing these prayers to remind the young people what a wedding was like in Ethiopia,” he told the crowd in spoken Amharic.

But the young people were nowhere in sight. Most of the 300 revelers in the room were of the older generation. The dozen young Ethiopian-Israelis who showed up that evening were outside drinking cheap Israeli beer and fiddling with their smartphones. When asked about the practice, they were ambivalent.

“I hope it continues, but it probably won’t,” said David Nadou, 24, shrugging.

The newly ordained kessoch are trying to work against that tide. Kess Semai says they’re close to ordaining yet another group of 30 kessoch – even though Israel vows not to recognize any more.

“We kept this tradition for more than 2,500 years,” Kess Semai said. “Our community won’t allow in the span of 30 years for this tradition to be erased completely.”

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The assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was the latest in a year that has already seen new U.S. economic sanctions, threats to bar American ships from the Persian Gulf, an Iranian death sentence to a jailed U.S. citizen and an escalation in Tehran’s uranium enrichment program.

Iranian reports said two assailants on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to Roshan’s car, killing him and his driver. Roshan was a chemistry expert and director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran, and the slaying suggested a widening covert effort to set back the Islamic republic’s atomic program.

But U.S. officials said they had nothing to do with it.

“I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters. “We believe there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community and be a productive member of it.”

Earlier, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland wouldn’t answer a question about whether Washington was involved in the killing — or if the administration viewed Roshan as an innocent victim. “I’m not going to speak to who may or may not have done this,” she told reporters.

The attack also came one day after Israeli military chief Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz was quoted as telling a parliamentary committee that 2012 would be critical for Iran — in part because of “things that happen to it unnaturally.”

And other Israeli officials, hinted at covert campaigns against Iran without directly admitting involvement.

“Many bad things have been happening to Iran in the recent period,” said Mickey Segal, a former director of the Israeli military’s Iranian intelligence department. “Iran is in a situation where pressure on it is mounting, and the latest assassination joins the pressure that the Iranian regime is facing.”

Iranian authorities blamed Israel.

One former official said the magnetic-bomb attack does bear the hallmarks of an Israeli hit. Current and former U.S. officials say Washington prefers proxies like Israel to carry out operations inside Iran, and that up until two years ago, the U.S. and Israel coordinated actions against Iran closely. But the officials say the White House halted such cooperation after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took power.

The officials, past and present, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic negotiations.

In the event that a military intervention might be needed to halt Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capability, they said counterterrorist officials had considered allowing Israel to use the U.S.-Afghan Shindand Airbase, in western Afghanistan, to launch an air strike against Iranian weapons facilities

The attack in Tehran bore a strong resemblance to earlier killings of scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program — which Iran has blamed on Israel’s Mossad, the CIA and Britain’s spy agency. They point to at least three slayings since early 2010 and the release of a malicious computer virus known at Stuxnet in 2010 that temporarily disrupted controls of some centrifuges — a key component in nuclear fuel production. But all three countries have denied the Iranian accusations.

The U.S. and its allies are pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment, fearful that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran insists the program is for peaceful purposes only and geared toward generating electricity and producing medical radioisotopes to treat cancer patients.

Natanz is Iran’s main enrichment site, but officials claimed earlier this week that they are expanding some operations to an underground site south of Tehran with more advanced equipment.

Clinton condemned Iran in a statement Tuesday for enriching uranium at the underground Fordo bunker to a level that can be upgraded more quickly for use in a nuclear weapon than the main stockpile. She said Tehran was demonstrating a “blatant disregard for its responsibilities” and that “”there is no plausible justification” for its decision to increase enrichment to 20 percent — higher than the 3.5 percent being made at Iran’s main plant.

Speaking beside Qatar’s visiting prime minister, Clinton expanded her criticism of Iran on Wednesday and expressed concern about a series of “provocative and dangerous” threats by Iranian officials to close off the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the world to the oil-rich waters of the Persian Gulf.

“This is an international waterway,” she told reporters in Washington. “The United States and others are committed to keeping it open. It’s part of the lifeline that keeps oil and gas moving around the world.”

She said the U.S. and its partners were making it clear to Tehran that such threats were unacceptable.

Washington and Tehran also are at odds over an Iranian court’s death sentence Monday for Amir Hekmati, a 28-year-old former U.S. military translator who was born in Arizona and raised in Michigan. Iran says he is a CIA spy; the Obama administration flatly rejects the accusations.

It is the first time Iran has handed down a death sentence to a U.S. citizen since the Islamic Revolution 33 years ago. Hekmati’s family says he was in Iran visiting his grandmothers.

Prime Minister Sheik Hamad Bin Jassem Bin Jabr Al Thani of Qatar, a country with deep economic ties to Iran and which exports its natural gas to the rest of the world through the Strait of Hormuz, urged more negotiations among Tehran, Washington and the rest of the international community.

“We need to find a way to live together, a peaceful way,” he said. “For us, it’s very important that we don’t trigger any military tension in the region.”

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But Israel wants to change that perception. The Jewish nation wants to become the LGBT beacon of the Middle East, the Associated Press reports.

Israel’s Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs has established a cadre of LGBT volunteers to promote its image abroad.

Ministry spokesman Gal Ilan said Thursday that the goal was to highlight Israel’s diversity. He said when people think about Israel, the gay community is often overlooked.

There are no details yet on how many people have volunteered.

In general, homosexuals have a hard time worldwide. But the Middle East seems to be the most dangerous area to be rainbow friendly. Syria, Israel’s neighbor to the north, criminalizes homosexuality and offenders can be slapped with three-year prison sentences. Israel’s other neighbors Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan do not have laws banning homosexuality. But neither nation is particularly welcoming of openly gay people, either.

Do you think Israel’s recruitment of gays and lesbians to promote their homeland is a good idea? Let us know what you think.

Check out the full article on gays in Israel here.

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The coin-sized seal found near the Jewish holy site at the Western Wall bears two Aramaic words meaning “pure for God.”

Archaeologist Ronny Reich of Haifa University said it dates from between the 1st century B.C. to 70 A.D. – the year Roman forces put down a Jewish revolt and destroyed the second of the two biblical temples in Jerusalem.

The find marks the first discovery of a written seal from that period of Jerusalem’s history, and appeared to be a unique physical artifact from ritual practice in the Temple, said Reich, co-director of the excavation.

Very few artifacts linked to the Temples have been discovered so far. The site of the Temple itself – the enclosure known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary – remains off-limits to archaeologists because of its religious and political sensitivity.

Archaeologists say the seal was likely used by Temple officials approving an object for ritual use – oil, perhaps, or an animal intended for sacrifice. Materials used by Temple priests had to meet stringent purity guidelines stipulated in detail in the Jewish legal text known as the Mishna, which also mention the use of seals as tokens by pilgrims.

The find, Reich said, is “the first time an indication was brought by archaeology about activities in the Temple Mount – the religious activities of buying and offering and giving to the Temple itself.”

The site where the seal was found is on the route of a main street that ran through ancient Jerusalem just outside the Temple compound.

Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, a biblical archaeologist not connected to the dig, said the seal was special because it “was found right next to the Temple and is similar to what we see described in the Mishna.”

“It’s nice when we can connect an activity recorded in ancient sources with archaeological finds,” he said.

The seal was found in an excavation run by archaeologists from the government’s Israel Antiquities Authority. The dig is under the auspices of a broader dig nearby known as the City of David, where archaeologists are investigating the oldest part of Jerusalem.

The City of David dig, located inside the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan and funded by a Jewish group affiliated with the settlement movement, is the Holy Land’s highest-profile and most politically controversial excavation.

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Ambassador Howard Gutman forewarned a gathering of European Jews last week that he would challenge their assumptions on anti-Semitism. He started by recounting his own personal history as the Jewish son of a Holocaust survivor, and then explained why he felt it was important to differentiate between older forms of anti-Jewish hatred and a newer, growing anti-Semitism in Europe stemming from the tensions of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

“Classic bigotry” is being held in check, he said. But, citing the recent resignation of a Belgian professor and a racially motivated attack by several students on a young Jewish girl in Belgium, Gutman spoke of the “problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimes even violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arab immigrant groups and Jews.”

“It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem,” he said, according to a prepared text. A full transcript of Gutman’s remarks wasn’t made public and few journalists were in attendance.

The story gained momentum over the weekend, prompting the White House on Saturday to condemn anti-Semitism in all forms. Gutman issued a similar statement, but some Jewish groups expressed outrage. Republican presidential candidates including Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney demanded Gutman’s resignation.

Gutman’s critics have argued that by drawing a distinction between different types of anti-Semitic hatred, he implied the newer form was somehow less heinous or excusable. Others contested whether it was fair to point to Israel’s policies as a cause for the growth of anti-Semitism.

Still, Gutman described Muslim anti-Semitism as well as a “serious problem” that demands counterstrategies.

He said much of the responsibility lies with Israel and Arab governments to establish peace.

“The largest part of the solution remains in the hands of government leaders in Israel and the Palestinian territories and Arab countries in the Middle East,” Gutman said. “It is the area where every new settlement announced in Israel, every rocket shot over a border or suicide bomber on a bus and every retaliatory military strike exacerbates the problem and provides a setback here in Europe for those fighting hatred and bigotry here in Europe.”

Gutman said this situation was unfortunate in that it affects people in Europe a continent away from the problem. But he argued that was fortunate because, unlike with the older anti-Semitism, a remedy exists. “Peace in the Middle East would indeed equate with a huge reduction of this form of labeled `anti-Semitism’ here in Europe,” he said.

His comments, which weren’t cleared by the State Department, have put the Obama administration in a bind. Officials have refused to condemn or endorse Gutman’s argument, repeating only its condemnation of anti-Semitism in all its manifestations. After the resignation calls from Romney and Gingrich, the State Department said it had full confidence in Gutman.

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The conversation between Sarkozy and Obama was overheard by reporters last week at the Group of 20 summit in southern France, via headsets that were to be used for simultaneous translation of an upcoming news conference.

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Obama, whose remarks were heard via a French translation, was not heard objecting to Sarkozy’s characterization of Netanyahu. Through the interpreter, Obama was heard asking Sarkozy to help persuade the Palestinians to stop their efforts to gain U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.

In Israel, the frank assessment elicited shock from some viewers — and chuckles and agreement from others.

Several French-speaking journalists, including one from The Associated Press, overheard the comments but did not initially report them because Sarkozy’s office had asked the journalists not to turn on the headsets until the press conference began, and the comments were deemed private under French media traditions.

A French website that analyzes media coverage of current affairs, Arret sur images, reported the fragments Tuesday.

Sarkozy’s office would not comment Tuesday on the remarks, or on France’s relations with Israel. The White House and Netanyahu’s spokesman also said they had no comment.

In the remarks Thursday in Cannes, Sarkozy said: “Netanyahu, I can’t stand him. He’s a liar.”

According to the French interpreter, Obama responded, “You are sick of him, but I have to work with him every day.”

The journalists heard only fragments of the leaders’ conversation.

Since becoming president in 2007, Sarkozy has strengthened French ties with Israel while also seeking to use France’s traditional good relations with Arab allies to encourage peace talks.

His latest comments reflect his increasing frustration with Netanyahu, and may complicate French efforts toward Mideast peace.

France’s government has not said so officially but appears to see Netanyahu as partially responsible for the deadlock in peace talks. France has repeatedly urged Netanyahu to stop building Jewish settlements in the West Bank and come to the negotiating table, to little avail.

