Matthew Kalman

Better Place Launches Electric Fleet in Israel

2012-01-26T23:25:00.000-08:00

Published by MIT

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Business

A network of fast battery-switching stations offers an unusual business model for electric cars.

By Matthew Kalman

Roll out: A fleet of 100 Renault Fluence electric cars arriving in Israel last week.
Better Place

See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Connected Vehicle.

In four years, the electric-car company Better Place has traveled from startup to starting line. Last week, a fleet of 100 electrically powered Renault Fluence ZE sedans set out in a caravan along Israeli highways, signaling the start of the company's efforts to reach a wide swath of consumers.

The cars are fueled by 225-kilogram lithium-ion batteries with a range of 160 kilometers. The batteries can be recharged at home or swapped for fully charged ones at a network of robotic battery-switching stations that Better Place has built throughout Israel to let owners extend their cars' range.

The switching stations, plus apps that guide a driver to them, are what make Better Place's business unique. In Israel, gas is expensive, and there are also high taxes on gasoline-powered cars, making electric vehicles more attractive.

Agassi predicts that by next year, electric cars will be the best-selling vehicles in both Israel and Denmark. Those, along with Australia, are the nations where the service is being launched this year.

The 100 new cars that took the road last week are all for Better Place employees, although a company spokesman says employees will pay to lease them just "like everyone else." About 70 cars were on the road already.

The Fluence ZE (for zero emissions) is a pleasure to drive. Smooth and silent, the car glides easily past the speed limit on Israel's fastest highways. Its navigation system can provide directions to the nearest battery-switching station at any time.

Better Place has won some important endorsements for its business model, which remains largely unchanged since the company was founded in 2008. Last November, it raised $200 million from investors, bringing the total it has raised to around $750 million. The company is now valued at approximately $2.25 billion.

Quick fix: A Better Place battery-swapping station in Israel, where putting a fresh battery in an electric car takes about as long as filling a gas tank.
Better Place

While some skepticism still surrounds the venture, two car leasing companies in Israel have recently signed on."We think switchable EV is more appealing ... for the consumer because it solves the range issue and makes the cars much more economic," says Anthony Bernbaum, the global head of direct principal investments at HSBC, which has so far sunk $150 million into the company. "We believe switchable EV will be the more enduring business model."

Most automakers are working on hybrid vehicles or electric vehicles using proprietary battery packs that don't pop out. That's left Better Place as the only large commercial venture betting on battery swapping. "The biggest surprise I have in the last four years is that we were left to our own to build a four-year advantage," says Agassi.

Competitors could emerge if Better Place finds commercial success. Agassi says the company plans to use the money it has raised to set up networks in more European countries, possibly France and Germany. That means plans for launches in Hawaii, China, and California will likely be put on the back burner for the time being.

"Everybody is waiting for them to prove the model," says Sam Jaffe, an analyst in renewable and distributed energy strategies at IDC Energy Strategies. "There are a lot of people following what they're doing very closely."

2012-01-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

FUCHSBERG JERUSALEM CENTER
8 Agron Street, Jerusalem
MONDAY EVENING FORUM
LECTURES & DISCUSSIONS IN ENGLISH
Monday January 16
THE JAMES OSSUARY “FRAUD” TRIAL IN JERUSALEM:
A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
with Matthew Kalman, foreign correspondent and filmmaker

AT 8.00 PM, ADMISSION 20 NIS

Vast Syrian crowds demand Arab League observers' help

2011-12-31T09:49:00.000-08:00

Saturday 31 December 2011

Emboldened protesters turn out in hundreds of thousands to put new pressure on Assad

Loveday Morris and Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

In the largest demonstrations for months, as many as a million Syrians poured on to the country's streets yesterday, determined to draw their plight to the attention of Arab League observers who some fear will turn a blind eye to atrocities by President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The protesters who swarmed on to public squares and roads from the country's most northerly cities to its southern border towns appeared emboldened by the presence of up to 100 monitors.

About 250,000 demonstrated in the central province of Hama, with a similar number in Idlib, near the Turkish border, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The organisation put the total number on the streets at nearly one million, in the biggest display of anti-government sentiment since at least July. In Homs, the city at the heart of the revolution, television footage showed dancing protesters chanting: "Revolution of glory and freedom Syria".

"This Friday is different from any other Friday. It is a transformative step. People are eager to reach the monitors and tell them about their suffering," said Abu Hisham, an activist in Hama.

But, even with the Arab League team present, the violence continued, and appeared to take a more sinister turn. The Observatory claimed to have spoken to two people injured when a nail bomb was used by security forces to disperse a 70,000-strong demonstration in the Damascus suburb of Duma.

Live rounds and tear gas were also reported to have been fired on the protesters. With press access in the country severely restricted, such reports are difficult to verify.

Five were reported to have been shot dead when security forces opened fire on protesters in the southern city of Deraa, and another five were killed in Hama, with a total of 20 dead in the clashes across the country, according to the human rights group. Five people were snatched by security forces in an overnight raid in Homs, it claimed.

The Syrian government had posted snipers on rooftops and deployed its forces at