“I think all this must not make us lose sight of the basics — which is to say there’s not a minute to lose to continue to work on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters Tuesday.

“In our relationship with Israel, as with our relationship with the Palestinians, what we want is to continue to work so that things move ahead — because they’re not moving ahead,” Valero said.

Obama, meanwhile, is thought to be cool to Netanyahu. At meetings, their lack of personal chemistry is clear.

Netanyahu has cultivated close ties to the Republican Party and is widely believed to consider Obama naive about the Middle East. After a meeting in the Oval Office five months ago, Netanyahu lectured the U.S. president on his view of Middle East realities even as cameras rolled, with Obama listening glumly by his side.

The overheard remarks by Sarkozy and Obama were prominently covered in Israel, where Sarkozy — whose maternal grandfather was Jewish — is widely perceived as a friend, in striking contrast to some of his predecessors.

Israel has had a fraught relationship with France. The country was an early supporter of the Jewish state, selling it arms and planes and helping it develop a nuclear reactor. But the relationship soured under Charles de Gaulle, perceived as having abandoned Israel before the 1967 war.

“There has been improvement of the relationship since Sarkozy took over,” Avi Pazner, who was Israel’s ambassador to France in the 1990s, said Tuesday.

In comments at the G-20 last week, Sarkozy said that if Israel’s existence is threatened, “France will not stand by with arms crossed.”

Netanyahu, meanwhile, is a controversial figure even at home. He is widely seen as divisive, and is regularly pilloried by the center-left opposition for preferring settlement construction in the West Bank to peace talks with a relatively moderate Palestinian leadership.

“Obama is wrong,” wrote one reader on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s web site. “We’re the ones that have to deal with him every day.”

In Jerusalem, retired driver Yair Peleg said Obama and Sarkozy made an accurate call about Netanyahu. Peleg, 66, said he voted for Netanyahu’s Likud party in the past but won’t anymore because of Netanyahu’s free-market economic policies, which many here believe has fueled a growing gap between rich and poor.

“Not only is he a liar, but a big liar,” Peleg said. “He speaks with his hands, it’s all about me, me me, and meanwhile he doesn’t do anything.”

Shabi Nissim chuckled as he heard the details of the slip. Nissim manages a yogurt and juice bar. “I am embarassed for Netanyahu,” he said. “It’s humiliating.”

The often blunt Sarkozy has shown little patience with Israeli hard-liners, and two years ago urged Netanyahu to fire his outspoken foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. In a private meeting, Sarkozy told Netanyahu that “you must get rid of that man,” according to two officials.

This September, the French leader tried to head off the Palestinians’ request for membership in the United Nations with a last-minute effort to revive peace talks.

But France then surprised Washington and other observers by voting last week in favor of membership for Palestine in UNESCO, the U.N. cultural and educational agency.

Remarks overheard by journalists have embarrassed world leaders in the past. At a Group of Eight summit in 2006, an open microphone caught then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair appearing subservient to President George W. Bush, who greeted him by shouting, “Yo, Blair!”

The poll reveals that 60 percent of Jewish voters approve of the president’s job performance, while 85 percent of Jewish Democrats approved.

Such numbers refute many predictions that Jewish supporters would abandon Obama because of comments made at a May 19 speech instructing Palestinians and Israelis to use 1967 boundaries as the starting point for peace talks.

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WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a cheering U.S. Congress on Tuesday he was willing to make “painful compromises” for peace with the Palestinians, but he offered little concrete to entice Palestinians back to the bargaining table.

By giving such a high-profile speech before overwhelmingly supportive U.S. lawmakers, Netanyahu was able to demonstrate to Israelis that he retains strong backing in the United States despite his frosty relations with President Barack Obama.

He also moved the needle on territorial compromise, for the first time explicitly saying in his address that Israel would have to give up some West Bank settlements.

But Palestinians immediately rejected his overall peace package, which for the most part was a recycling of previously stated positions that the Palestinians had turned down. One senior Palestinian official even dubbed Netanyahu’s peace blueprint a “declaration of war.”

Speaking before a sympathetic Congress that showered him with more than two dozen sustained standing ovations, Netanyahu said Israel wants and needs peace and would make “generous” territorial concessions. Under any final peace accord, he added, “some settlements will be beyond Israel’s borders.”

But undercutting his overture was his insistence that Israel hold onto major settlement blocs and all of contested Jerusalem, that his country maintain a long-term military presence on the eastern edge of the West Bank and that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas scuttle his power-sharing agreement with the violently anti-Israel Hamas militants.

He also restated Israel’s refusal to repatriate millions of Palestinians who lost homes in Israel during the fighting over the Jewish state’s 1948 creation.

Unlike the Americans, Palestinians had no accolades for Netanyahu.

In the West Bank, Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian official, called the speech “a declaration of war against the Palestinians.”

“This is an escalation and unfortunately, it received a standing ovation,” he said, noting that Netanyahu had rejected Palestinian demands on central issues such as borders, competing claims to Jerusalem and the fate of refugees.

In Gaza, the Islamic militant Hamas fumed that “Netanyahu denied us all our rights.”

“We must work to adopt an Arab and Palestinian strategy based on the right of resistance,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, referring to armed attacks on Israeli targets.

In lieu of negotiations, Abbas is campaigning to obtain U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood when the General Assembly meets in September. Both Israel and the U.S. oppose this strategy, calling instead for the negotiated solution that has been the cornerstone of two decades of peace efforts.

Abbas is to meet with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and his Fatah movement on Wednesday to discuss their next move. The Palestinians have developed an alternate strategy to moribund negotiations, largely on hold since 2008, and have said they will seek U.N. recognition of their state in September.

Netanyahu came to the U.S. in a fighting mood, sparring – even before he landed – with Obama, who hours before had expressed support for drawing future borders on the basis of the boundaries Israel had before capturing east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

Netanyahu repeatedly challenged the president’s position, ignoring Obama’s assertion that the territorial markers could be adjusted through mutually agreed land swaps. The Palestinians accept that principle, which would allow Israel to retain major West Bank settlement blocs and help to assure its security.

In his speech before Congress, Netanyahu backed off from this dispute, acknowledging that the president had not called for a return to Israel’s prewar borders. Israeli officials said that was because Obama sharpened his position on this matter, but it is possible Netanyahu felt he could ease the assault because of the tremendous outpouring of support he received in Congress and, the night before, at a meeting of the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

That support in the U.S. has allowed Netanyahu in the past to fend off Obama’s demands that he do more to advance peacemaking by freezing settlement construction.

Obama has, in large part, staked his reputation in the Muslim world on finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But he has not been able to draw Israelis and Palestinians back to the bargaining table for sustained talks. The Palestinians are refusing to return as long as Israeli settlement construction continues on lands they want for a future state.

Netanyahu, early in his speech, congratulated the United States for killing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, wishing him “good riddance.” He dismissed shouts from an anti-Israel protester as evidence that freedom of speech is alive and well in the United States and is respected there and in Israel.

In a sign of the sympathy Netanyahu can hope to enjoy in Congress, Obama’s own political ally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, challenged Obama on the border issue at the AIPAC dinner.

“No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or about anything else,” Reid, D-Nev., said.

Benjamin Netanyahu made this pledge in an address Monday to thousands of pro-Israel American Jews and U.S. lawmakers. His speech drew roaring cheers and standing ovations, a sign of the powerful backing he enjoys in the U.S. as the White House pressures him to do more to renew stalled Mideast peacemaking.

The warm reception Netanyahu enjoyed at the gala dinner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee contrasted sharply with the contentious quality of some of his recent exchanges with President Barack Obama precisely over border issues.

His planned address on Tuesday to a joint meeting of Congress, where Israel enjoys strong bipartisan backing, could similarly remind Obama, ahead of his re-election bid, of the political price he might pay if he tries to push Netanyahu too hard.

In that speech, Netanyahu said, he will “outline a vision for a secure Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

But in language that suggested he was not going to take a conciliatory pose, he promised to “speak the unvarnished truth.”

“This conflict has raged for 100 years because the Palestinians refuse to end it. They refuse to accept a Jewish state.”

A peace agreement, he said, must assure Israel’s security: “Israel cannot return to the indefensible 1967 borders,” he declared, rekindling the dispute with Obama in a possible effort to placate territorial hardliners in his government.

Borders became an issue last week when Obama, in a major Mideast policy speech, took the position that any negotiations on final borders of the Jewish and Palestinian states must be based on the boundaries Israel held in 1967 before capturing east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – lands the Palestinians claim for their hoped-for state.

In direct statements and through aides, Netanyahu suggested Obama did not understand Israel’s security needs or the realities of the conflict-riven Mideast.

Obama said clearly in his policy speech and in his own address before AIPAC on Sunday that the territorial markers could be adjusted through mutually agreed land swaps – a principle accepted by the Palestinians that would allow Israel to retain major settlement blocs and help assure its security.

But Netanyahu has repeatedly sidelined this part of the Obama message.

In a sign of the sympathy Netanyahu can hope to enjoy in Congress, Obama’s own political ally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, challenged Obama on the border issue at the AIPAC dinner.

“No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or about anything else,” Reid, D-Nev., said.

The reference to building alluded to earlier U.S. demands that Israel renew an expired moratorium on settlement construction.

Peacemaking with the Palestinians stalled in late 2008, shortly before Obama and Netanyahu each took office. Obama had hoped to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table and wrest a deal by September 2011. But those efforts foundered after Israel refused to extend a settlement construction slowdown and Palestinians abandoned negotiations after three short weeks, saying continued Israeli building on land they want for a future state did not show good faith.

Now, they are refocusing their strategy on trying to obtain a unilateral declaration of statehood at the U.N. when the General Assembly meets in September. Israel would like to derail that campaign, which, if successful as expected, could compound its diplomatic isolation.

The U.S. also opposes unilateral action, which would put Washington in the awkward position of having to vote against Palestinian statehood at a time when calls for greater democracy are ringing out across the Arab world.

Further complicating peace efforts is a unity deal between rival Palestinian factions that would bring violently anti-Israel Hamas militants into the Palestinian government.

Obama has said Israel should not be expected to negotiate with a government that does not recognize its right to exist.

Anti-Israel hecklers interrupted Netanyahu’s speech several times, but supporters drowned them out, leaping to their feet, giving him a standing ovation and at one point chanting his nickname, “Bibi, Bibi” and pumping their arms in the air.

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JERUSALEM  — Israel’s prime minister on Thursday gave a cool reception to President Barack Obama’s Mideast policy speech, warning a withdrawal from the West Bank would leave Israel vulnerable to attack and setting up what could be a tense meeting at the White House.

In his speech, Obama endorsed the Palestinian position on the borders of their future state, saying it should be based on Israel’s lines before the 1967 Mideast war. Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in the fighting, and the Palestinians claim those areas for their state.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas planned to convene a meeting with senior officials as soon as possible to decide on the next steps, said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

Abbas is determined “to give President Obama’s effort and that of the international community the chance they deserve,” Erekat said.

The U.S., the international community and even past Israeli governments have endorsed a settlement based on the 1967 lines, but Obama was far more explicit than in the past. His position appeared to put him at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has not accepted the concept.

Reacting to Obama’s speech, Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a full withdrawal from the West Bank, saying the 1967 lines were “indefensible” and would leave major Jewish settlements outside Israel. Netanyahu rejects any pullout from east Jerusalem.

Netanyahu heads to the White House on Friday and said he would seek clarifications.

Behind the rhetoric, though, was the possibility of finding common ground. Obama said he would support agreed-upon territorial swaps between the Israel and the Palestinians, leaving the door open for Israel to retain major West Bank settlements, where the vast majority of its nearly 300,000 Jewish settlers live.

Netanyahu said he would urge Obama to endorse a 2004 American commitment, made by then President George W. Bush, to Israel. In a letter at the time, Bush said a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines was “unrealistic” and a future peace agreement would have to recognize “new realities on the ground.”

Israelis have interpreted Bush’s commitment as U.S. support for retaining the major settlement blocs. Earlier this week, Netanyahu said Israel would have to retain the blocs as part of any future peace agreement.

But Netanyahu also wants to keep other parts of the West Bank, including a strategic section of land along the Jordanian border that he believes is vital to Israel’s security. The Palestinians oppose any Israeli presence in their future state.

Netanyahu said he would reiterate his security demands at Friday’s meeting.

Netanyahu said he plans to raise other demands: Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland, guarantees that Palestinian refugees be resettled outside of Israel and condemnation of an emerging Palestinian government that is to include the anti-Israel Hamas militant group.

With peacemaking stalled for months, the Palestinians have said they will ask the United Nations to recognize their independence in September, with or without a peace deal.

In his speech, Obama rejected the U.N. push. “Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state,” Obama said.

It was not immediately clear whether Obama’s statement on the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiations – something the Palestinians have long sought – would be sufficient to persuade the Palestinians to drop their quest for U.N. recognition.

Former U.S. Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler, president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace in Washington, said the speech had created a “moment of truth” for the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

“No longer in earnest can President Abbas seek a United Nations resolution and say he’s serious about the creation of a Palestinian state. And likewise, Prime Minister Netanyahu must determine whether he is willing to negotiate based on the 1967 lines with agreed-upon territorial swaps,” he said.

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Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said Obama, whom he served as U.S. ambassador to China until last month, undercut an opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians to build trust. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said Obama “threw Israel under the bus” and handed the Palestinians a victory even before negotiations between the parties could resume. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it “the most dangerous speech ever made by an American president for the survival of Israel.”

Foreign policy has hardly been the center of the debate among the still-forming GOP presidential field. Instead, the candidates and potential candidates have kept their focus — like the country’s — on domestic issues that are weighing on voters and their pocketbooks. Obama’s speech Thursday provided one of the first opportunities for Republicans to assert their foreign policy differences with Obama and his Democratic administration.

Obama endorsed Palestinians’ demands for the borders of its future state based on 1967 borders — before the Six Day War in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. That was a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy.

Campaigning here in the state that hosts the first presidential nominating primary, Huntsman also said the United States should respect Israel and work to foster trust between Israelis and Palestinians.

“If we respect and recognize Israel as the ally that it is, we probably ought to listen to what they think is best,” said Huntsman, who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush before surprising his party and serving Obama, a Democrat.

He acknowledged he didn’t watch Obama’s speech and was reacting to news coverage — or, as he called it, “the aftermath.”

“It is disrespectful of Israel for America to dictate negotiating terms to our ally,” Romney said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It is not appropriate for the president to dictate the terms.”

Instead, the United States should work with Israel to push for peace without acceding to the Palestinians, he said.

Gingrich said Israel simply cannot go back to the 1967 borders and expect to remain secure, given technological advancements that would allow its enemies to fire rockets deeper into the state.

“Get a map of the region and look at what Hamas does in firing missiles into Israel,” Gingrich told The Associated Press. “The president should have said that Hamas has to abandon its determination to destroy Israel.”

Obama urged Israel to accept that it can never have a truly peaceful nation based on “permanent occupation.” That follows what other Republicans have painted as hostility from this administration toward a stalwart ally in the Middle East.

“The current administration needs to come to terms with its confused and dangerous foreign policy soon, as clarity and security are the necessary conditions of any serious and coherent American set of policies,” Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

Obama’s speech at the State Department addressed the uprisings sweeping the Arab world. Speaking to audiences abroad and at home, he sought to leave no doubt that the U.S. stands behind the protesters who have swelled from nation to nation across the Middle East and North Africa.

“We know that our own future is bound to this region by the forces of economics and security; history and faith,” the president said.

But the remarks only muddied things, especially on the dicey issue of Jerusalem, said former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

“The city of Jerusalem must never be re-divided,” Pawlenty said. “At this time of upheaval in the Middle East, it’s never been more important for America to stand strong for Israel and for a united Jerusalem.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a tea party favorite who is leaning toward a run, called the border suggestions “a shocking display of betrayal” to Israel.

“Today President Barack Obama has again indicated that his policy towards Israel is to blame Israel first,” she said in a statement.

On Twitter, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t directly address the speech but urged Obama to publicly welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instead of ushering him into private meetings away from reporters, as has occurred on Netanyahu’s previous visits. The two leaders will talk Friday at the White House.

“Dear Mr. President, please allow our ally, PM Netanyahu, to respectfully arrive through the front door this time. Thanks, Concerned Americans,” she tweeted.

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The blast could be heard throughout Jerusalem and blew out the windows of two crowded buses.

Rescuers were seen removing bloodied people from the area on stretchers.

Israel’s national rescue service said 25 people were wounded, including 15 seriously. No deaths were reported.

Meir Hagid, one of the bus drivers, said he heard a loud explosion as he drove by the site, located near the main entrance to Jerusalem and its central bus station.

“I heard the explosion in the bus stop,” he said. He halted his vehicle and people got off. He said nobody in his bus was hurt.

Jerusalem suffered dozens of suicide bombings that targeted buses and restaurants during the second Palestinian uprising last decade. But the attacks have halted in recent years. Jerusalem last experienced a suicide bombing in 2004.

The bombing came amid rising tensions between Israel and the Hamas militant group, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks in recent years.

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President Barack Obama leads Israel and the Palestinian Authority into direct talks starting tomorrow aiming for a big prize: a peace deal that will help stabilize the region and thwart Iran’s bid to expand its influence.

Obama is bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together in Washington to seek agreement on security and territorial issues that lie at the heart of their dispute and have defied solution over two decades of negotiation.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has provided openings for regimes seeking to exploit Arab anger for their own purposes, and a resolution could put an end to such maneuvers, said State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley.

Read more at Bloomberg

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce Friday that Israel and the Palestinians will return to direct negotiations for the first time in 20 months, delivering the Obama administration a small victory in its protracted effort to revive the Middle East peace process, two officials briefed on the situation said Thursday evening.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, have agreed to place a one-year time limit on the talks, these officials said.

Read more at NYTimes

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President Obama suggested Thursday that his Muslim middle name – Hussein – makes a lot of Israelis nervous about his commitment to the Jewish state.

When asked by an Israeli interviewer why many Israelis are “anxious about you,” and “feel like you don’t have a special connection to Israel,” Obama said, “Some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is ‘Hussein,’ and that creates suspicion.”

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If you were a Jew, you’d probably feel like you had to be God’s chosen people because other human beings have always treated you so horribly.

Enslaved in Africa, your top guy Moses, through war and attrition, secures you a homeland called “Israel”.

You more or less keep Israel right up until around 70 A.D. when the same Romans who cosigned on the necessity of the death of that heretic among your people, would eventually decide to name that same heretic the “Son of God”, place the entire blame for his death on you and wipe you out.

So what do you do?

Well, first you scatter then you blend of course, wherever you go, but you keep your same traditions and religion, settling throughout the world but being most visible now in Europe.

Then Hitler comes along.

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It speaks volumes that a decision was made basically for the Jews that they should have their own homeland. It was almost as if the West understood that another European Hitler could always arise—and probably would—in which case the Jews would need to be protected by, if nothing else, isolation.

And it’s not like the murder of 6 million Jews really seemed to bother anybody but Jews.

I’m not exactly saying that Hitler punked Europe, but if he hadn’t gotten cocky enough to pull a blitz on London, who knows if and when the Allies would have deaded his run towards world domination.

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One might almost imagine that so long as Hitler’s agenda was only the killing of the Jews, everybody would have continued to pretend that they didn’t see anything.

But imagine that you had nothing to do with the killing of the Jews and you were just home chilling when suddenly you get the news that your home won’t be your home anymore.

You see, it wasn’t your home 2000 years ago and the original inhabitants all of a sudden need it back.

“God” had given them that land and it always had and always would be theirs.

At the very least, you might stop and wanna ask somebody “Whose God?”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to warm rocky relations on Tuesday, declaring after a White House meeting that any talk of a rift is unfounded. Obama said the U.S.-Israeli bond is unbreakable.

“The United States is committed to Israel’s security,” Obama said as the two leaders addressed reporters in the Oval Office. “We are committed to that special bond. And we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words, but with actions.”

For the Israeli leader’s part, Netanyahu said of solving years of strife with Palestinians: “We’re committed to that peace. I’m committed to that peace.” And he said that reports of the demise of the U.S.-Israeli relationship are “flat wrong.”

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Netanyahu said without elaborating that he and Obama discussed specific steps that could be taken in the coming weeks to move the peace process forward. “When I say the next few weeks, that’s what I mean,” he said. “The president means that too.”

Netanyahu and Obama talked in the Oval Office as protesters gathered across the street in Lafayette Park and chanted “No More Aid, End the Blockade,” referring to Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The meeting between Obama and Netanyahu was their first since a troubled White House get-together on March 23. That session was frosty, coming three weeks after Israel embarrassed Vice President Joe Biden by announcing plans for new construction in east Jerusalem during his visit. The Palestinians expect east Jerusalem to be the capital of their eventual independent state.

Tuesday’s session was much friendlier than the one in March, when the White House kept Netanyahu out of sight of media coverage. This time, the leaders appeared together before reporters in the Oval Office and then went into a lengthy working lunch.

A critical topic was resuming the U.S.-mediated indirect peace talks. Netanyahu has repeatedly said he is ready to meet face to face with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, but has given few indications of concessions he might be willing to make.

Specifically, he has rejected demands from Obama and the Palestinians for a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and a promise to resume negotiations from where they broke off under his more dovish predecessor, Ehud Olmert.

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Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu must choose between settlements and peace. “We want to resume direct negotiations, but the problem is that the land that is supposed to be a Palestinian state is being eaten up by settlements,” he told The Associated Press. He said the Palestinian demand that Israel halt all construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and resume talks where they broke off in 2008 “are not conditions; these are obligations.”

Netanyahu endorsed on Sunday the U.S. idea to return to direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, just days after White House officials said Obama would push during the Oval Office session for those negotiations to get under way sooner rather than later.

Addressing his cabinet on Sunday, Netanyahu said the “time has come” for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to get ready to meet with the Israelis “because there is no other way to advance peace. I hope this will be one of the results of the visit to Washington.”

Aides to Obama sounded a hopeful tone late last week, telling reporters that weeks of shuttle diplomacy between the two sides by George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, had paid off and “the gaps have narrowed.”

“We believe there are opportunities to further narrow those gaps, to allow the sides to take that next step to direct talks,” added Daniel Shapiro, the senior Middle East director at the National Security Council.

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Obama and Netanyahu also are expected to discuss Israel’s decision Monday to significantly ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip to let in most consumer goods. Israel’s ban on exports from Gaza and limits on shipments of construction material remain.

Israel came under heavy international pressure, including from Obama and other top U.S. officials, to loosen its 3-year-old land and naval blockade of the seaside territory after Israel’s deadly May 31 military raid on a flotilla trying to break the embargo.

At the time, Obama said the situation was “unsustainable.” He called for a narrow blockade to bar weapons that Gaza’s Hamas rulers could use against Israel while admitting items the territory’s 1.5 million Palestinians need for daily living and economic development.

Obama and Netanyahu also are likely to discuss efforts to end Iran’s nuclear weapons pursuit, including sanctions Obama signed into law last week. That legislation followed a fourth round of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.

Tuesday’s meeting was the fifth between Obama and Netanyahu and would make up for a scheduled June 1 session at the White House that Netanyahu canceled to deal with fallout from the flotilla raid.

The session follows meetings Obama held at the White House in recent weeks with major Mideast players, including Abbas and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Getting both sides to resume direct talks, which broke off in December 2008, is a huge challenge. One big sticking point is Israel’s continued construction of Jewish housing in east Jerusalem, an area the Palestinians claim as part of a hoped-for future state.

The Palestinians have refused to sit down with Netanyahu until he agrees to freeze construction in areas they want for an independent state. Israel recently said it has no intention of doing that.

Abbas said last week that the borders of a future Palestinian state and security relations with Israel are the two issues on the table. He said direct talks can resume if an agreement is reached on them.

Obama has called on Jerusalem to halt settlement construction and on the Palestinians to show progress on security and inciting violence against Israel.

The hypocrisy of America is unreal: Helen Thomas is being crucified by the media for her recent statement in which she said Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland and Germany. Now, don’t get me wrong I am not defending her comments but a lot worse has happened since President Obama has took office.

If we as Americans are going to call her out why not Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others? Mr. Beck recently said “This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture….I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.” Yet he is still on the FOX news station and on the radio. Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show that he wanted the President to fail. That statement only made his listenership grow. He also stated about Haiti, the disaster enables Mr. Obama to highlight his “compassionate” and “humanitarian” credentials and to “boost his credibility with the black community,” Limbaugh said.

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He also decried the White House’s promotion of charitable organizations through which people can contribute to the disaster relief. “We’ve already donated to Haiti,” he said. “It’s called the U.S. income tax.” Why is the world coming down so hard on Mrs. Thomas when there’s much worse being said about the President?

I will tell you why: because the world views the Holocaust different then slavery although they really are the same. In the Holocaust the Jews were locked up and separated from their families. They were killed and treated as in-human. Well America the same thing happened on the shores of this country and it was called slavery.

Our country has come so far to the point we elected a black man as the President. Yet we still cannot talk about race when it comes to black and white in this country. We see and hear everyday how blacks are still treated as less than in this country. We see it in the media not one station on cable or regular TV has one show hosted by a Black person that’s opinionated? We see it in the movies were Black actors have to play thugs or sex starved people to get an Oscar.

We have come a long way, no one can deny that, however until this country realizes that another Holocaust took place on its shores we will always be a hypocritical country and that’s why when an 89-year-old woman speaks against the Jewish community all hell breaks loose.

Again Mrs. Thomas was wrong but, if we are willing to give Beck, Limbaugh and many other Americans a pass why not her?

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JERUSALEM – Israeli commandos rappelled down to an aid flotilla sailing to thwart a Gaza blockade on Monday, clashing with pro-Palestinian activists on the lead ship in a botched raid that left at least nine passengers dead.

Bloodied passengers sprawled on the deck and troops dived into the sea to save themselves during several hours of hand-to-hand fighting that injured dozens of activists and six soldiers. Hundreds of activists were towed from the international waters to Israeli detention centers and hospitals.

International condemnation was swift and harsh as Israel scrambled to explain how what was meant to be a simple takeover of a civilian vessel went so badly awry.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly canceled a planned meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington to rush home. The global reaction appeared likely to increase pressure to end the embargo that has plunged Gaza’s 1.5 million residents deeper into poverty.

Most of the information about what happened on the single ship where violence broke out came from Israel, which cut off all communication to and from the activists and provided testimony and video evidence that its soldiers came under attack by activists armed with metal rods, knives, slingshots and two pistols snatched from the troops.

Passengers reached at an Israeli hospital and journalists aboard the ship accused the soldiers of using excessive force. One passenger, who identified himself as American, spoke briefly with reporters.

“I’m not violent. What I can tell you is that there are bruises all over my body. They won’t let me show them to you,” he said before he was pushed away by a security escort.

A soldier identified only as a sergeant told reporters at a military briefing that the activists on board “were armed with knives, scissors, pepper spray and guns.” He said he was armed only with a paintball rifle. “It was a civilian paintball gun that any 12-year-old can play with,” he said. “I saw my friends on the deck spitting blood.”

The high-seas confrontation was a nightmare scenario for Israel, which insisted its soldiers were simply unprepared for what awaited them on the Mavi Marmara, the ship carrying 600 of the 700 activists headed for Gaza. Instead of carrying their regular automatic rifles, the Israelis said they went in with non-lethal paintball guns and pistols they never expected to use.

Israel intercepted the six ships carrying some 10,000 tons of aid for the isolated seaside territory, which has been blockaded by Israel for three years, with Egypt’s cooperation. The Israeli government had urged the flotilla not to try to breach the blockade before the ships set sail from waters off Cyprus on Sunday and offered to take some aid in for them.

Israel has allowed ships through five times, but has blocked them from entering Gaza waters since a three-week military offensive against Gaza’s Hamas rulers in January 2009.

Key regional ally Turkey withdrew its ambassador on Monday, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session, the British foreign secretary demanded an end to the blockade of Gaza, and Jordan called Israel’s raid a “heinous crime.”

An al-Jazeera journalist delivering a report before Israel cut communications said Israel fired at the vessel before boarding it. In one web posting, a Turkish television reporter on the boat cried out, “These savages are killing people here, please help” — a broadcast that ended with a voice shouting in Hebrew, “Everybody shut up!”

The military said naval commandos descending from a helicopter onto the deck of a Turkish-flagged ship were assaulted by armed activists. Military footage showed activists swarming around the commandos as they rappelled from a helicopter one by one, hitting them with sticks until they fell to the deck, throwing one off the ship and hurling what the military said was a firebomb.

Speaking alongside the Canadian prime minister, Netanyahu expressed “regret” for the loss of life but said the soldiers “had to defend themselves, defend their lives, or they would have been killed.”

Activists said Israeli naval commandos stormed the ships after ordering them to stop in international waters, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) from Gaza’s coast.

A spokeswoman for the Free Gaza movement, which organized the flotilla, said the group’s goal — beyond just bringing supplies to the impoverished territory — was to shatter the blockade.

“What we’re trying to do is open a sea lane between Gaza and the rest of the world,” Greta Berlin said in Cyprus. “We’re not trying to be a humanitarian mission. We’re trying to say to the world, ‘You have no right to imprison a million and a half Palestinians.’”

Israel’s international image had already taken a beating from allegations that it committed war crimes during its 2008-2009 winter war in Gaza, and from widespread global opposition to the blockade. Hamas was also accused of rights violations in that conflict.

Relations with Turkey, a key supporter of the aid flotilla but also until recently Israel’s staunchest ally in the Muslim world, were badly damaged by Monday’s events, possibly irreparably. Ankara announced it would recall its ambassador and call off all military exercises with Israel. Around 10,000 Turks marched in protest.

At the U.N., Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called the raid “murder conducted by a state” and demanded an immediate Israeli apology, international legal action and an end to the blockade.

The bloody showdown came at a sensitive time for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. Netanyahu had hoped to receive a high-profile expression of support from Obama after months of strained relations over Israeli settlement construction.

Obama voiced “deep regret,” over the raids, and the White House said he and Netanyahu agreed by phone to reschedule White House talks. The U.S. recently began mediating indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians following a 17-month breakdown in contacts.

Israel’s immediate concern on Monday was what to do about the boats and their passengers. It ferried the wounded to hospitals by helicopter and towed the six ships to port, giving each of the activists a choice of deportation or detention.

By late Monday, about 150 of the activists — most from Turkey — had been taken off the boats, Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said, adding the process would continue into Tuesday. She said about 30 had agreed to be deported, and the rest would be detained.

A commando who spoke to reporters on a naval vessel off the coast, identified only as “A,” said he and his comrades were taken off guard by a group of Arabic-speaking men when they rappelled onto the deck. He said some of the soldiers were stripped of their helmets and their pistols and some had jumped overboard to escape the violence.

A high-ranking naval official displayed a box confiscated from the boat containing switchblades, slingshots, metal balls and metal bats.

Turkey’s NTV network showed activists beating one commando with sticks as he landed on deck. Dr. Arnon Afek, deputy director of Chaim Sheba Medical Center outside Tel Aviv, said two commandos were brought in with gunshot wounds. Another had serious head wounds, Afek added.

At Barzilai hospital in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, a few activists trickled in under military escort, claiming they had been beaten during the assault.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the Israeli “massacre” and declared three days of mourning across the West Bank.

Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the rival Hamas government in Gaza, condemned the “brutal” Israeli attack and called on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to intervene.

After nightfall, Hamas-linked militants fired a rocket that exploded in Israel, the militants and the Israeli military said. Nobody was hurt. The militants said the rocket attack was in response to Israel’s raid on the flotilla.

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As we enter this holiday season, Jews around the world will celebrate Hanukah. And the global Jewish community is a diverse one, a multicultural and multiracial assemblage, by no means monolithic, representing millions of people throughout the world. Jews in China look like other Chinese, while Jews in India resemble other Indians, as is the case with the Igbo Jews of Nigeria and the Lemba of Southern Africa, and so on. They differ in their religious and cultural expression. For example, some may not know about glatt kosher, but still observe traditional dietary laws. And in some places only women can become a mohel (the person who performs circumcisions on baby boys).

But like a faulty census that leaves out people and portrays an inaccurate picture of what is happening, the Jewish Diaspora is not counting all of its members. Part of the reason is that Jews of color are often held in suspicion, not viewed as real or authentic. The reality is that black and brown Jews always existed, and for thousands of years. Given the places where the stories in the ancient scriptures took place, what else could you expect? Yet, media images – including Charlton Heston’s portrayal of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Moses in The Ten Commandments – only serve to create confusion concerning race and Judaism.

“Jews of color have been like Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a bird trying to reintegrate itself into its flock, but looks so different that the flock would turn itself on the painted bird, pecking on the painted bird until it falls to the ground,” said Rabbi Capers Funnye, head rabbi of the predominantly African-American Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago. The congregation was founded in 1918 by a rabbi from Bombay, India.

Rabbi Funnye converted to Judaism, but his introduction to Judaism was through the lens of Africa. His congregation combines the usual Jewish prayers with gospel music and the beat of the drum. But that is ok, because that is what culture is all about. “Jewish practices are based on cultural adaptations, where people found themselves,” the rabbi notes. Although he is a rabbi with extensive knowledge and undeniable passion, Rabbi Funnye is asked if he is really a Jew. “For a Jew who don’t look like you, that question is offensive,” he responds.

Rabbi Funnye – who is also a member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, and the cousin of First Lady Michelle Obama – recently gave the keynote speech at a symposium on race and Judaism at Temple University. The symposium was convened by Professor Lewis Gordon of Temple’s Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, and had participation from the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based group which encourages ethnic, racial and cultural inclusion in the Jewish community.

The conference was refreshing in that it invited a discussion on subjects usually not covered in academia or the mainstream Jewish community. For example, there was a discussion on Rabbi Alysa Stanton, the first African-American woman ordained as a rabbi, and the first black rabbi to lead a majority white congregation. Stanton, whose congregation is in Greenville, NC, received death threats and required a police escort the day she was installed as rabbi.

Another topic of discussion was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, that mythic symbol of black-Jewish cooperation who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. Rabbi Heschel is a great source of pride for the Jewish community, yet he was marginalized during his life, and regarded as an oddball. Other rabbis advised him to stay away from the rabble-rouser King. And today, Heschel’s anti-racist, social justice message is defanged.

Further, there was an examination of black-Jewish relations and the civil rights coalition, and the manner in which Jews benefited from civil rights in ways blacks could not; the focus by organizations such as the ADL on issues of Jewish authenticity and Minister Louis Farrakhan, when there are genocides taking place around the world; concepts of whiteness and blackness, and the ways in which the Jewish communities have negotiated race. Participants also tackled such weighty issues as black power, and the attempts to equate it with anti-Semitism; the disproportionate representation of neoconservative Jewish voices in American political discourse, and the use of white Ashkenazi Jewish voices as the authoritative voice against affirmative action.

Included in the symposium was the inevitable discussion of Israel, and the ways in which some immigrants become “white” when they arrive in Israel, although they were not considered as such in their home countries. And of course, there is Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Rabbi Funnye, who works with the Palestinian-American community in Chicago, believes that Israel must do a better job of showing its own diversity. He also shed some light on African-American perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Black people don’t say anything because they see the Palestinians as David, and Israel as Goliath,” Funnye concluded. “They don’t want to be called anti-Semites.”

These are tough issues, to be sure, and the conversations must continue at Temple University and throughout the country and the world. A culture benefits when its diverse voices are allowed to express themselves. This is how a culture sustains itself and grows. Jews of color have much to contribute, and much to say. And they must be heard.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

BOSTON — President Obama will deliver his first address to a Jewish organization since taking office when he speaks to UJC/The Jewish Federations of North America on Nov. 9 in Washington.

Mr. Obama’s approval ratings in Israel dropped into the single digits this summer as he increased pressure on the Israeli government to freeze settlements in the West Bank. Since then, amid immovable resistance from Israel, Mr. Obama has largely set aside that issue as a first step toward restarting Middle East peace talks, and is now instead pressing Palestinians and Israelis to negotiate all the difficult issues between them toward a final deal.

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No one in the White House, the Israeli government or among Palestinian officials is publicly predicting a breakthrough out of the three-way Mideast meeting that President Barack Obama is hosting here. And yet the session Tuesday is seen as a crucial step for Obama.

After seeing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu andPalestinian President Mahmoud Abbas separately, Obama is bringing the two together for the first Israeli-Palestinian meeting since Netanyahu took office in March. Taking place on the sidelines of this week’s annual U.N. General Assembly here, just the fact that the meeting is scheduled is big news.

Even if little more than a photo opportunity, it will probably be the most-watched portion of a marathon day of international diplomacy for Obama, a 12-hour sprint through many high-profile global problems and disputes.

In addition to the three-way Mideast talks, Obama meets the Chinese president at a fraught time in the Washington-Beijing relationship; plays luncheon host, as America’s first black president, to sub-Saharan African leaders for talks on boosting opportunities for young people in their poverty-stricken nations; delivers key speeches toformer President Bill Clinton‘s Global Initiative and to a U.N. heads-of-state session on the stalled issue ofclimate change; and ends the day with a U.N.-sponsored leaders dinner.

The Israeli-Palestinian sit-down wasn’t announced until Saturday and comes with the two sides still far apart on what it would take to resume peace talks that broke off in 2008.

U.S. envoy George Mitchell failed last week to bridge the gap between the two sides on the issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory, putting the long hoped-for three-way meeting in doubt. Obama has askedIsrael to freeze all settlement construction, a condition for Abbas to resume negotiations. But Israel has only committed to a partial halt.

Still, the sides decided to go ahead, even though Obama is considered unlikely to resolve the settlement showdown and announce a relaunching of peace talks.

“We have no grand expectations out of one meeting,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

One reason to have the meeting is the need to get momentum going.

“The U.S. wants to and the U.S. needs to negotiate in public,” said Jon Alterman, a senior fellow in Middle East policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former State Department official inPresident George W. Bush‘s first term. “There’s a perceived need for the U.S. to visibly be involved in making progress on Arab-Israeli issues.”

Obama opens his day with brief remarks to a climate summit convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. As an opener for Wednesday’s main General Assembly meetings, Ban invited all leaders to the climate summit, hoping to generate political momentum for crucial talks in Copenhagen in December on a new global treaty to curb global warming.

Over 100 leaders plan to attend, the largest number ever to discuss climate change.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Obama will “reaffirm the U.S. commitment to addressing the challenge” — something he hasn’t done previously before what she called “the entire global audience.”

Yet Obama appears before fellow leaders with little to show in his own country on the issue so important to him. A source of great disappointment about Obama in Europe, a House bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions was passed in June but has languished in the Senate and probably won’t go anywhere until next year, if at all.

“Clearly, the road is rough ahead,” Rice said. “But I think it is significant that you will have many heads of state … all together and seriously addressing this problem.”

With Chinese President Hu Jintao, Obama has a full plate.

A little more than a week ago, the president penalized China, citing thousands of lost U.S. jobs when slapping punitive tariffs on all Chinese-made tire imports. Though the move appears unlikely to spark a trade war, it infuriated China at a time when Obama wants Beijing‘s help on climate change and nuclear standoffs with Iranand North Korea.

As a veto-holding member of the U.N. Security Council, China’s support is crucial for getting new sanctions against Iran‘s suspected nuclear weapons program. That topic is especially timely given the upcoming Oct. 1 talks between Iran and an international group that includes the U.S. and China.

China also is the world’s third-largest economy, and is participating in the Group of 20 meetings Obama is hosting later this week in Pittsburgh on the economic crisis.

From PressTV

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel’s Shas Party, has called US President Barack Obama “a slave” who seeks to rule the world and control Tel Aviv’s affairs.

“American insidiousness tells us to build here and not to build there as though we were slaves working for them,” he said. “We live in a time when slaves are governing us and are trying to control us.”

The racist remarks were made during Yosef’s weekly sermon on Saturday during which he protested the Obama administration’s policy to exert pressure on Tel Aviv over its settlement expansion.

“We are not employees of the Americans… and Israel does not work for the United States,” he shouted.

Barack Obama, the first African-American US president, has come under increasingly pressure from Israel over his strategy for peace in the Middle East.

In Israel, President Obama is accused of pressuring Tel Aviv to please the Arab states and is criticized for personal dislike for hawkish Netanyahu.

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From The Atlanta Journal Constituition

Cynthia McKinney’s mom said she’s learned that her daughter is on the way home.

Leola McKinney said a friend who contacted the U.S. Embassy in Israel reported that the former congresswoman was released from Israeli custody and taken to Ben Gurion International Airport.

“We finally got word that she was released,” Leola McKinney said late Sunday afternoon. “We don’t know what time she is supposed to fly out. All we know is that they took her to the airport.

“I would be more relieved when I know she’s on the flight,” Leola McKinney added. “But I am relieved that she’s away from there.”

McKinney had been in custody since Tuesday, when she and 20 others were swept up by the Israeli Navy while allegedly trying to sail through a navy blockade. The group says it was attempting to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza.

McKinney and the rest of her group could have been released soon after they were taken into custody but they refused to sign a document admitting they violated Israel’s blockade, according to McKinney’s parents. The group was due to appear in an Israeli court Sunday.

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Listen To McKinney’s Phone Call To WBAI

The Israeli navy intercepted a ship carrying foreign peace activists trying to break a blockade of Gaza on Tuesday and forced it to sail to an Israeli port, the military said.

A statement said the Greek-registered freighter Arion ignored a radio message from the Israeli military saying it would not be allowed to enter Gaza waters and ordering it to turn back.

The statement said naval personnel boarded the small vessel without any shots being fired.

The military said those on board would be handed over to immigration authorities on arrival in the southern port of Ashdod, and humanitarian cargo would be trucked into the Gaza Strip after a security check. The ship arrived at Ashdod port after nightfall.

An earlier statement by the voyage’s organizers, the Free Gaza Movement, said the vessel, renamed the Spirit of Humanity, left the Cypriot port of Larnaca on Monday bound for Gaza with three tons of medical supplies.

The 20 passengers include former U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and other activists from Britain, Ireland, Bahrain and Jamaica.

The ship was flying a Greek flag, but no Greek citizens were aboard. The Greek government issued a statement saying it sent a message to Israel demanding that it release the ship, crew and passengers.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel was planning to free the crew and passengers. “Nobody wants to keep them here,” he said. “They will be released as soon as they are checked.”

The Free Gaza Movement has organized five boat trips to Gaza since August 2008, defying a blockade imposed by Israel when the militant group Hamas seized control of the territory from its Palestinian rivals in June 2007.

Two other attempts were stopped by Israeli warships during Israel’s three-week war in the territory in December and January. Nobody on board was harmed.

With his speech at Cairo University, President Obama has laid the groundwork, potentially, for a new era of peace in the Mideast. Israeli officials are now realizing that they will have to accept a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile, there is an indication that the President’s speech is paving the way for waning animosity towards America in the Muslim world, which would undercut the activities of extremist groups that benefit from continued violence, hostility and death in that region of the world.

Well, it is about time. The past administration, whose name I dare not utter for fear it will reappear, paid nothing but lip service to the Mideast. The former president gave a rubber stamp to the status quo, and endorsed Israeli incursions and military strong-arming in the name of the war on terror. That rightwing faux fundamentalist Christian occupant of the White House from 2001 until this past January-and his constituency for that matter-really cared very little about Jewish people. Little that is, except under the fundamentalist concept of the so-called rapture, or end times, in which Jesus returns and Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will supposedly perish, or so the mythology goes. And that is the nonsense that governed Mideast policy for a decade. But I digress…

The Obama speech was a game changer because he accomplished a number of things: he presented a humbler and more contrite America, one which comes to the Muslim world with respect. With that respect, however, came a stern message. Obama discussed the long history of persecution of the Jewish people. Centuries of anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust, including the network of death camps-including Buchenwald, which Obama recently visited-that murdered 6 million Jews. “Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve,” the President emphasized.

Addressing Israel, Obama declared that the growth of the settlements in the West Bank must end. To the Palestinians, he acknowledged their “intolerable” suffering, but suggested that violence will not work. Borrowing from the African American and South African experience, he noted that things changed for Black people not through violence, but fighting for and demanding their rights:

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now, Obama is what some folks would call a real mensch, which is Yiddish for a man of integrity and honor. He laid it out on the table, seemingly without attachments to the way things were done in the past. Surely, he realizes that U.S. policy towards the Mideast must change, and the country must exert some positive leadership. (Whether Obama decides to resist the urge for a Bush-lite policy with empire building in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains to be seen.)

Palestinians cannot sustain any more of an occupation that crushes the spirit and any sense of civil society, and Israelis can no longer pretend that they will ever feel safe, secure and free as long as they subjugate another people with Bantustans, checkpoints and identity cards. The hardliners, the base of Netanyahu’s coalition government, want nothing less than to keep building the settlements. Will the parties come to their senses and come to the table? Time will tell. “Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed,” as Obama said. “All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear.”

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BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

From Daily Press

“Of course I voted for him; he’s my son. I’m proud of him,” Wright said. “I’ve got five biological kids. They all make mistakes and bad choices. I haven’t stopped loving any of them.

“He made mistakes. He made bad choices. I’ve got kids who listen to their friends. He listened to those around him. I did not disown him.”

Asked if he had spoken to the President, Wright said: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office. …

“Ethic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing of the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel,” Wright said.

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Prodding the international community,President Barack Obama called Friday “for all of us to redouble our efforts” toward separate Israeli and Palestinian states. “The moment is now for us to act,” he declared.

Alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel following his Mideast trip, Obama said: “The United States can’t force peace upon the parties.” But he said America has “at least created the space, the atmosphere, in which talks can restart.”

The president announced he was dispatching special envoy George J. Mitchell back to the region next week to follow up on his speech inCairo a day earlier in which he called for both Israelis and Palestinians to give ground in the standoff.

Obama says Israel must live up to commitments it made under the so-called “Road Map” peace outline to stop constructing settlements and the Palestinians must control violence-inciting acts and statements.

Fresh from visits to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Obama said that while regional powers and the entire international community must help achieve peace, responsibility ultimately falls to Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord.

Merkel, for her part, promised to cooperate on this long-sought goal. She said the two leaders discussed a time frame for a peace process but did not elaborate.

“I think that, with the new American government and the president, there is a truly unique opportunity to revive this peace process or, let us put this very cautiously, this process of negotiations,” Merkel said.

Added Obama: “I think the moment is now for us to act on what we all know to be the truth, which is each side is going to have to make some difficult compromises.”

He renewed his call for Israel to halt West Bank settlement activity and follow through on such previously made commitments, adding: “I recognize the very difficult politics in Israel of getting that done and I’m very sympathetic to how hard that will be.” He also pressed Palestinians anew to dial back anti-Israel rhetoric, saying thatPalestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ”has made progress on this issue, but not enough.”

While Obama did not address peace-process benchmarks, he told international reporters Thursday in Egypt: “I don’t want to impose an artificial timeline.” He added: “When things stall, everybody knows it … I want to have a sense of movement and progress.”

Touching Friday on an issue that has strained the American-German relationship, Obama also said he didn’t seek any commitments from Germany to take a dozen prisoners when the United States closes its prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. German officials have said most should be resettled in America.

Merkel said her country is prepared to “constructively contribute” to U.S. closure efforts and said she was confident of eventually reaching a “common solution” on the prisoners’ fate.

On other matters, Obama said he’s seen “some progress” in bringing economic stability to the world, and said he and Merkel agreed that they must continue to “work very closely together” on the issue. Addressingclimate change, Obama also said “we’re going to have to make some tough decisions and take concrete actions.”

The two leaders spoke to reporters after meeting privately at a castle in this east Germany city that has bitter wartime memories. Starting on the night of Feb. 13, 1945, first British, then American bombers pounded the defenseless and largely non-strategic architectural gem, igniting a firestorm in which 25,000 people died — and in so doing, creating an enduring controversy.

Obama did not address the firebombing, and was in Dresden at the invitation of Merkel, who hails from her country’s East.

Later, Obama was to tour the Buchenwald concentration camp, where an estimated 56,000 people perished. Thousands were Jews — worked to death, shot or hanged by Nazi guards.

In Thursday’s speech in Egypt, Obama issued a scathing indictment of those who question the Holocaust, saying that to do so “is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.”

“Threatening Israel with destruction or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews is deeply wrong and only serves to evoke in the minds of the Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve,” Obama added.

It was a pointed message to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has expressed doubts that 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis and who has urged that Israel be wiped from the map.

“He should make his own visit” to Buchenwald, Obama told NBC in an interview Friday. He added: “I have no patience for people who would deny history.”

Earlier, the president told reporters: “The international community has an obligation, even when it’s inconvenient, to act when genocide is occurring.”

Obama is the first U.S. president to visit Buchenwald, and the stop was personal. A great-uncle helped liberate a nearby satellite camp, Ohrdruf, in early April 1945 just days before other U.S. Army units overran Buchenwald.

Ohrdruf no longer stands. But Buchenwald’s main gate, crematorium, hospital and two guard towers have been kept as a memorial.

Accompanying Obama to the site was Elie Wiesel, a 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, author and Holocaust survivor.

Following the tour, Obama was flying to Landstuhl medical hospital for private visits with U.S. troops recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he was ending the day in Paris — reuniting with his wife, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha, who planned a brief holiday in the City of Light after commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Allies’ D-Day invasion in France.

From Haaretz.com:

Some 130 protesters gathered in front of the American Consulate in Jerusalem Wednesday afternoon to rally against U.S. President Barack Obama, who had just launched his Middle East tour, during which he is expected to reach out in friendship to the Muslim world.

As more than a dozen local and international journalists looked on, the protesters chanted “No, You Can’t” and waved posters saying “20 new ‘settlements’ by 2010 – Yes We Can!”

Far right activist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who attended the protest, told Channel 10 that “it appears that we’ve arrived at a red line, which has already been crossed by the most anti-Semitic American president.”

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When a person commits a crime, everyone has an answer as to what punishment should or should not be meted out. But what do you do when a law is a crime unto itself, and society is committing the crime?

I asked myself that question when I recently saw the film The Lemon Tree. A fictional account based on real-life stories, it centers around Salma Zidane, Palestinian woman who owns a lemon grove on the West Bank-Israel border. Zidane’s neighbor, the new Israeli defense minister, builds an upscale home near the lemon trees and the secret service declares the grove a security threat. The military erects a watchtower, and bars her from entering her lemon grove and tending to it. As the minister and his family take some of the lemons for their own use, Zidane is met with physical force, at gunpoint, when she climbs the wire fence in an attempt to enter her own grove. The minister orders the trees uprooted pursuant to military law, and Zidane, who rejects the government’s offer to compensate her, fights the decision all the way up to the Israeli high court.

The Lemon Tree makes a statement about the dysfunctional state of affairs in the Mideast, and a struggle of people who are fighting for their rights. Central to the film, in my view, is the law which allowed for the destruction and confiscation of Palestinian property on the grounds of “military necessity” (translated: Palestinian terrorist threat).

People do not think much about laws, and they question not how and why they are promulgated. In a previous commentary, I argued that a law is that which is bought and paid for. I would like to add to that definition with a secondary definition: a law endorses and legitimizes the oppressive tendencies of a given society. In order to justify an injustice, simply write it into law and legalize it. Rubber stamp it. You don’t have to justify the abhorrent practice on its merits, you simply back into it. It is now the law, so it is lawful. And the nation’s legal apparatus will bring force to bear and uphold the law.

A law can also reveal a narrative, a story that a given society wants to tell about itself, its values, and the way it deals with certain conduct. So in The Lemon Tree, the law that Salma Zidane challenges provides us with a story about Israeli-Palestinian relations: In Israel, Palestinians are second-class citizens – better yet, non-citizens – who have no rights, including the right to own land in a country that is not their own, even though this is the only home they have known. They are bad people and considered dangerous, whether men, women or children, and should be viewed as potential if not actual terrorists. That is why they are subjected to a regime of ID cards, unreasonable checkpoints and curfews. These security precautions must be taken, the argument goes, to protect Israeli families and their homes from these terrorists (Palestinians).

In the United States, we have seen recent examples of unjust laws. A nation that has all but forsaken the notion of rehabilitation in its criminal justice system, America chooses to punish people – whether through incarceration, fine, sanction, etc. – not only for the crime for which they are convicted. Rather, there are laws that add collateral punishment to a prison sentence by denying a convicted felon access to student loans for college, or by barring that person employment and licensure in many professions, access to public assistance and public housing. Yet, that person is likely expected to find employment in order to pay restitution, as a term of his or her probation or parole. As a result, people with a criminal record are unable to provide for their families and become productive members of society. Such laws articulate the narrative of a country that has decided to write off certain members of society, to banish them from participation in daily life, and pronounce them dead in a civil sense.

Another example is the Bush administration’s endorsement of torture of terror suspects. The Bush cronies started with the blatantly false assumption that torture is acceptable – although domestic and international law clearly says the practice is illegal. Hack lawyers working for former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney provided the legal cover by engaging in professional misconduct – writing memos with faulty legal reasoning declaring that torture is legal. They essentially backed into the legalization of torture by declaring torture is legal because the memos say it is legal.

Wherever you find unjust laws and a legal system that serves as the commission of a crime on society, you will find lawyers and judges as willing participants in the injustice. In the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa, not only were racism, racial discrimination and oppression accepted, they were the law. And there were legal tacticians who were willing and able to prop up those systems of injustice. Segregation, disenfranchisement, miscegenation laws, curfews, capital punishment and prison farms were part of a legal framework to kill Black aspirations of empowerment and self-determination.

In a similar vein, the Nuremberg laws devised by Nazi Germany sanctioned the oppression and ultimately the annihilation of European Jews, with the enforcement of these laws by sham kangaroo courts. The Nazi legal regime received their cues from the American South, with racial integrity laws that defined a Jew in ways that echoed the “one-drop rule” for Blacks under Jim Crow. The discriminatory laws disenfranchised Jews; kept them segregated and contained in ghettos; stripped them of their German citizenship; prohibited them from engaging in a profession or working in a government job; barred Jews from intermarrying and having sexual relations with Germans; excluded them from receiving social welfare and attending public schools and universities, and prohibited them from holding driver’s licenses. Jews were banned from resorts, beaches and swimming pools, barred from sleeping and dining cars on trains, and made to register for forced labor. And they were forbidden to walk in certain places at certain times of the day. All of these measures were passed under German law, under penalty of hard labor (like Jim Crow), for the sake of maintaining the purity of German blood. Nazi law defined children as “persons who are not Jews.” Being Jewish, in essence, became illegal.

Dr. Martin Luther King had much to say about unjust laws. In his April 16, 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, he said that unjust laws are made to be broken:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust…. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’…. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

In our daily lives, wherever we may find ourselves in the world, we must fight the temptation to endorse unjust laws. We should resist participating in the oppression of others through the use of the law. After all, when you have blood on your hands, it is very hard to wipe them clean.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is signaling he may resist President Barack Obama‘s pressure to support Palestinian statehood as the two leaders try to tackle an array of Mideast issues Monday on which they disagree.

A senior aide to Netanyahu, national security adviser Uzi Arad, suggested the Israeli leader might not yield to pressure from Obama for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. He also seemed to hint that Israel might consider military action against Iran when he said there was a “sense of urgency” in Israel over the Iranian nuclear threat.

Such rhetoric suggests diplomatic high stakes as the two men hold their first White House meeting against a backdrop of disagreement over several key issues: U.S. overtures to once-shunned Iran and Syria and pressure on Israel to support a Palestinian state.

The Obama administration is trying to promote dialogue with Iran and Syria, Israel’s arch foes. Israel fears such efforts could lead to greater tolerance for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Before his Feb. 10 election, Netanyahu derided the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which stalled late last year, as a waste of time.

Jewish settlement activity is another source of potential conflict with the United States.

In Israel on Monday, settlers announced that government officials have begun taking bids to build infrastructure for a fledgling Jewish community deep in the West Bank. The timing of the announcement could cause friction at the Obama-Netanyahu meeting.

Palestinians want Obama to tell the Israelis that they have obligations under an existing U.S.-backed peace plan to accept the two-state solution and stop settlement construction, said Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and longtime negotiator.

While not opposing the Obama administration’s efforts to promote dialogue with Iran and Syria, Israel is skeptical. Like Washington, it dismisses Tehran’s claims that its nuclear program is peaceful and fears the U.S. outreach could lead to greater tolerance for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The Israelis are also worried by the recent diplomatic shuttles to Syria for fear they reward Damascus even as it maintains close ties to Tehran and harbors Iranian proxies that have warred with Israel, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas.

Still, there have been mixed signals from the Israelis on the Mideast peace process ahead of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting.

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, said Sunday in Jordan that Netanyahu would abide by agreements signed by his predecessors, including the U.S.-backed Mideast peace plan calling for a two-state solution to the conflict with Palestinians. Peres said progress depended on an end to attacks by Hamas militants and greater Palestinian efforts to ensure Israel’s security.

Netanyahu has tried to persuade the Americans that Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and anti-Israel proxies in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, must be reined in before peacemaking with the Palestinians can progress. Israel’s security services see the Netanyahu-Obama meeting as crucial in this regard, and the military chief of staff, the head of military intelligence and the Mossad chief all held lengthy meetings with the prime minister ahead of the trip, defense officials said.

The meetings focused on what Israel sees as Iran’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons and on the effect that would have in strengthening Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah and undermining the stability of Western-allied Arab countries.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings were not made public.

There has been a flurry of diplomatic activity surrounding Syria in recent weeks.

An Obama envoy was in Syria to try to repair strained relations and assured the government the U.S. is committed to pursuing a comprehensive Mideast peace.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Israel of being the “most cruel and racist regime,” sparking a walkout Monday by angry Western diplomats at a U.N. racism conference.

The hardline leader’s appearance overshadowed the substance of the weeklong United Nations attempt to stamp out intolerance worldwide. The United States and eight other Western countries, expressing concerns about its fairness, were already boycotting the event.

Protesters dressed with clown wigs and holding placards repeatedly interrupted Ahmadinejad’s speech with shouts of “Shame! shame!” and “Racist! racist!” throwing soft red objects on the podium. Later, about 100 members of mainly pro-Israel and Jewish groups blocked Ahmadinejad’s entrance to a scheduled news conference.

Ahmadinejad, in a rambling speech, accused Israel of being the “most cruel and racist regime” and pointed the finger at the United States and Europe for helping to establish the country after World War II “under the pretext of Jewish suffering.”

That prompted a walkout by some 40 diplomats from European countries such as Britain and France, which had threatened to leave the conference if it descended into anti-Semitic or other rhetoric harshly critical of Israel, which marred the U.N.’s last racism gathering.

The boycotting countries expressed concern that Muslim countries would drown out many issues with calls for a denunciation of Israel and a global ban on criticizing aspects of the Islamic faith.

“As soon as he started to address the question of the Jewish people and Israel, we had no reason to stay in the room,” said French Ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattei.

Speaking directly after Ahmadinejad, Norway’s foreign minister said the Iranian leader’s comments “run counter to the very spirit of dignity of the conference.”

Ahmadinejad “has made Iran the odd man out,” Jonas Gahr Store said.

Even before his speech, Ahmadinejad polarized the meeting, which is intended to examine all forms of intolerance around the world.

Israel recalled its ambassador to Switzerland earlier Monday to protest Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz’s meeting with Ahmadinejad late Sunday during which Merz pressed the case of a jailed American journalist in Tehran.

“The meeting between the president of a democratic country with an infamous Holocaust-denier such as the president of Iran, who calls for Israel’s destruction, does not mesh with the values that Switzerland represents and that are supposed to be represented at the U.N. conference on racism,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

President Barack Obama said Sunday that the United States would communicate with Iran about journalist Roxana Saberi through its Swiss intermediaries, which have officially represented U.S. interests in Iran since the American hostage crisis that began in 1979. The Swiss government said it also took up other “unresolved cases” of U.S.-Iranian relations.

Ahmadinejad’s attendance has provoked outrage from Jewish groups and Israel, as he has in the past questioned the Holocaust and called for Israel’s destruction.

OPINION: Obama & The Racism Conference: Blacks vs. Jews?

The United Nations opens its first global racism conference in eight years on Monday with the U.S. and at least five other countries boycotting the event out of concern that Islamic countries will demand that in denounce Israel and ban criticism of Islam.

The administration of President Barack Obama, America’s first black head of state, announced Saturday that it would boycott “with regret” the weeklong meeting in Geneva, which already is experiencing much of the bickering and political infighting that marred the 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa.

The Netherlands declared its boycott Sunday, while Australia, Canada, Israel and Italy already have said they would not attend.

“I would love to be involved in a useful conference that addressed continuing issues of racism and discrimination around the globe,” Obama said in Trinidad on Sunday after attending the Summit of the Americas.

But he said the language of the U.N.’s draft declaration “raised a whole set of objectionable provisions” and risked a reprise Durban, “which became a session through which folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive.”

“We expressed in the run-up to this conference our concerns that if you adopted all of the language from 2001, that’s not something we can sign up for,” Obama said. “Our participation would have involved putting our imprimatur on something we just didn’t believe in.”

Some European countries are still deciding whether to attend the U.N. conference.

U.N. spokesman Rupert Colville said Germany informed the global body on Sunday that it would boycott it. In Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry refused to confirm that, but said the government would announce its final decision on Sunday night.

Britain said it will send diplomats, despite concerns the meeting could become a forum for Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic attacks.

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI said the conference is needed to eliminate racial intolerance around the world. Asia News, a Catholic news agency that is part of the missionary arm of the Vatican, said of the pope’s comment: “The Holy See is distancing itself from the criticisms of some Western countries.”

“I am shocked and deeply disappointed by the United States’ decision not to attend,” said U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay, who is hosting the conference.

She conceded some countries were focusing solely on one or two issues to the detriment of the fight against intolerance, but said it is essential that the issue of racism be tackled globally.

The major sticking points regarding the proposed final U.N. declaration are its implied criticism of Israel and an attempt by Muslim governments to ban all criticism of Islam, Sharia law, the prophet Muhammad and other tenets of their faith.

OPINION: Obama & The Racism Conference: Blacks vs. Jews?

Some eerie historical dates coincide with the conference, which is supposed to examine the various manifestations of racism, intolerance, discrimination and xenophobia around the world. Tuesday marks this year’s day for Holocaust remembrance, while Monday’s opening of the conference falls on the birthday of Nazi Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who repeatedly has called for the destruction of Israel and denied the Holocaust — is slated to speak on the first day. He also meets Sunday evening with President Hans-Rudolf Merz of Switzerland, the country which represents the diplomatic interests of the United States in the Islamic republic.

A British Foreign Office spokesman said Britain doesn’t want to see countries such as Iran debating about whether the Holocaust occurred. The official spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

The pullout of Germany would be significant as it has played a leading role in U.N. anti-racism efforts as a result of its troubled historical legacy. In recent meetings, it has expressed dismay about some governments’ attempts to downplay the significance of the Holocaust.

The bland U.N. draft statement does not mention Israel by name, but it reaffirms the Durban statement and its reference to the plight of Palestinians. That document was agreed after the United States and Israel had walked out over attempts to liken Zionism — the movement to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land — to racism.

Israel and Jewish groups have lobbied hard against Western participation in the meeting, arguing that the presence alone of American and European negotiators would give legitimacy to an anti-Semitic gathering.

Still, after years of contentious preparations there appears little evidence to validate these fears. The statement of 2001 that is so contentious now was cheered in Israel at the time, as it recognized the Jewish state’s right to security. Then-Israeli President Shimon Peres called it “an accomplishment of the first order for Israel and Israeli democracy.”

Pillay said, “I fail to see why, given that the Middle East is not mentioned in this document, that politics related to the Middle East continue to intrude into the process.”

Washington could easily have opted out of any language reaffirming the 2001 Durban Declaration, while taking part in the new agreement, she said. “And then we could have all moved on together, and put the problems of 2001 behind us,” Pillay added in a statement.

Regarding its boycott, the Obama administration said it could not endorse any statement that singled out Israel or included passages demanding a ban on language considered an “incitement” of religious hatred. Such calls “run counter to the U.S. commitment to unfettered free speech,” said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

Many Muslim nations want curbs to free speech to prevent insults to Islam they claim have proliferated since the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. They cite the 2005 cartoons of Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper that sparked riots in the Muslim world.

European countries also have criticized the meeting for focusing heavily on the West and ignoring problems of racism and intolerance in the developing world.

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OPINION: Obama & The Racism Conference: Blacks vs. Jews?

Israel‘s incoming prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says his government will seek a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

The comments appeared to be aimed at easing concerns that the hardline Netanyahu will try to freeze past peace efforts once he takes office.

Netanyahu told a conference in Jerusalem on Wednesday that peace is an “enduring goal” for all Israeli governments, including his own.

He says he will negotiate with the Palestinian Authority and work to develop their economy. He says the Palestinians must understand that his government will be a “partner for peace.”

Late Tuesday, the centrist Labor Party joined Netanyahu’s emerging coalition, saying it would help moderate what would otherwise have been a narrow, hardline government.

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How Black Men Can Relate To War In The Gaza Strip | CLICK HERE

GALLERY: Casualties Of The Gaza War | CLICK HERE**

**(Disclaimer: Graphic Content Not Suitable For All Audiences)

Pulitzer-prize winning author Alice Walker, who wrote “The Color Purple,” is traveling to Gaza along with other female activists to highlight the devastation of the Israeli offensive on Gaza’s residents.

“I feel that what is happening in the Middle East is very important because the situation is so volatile,” said Walker, speaking by telephone Saturday from the Rafah border crossing as her group waited to travel into Gaza. “I love people, and I love children and I feel that the Palestinian child is just as precious as the African-American child, as the Jewish child.”

Walker is part of a group of about 60 women going to Gaza to deliver aid and meet with NGOs and residents. The trip, organized by the U.S. anti-war group Code Pink, is intended to push both Israel and Egypt to open the borders into Gaza, said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink who helped organize the trip.

The trip comes as efforts to reach a long-term cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hamas have hit a roadblock. An Israeli offensive on Gaza, intended to stop rocket fire into southern Israel, ended Jan. 18 with separate cease-fires declared by both Israel and Hamas.

Members of the group intend to stay in Gaza until March 11, Benjamin said. During their trip, timed to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8, they will also deliver baskets filled with personal items such as shampoo for women in Gaza.

Walker, who was making her first trip to Gaza, said it was important for Americans who give so much military aid to Israel to understand how their money was being used.

“It’s very important that they understand what is happening, and that we hold our own administration accountable,” she said.

Dozens of students have barricaded themselves inside of New York University’s student union cafeteria to demand increased transparency of the school’s finances, divestment from Israel due to the Gaza war and support for Palestinian students

The protest began about 10 p.m. Wednesday when students from various city universities gathered inside the cafeteria of the Helen & Martin Kimmel Center for University Life.

Members of the coalition called Take Back NYU! pushed tables and chairs against the doors. A supporter said about 60 students were involved.

In a list of demands posted on a Web site, the students called for the university to release information on staff salaries and financial aid.

NYU spokesman John Beckman says the group’s calls for the release of salary information is “not a reasonable request.”

He said the university gives students “countless opportunities for dialogue and even protest.”

Here’s a Video of the Protest

An agreement between Hamas and Israel to bring quiet to the war-torn Gaza Strip could be announced within days, Hamas officials said, as rocket fired from the territory Friday further strained an informal cease-fire.

Two rockets fired by Gaza militants hit near a communal farm and the town of Sderot, the Israeli military said. No one was injured and no armed group took responsibility for the attack.

Rocket fire and shooting incidents along the Gaza-Israel border have persisted since the end of Israel’s devastating offensive against Hamas in the territory. Israel halted the operation on Jan. 18 and Hamas declared a cease-fire later the same day.

Friday’s rockets came as Hamas officials said talks in Cairo aimed at achieving a long-term truce were close to success.

A Hamas delegation is in the Egyptian capital and an Israeli envoy has been flying in periodically from Tel Aviv. Egypt is mediating between Israel and Hamas because the sides will not talk directly to each other.

Late on Thursday, Hamas deputy leader Moussa Abu Marzouk told Egypt’s official MENA news agency that the Islamic militant group has agreed to an 18-month truce with Israel. He said it would be announced within two days after the group consults with other Palestinian factions, the news agency reported. Abu Marzouk said the deal calls for Israel to reopen its border crossings into Gaza, fulfilling Hamas’ central demand.

The border crossings have been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since Hamas violently seized power in the territory in June, 2007, defeating its rivals from the Fatah movement.

Taher Nunu, a Hamas spokesman in Cairo with the group’s truce delegation, said Friday he expects an agreement “within the coming three days.” He said progress had been made on a cease-fire, on a reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and on reconstruction funds for Gaza.

“Many obstacles have been resolved, especially stopping all forms of aggression and the issue of the quality and kind of goods (entering Gaza) and the opening of the border,” Nunu said in a statement e-mailed to reporters in Gaza.

Little has leaked from the Israeli side on the truce talks. In Jerusalem, government officials would not comment Friday.

Israeli defense officials said the talks were serious and making progress. An initial agreement could involve a partial opening of Gaza’s crossings, they said, with a later agreement to include the release of Sgt. Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas since 2006, in return for the release of Palestinian prisoners demanded by Hamas. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the details remain classified.

Talks on Schalit’s release have stalled over disagreements about which prisoners Israel would free. The hundreds of names on Hamas’ list include senior militants and masterminds of deadly suicide bombings.

It is unclear how the results of Israel’s national election this week are affecting the Cairo talks. The election ended with the moderate foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, winning one more parliament seat than hard-line Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. But with a majority of hard-line lawmakers now in parliament, Netanyahu has better chances of cobbling together a coalition government. He met with potential allies Friday. Coalition wrangling is expected to last weeks, at least.

A new government is likely to be either a hard-line coalition led by Netanyahu or a centrist coalition involving a power-sharing arrangement between Netanyahu and Livni.

Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, has become the first of any college or university in the U.S. to divest from companies on the grounds of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

This landmark move is a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The group pressured Hampshire College’s Board of Trustees to divest from six specific companies due to human rights concerns in occupied Palestine. Over 800 students, professors, and alumni have signed SJP’s “institutional statement” calling for the divestment.

The proposal put forth by SJP was approved on Saturday, 7 Feb 2009 by the Board. By divesting from these companies, SJP believes that Hampshire has distanced itself from complicity in the illegal occupation and war crimes of Israel.

Meeting minutes from a committee of Hampshire’s Board of Trustees confirm that “President Hexter acknowledged that it was the good work of SJP that brought this issue to the attention of the committee.” This groundbreaking decision follows in Hampshire’s history of being the first college in the country to divest from apartheid South Africa thirty-two years ago, a decision based on similar human rights concerns. This divestment was also a direct result of student pressure.

The divestment has so far been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rashid Khalidi, Vice President of the EU Parliament Luisa Morganitini, Cynthia McKinney, former member of the African National Congress Ronnie Kasrils, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, John Berger, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, among others.

The six corporations, all of which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza are: Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola, and Terex (see attached info sheet for more information on these corporations.) Furthermore, our policy prevents the reinvestment in any company involved in the illegal occupation.

SJP is responding to a call from Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a way of bringing non-violent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law. SJP is following in the footsteps of many noted groups and institutions such as the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in the UK, the Israeli group Gush Shalom, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the American Friends Service Committee.

As well as voicing our opposition to the illegal occupation and the consistent human rights violations of the Palestinian people, we as members of an institute of higher education see it as our moral responsibility to express our solidarity with Palestinian students whose access to education is severely inhibited by the Israeli occupation.

SJP has proven that student groups can organize, rally and pressure their schools to divest from the illegal occupation. The group hopes that this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the U.S. to take similar stands.

Al-Qaida’s No. 2 criticized President Barack Obama for not mentioning Gaza in his inauguration speech, and urged Muslims around the world to target U.S. interests to avenge American backing of Israel’s offensive against Hamas.

In a new audio recording posted Tuesday on the Internet, Ayman al-Zawahri also called on Muslims to continue fighting in the Gaza Strip, where a two-week truce remains fragile.

While Obama later voiced concerns about the killings of civilians, “in his inauguration speech, he gave no mention to what happened in Gaza,” al-Zawahri said.

“As for Obama, he has expressed his worries over the killing of civilians in Gaza. Worried? We really appreciate your worries Mr. Obama,” he said. “We have learned about your worries, as well as about thousands of the missiles and white phosphorus,” al-Zawahri added in a reference to charges that Israeli forces used phosphorous shells in a way that burned civilians in Gaza.

The recording was the second al-Zawahri has posted this year about the three-week offensive that began on Dec. 27. The terror network’s chief Osama bin Laden also issued an audio message on Gaza in January, urging Muslims to launch a jihad against Israel.

“The path to fighting the occupation is open to all Muslims,” al-Zawahri said in the recording accompanied by video and still images from the Gaza offensive. “Bring weapons into Gaza. … Punish everyone who stands against Gaza and the rest of the Muslim world.”

Al-Qaida holds little influence among Palestinians but the network’s Gaza-related postings are likely aimed at harnessing Muslim anger about the offensive and channeling it at the new U.S. administration.

The authenticity of the 17-minute recording could not be independently confirmed but it was posted on an Islamist militant Web site known as a clearing house for al-Qaida messages.

The recording opened with video scenes of Gaza, showing buildings exploding and wounded crowding into hospitals. Then it settled into a montage of still photographs showing the white-turbaned al-Zawahri, dead Palestinian children, and photographs of Egyptian and Saudi leaders, as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas rival.

Al-Zawahri, who is Egyptian, also lashed out at Arab rulers. He singled out Egypt for refusing to open its border with Gaza and preventing humanitarian access to the strip.

“Anybody who imposes a siege on Gaza is an enemy,” he said.

He urged Muslims to not just protest, but to attack U.S. and Israeli targets.

“The Israeli and American interests are spread everywhere,” he said. “If it (attack) doesn’t work in one place, it’s possible in other places. And if the enemy fortified some of its interests, many others remain without cover and under threat.”

President Barack Obama’s Mideast envoy turned his attention to the Western-backed Palestinian government in the West Bank on Thursday as rockets thudded into southern Israel and Israeli warplanes attacked new targets in Gaza.

George Mitchell was seen entering Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah and was due to meet later in the day with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

He is not meeting with Hamas, the Islamic group that is Abbas’ rival and the ruler of the Gaza Strip. The U.S., Israel and European Union have blacklisted Hamas as a terrorist group.

Mitchell held his first round of talks with regional leaders in Cairo and Jerusalem Wednesday to determine the next steps toward reviving peace negotiations following Israel’s blistering military offensive Hamas.

But a flare-up of violence in Gaza underscored the more immediate priority — shoring up a 10-day-old cease-fire. Palestinians fired a rocket into Israel early Thursday, and residents of the south Gaza town of Khan Younis said an Israeli airstrike there wounded an unidentified man on a motorcycle and five passers-by, among them children walking home from school.

The Israeli military said it targeted the motorcyclist because he was involved in a bomb attack Tuesday on the Gaza-Israel border which killed an Israeli soldier and wounded three others.

On Wednesday Israeli warplanes struck Gaza smuggling tunnels and a weapons factory. There were no reports of casualties.

Israel and Hamas separately declared a cease-fire on Jan. 18, ending a three-week Israeli offensive that killed nearly 1,300 Palestinians and caused widespread destruction in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Thirteen Israelis also died in the fighting.

Israel launched the operation to end years of rocket fire on its southern towns.

International diplomats have been trying to work out arrangements for a longer-range truce. Israel wants an end to Hamas rocket attacks and weapons smuggling. Hamas wants Israel to end a crippling economic blockade of Gaza’s borders, imposed after the Islamic militant group seized power in June 2007.

After talks in Jerusalem Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Mitchell said consolidating the cease-fire was “of critical importance.” He said a longer-term truce should be based on “an end to smuggling and reopening of the crossings” into Gaza.

Mitchell’s Mideast foray comes just a week after Obama took office, signaling the new U.S. administration’s willingness to make the region a priority. Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader and a broker of the 1998 Northern Ireland peace deal, said that after finishing his consultations in the region and with European leaders, he would report his recommendations to Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mitchell was silent on the details of his meetings, and he has no news conferences planned during his seven-day tour.

In a meeting Wednesday night, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told Mitchell that only a peace agreement which guaranteed Israeli security would win the approval of the Israeli public.

“In order for the peace negotiations to succeed, Israel must continue its war against terror wherever it exists and is directed against us,” her office quoted her as saying.

Livni has been Israel’s chief negotiator in the past 15 months of peace talks with Abbas’ government. Those talks have been put on hold due to the fighting in Gaza, and Israel’s political campaign ahead of a Feb. 10 parliamentary election.

The recent Israeli offensive has fueled new calls for Abbas’ Fatah movement and Hamas to reconcile. The sides met in Cairo this week for their first talks since Hamas took control of Gaza, and Egypt hopes to hold more substantive reconciliation talks by mid-February.

The Palestinians want to establish an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank — areas located on opposite sides of Israel. Israel says a peace agreement is impossible as long as Hamas remains in charge in Gaza.

In the meantime, it would be hard for the cease-fire to hold unless arrangements are made to stop the flow of arms to Hamas and end the blockade of the tiny coastal territory, which has deepened the deprivation there and trapped 1.4 million people inside.

Mitchell said the crossings should be opened on the basis of a 2005 agreement brokered by the U.S. that put the main crossing — the passage between Egypt and Gaza — under the management of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, with European monitors deployed to prevent smuggling.

However, Hamas wants a role at the crossings in recognition of its power in the territory. Israel and Abbas do not want Hamas there.

Olmert told Mitchell Wednesday that Hamas’ power in Gaza “must diminish” and Abbas must “gain a foothold” there, an Olmert aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity because their meeting was closed.

Olmert said crossings between Israel and Gaza “will only open permanently” after the freeing of Sgt. Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier Gaza militants captured in June 2006, the aide said.

In Qatar on Wednesday, Hamas’ supreme leader, Khaled Mashaal, said the group would not link the opening of crossings to the release of the Israeli soldier.

Hamas wants Israel to free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Schalit.

Egypt has been exploring the possibility of including some Hamas personnel in a Palestinian Authority presence at the border, but that would require some form of reconciliation between the factions, which remain bitter rivals.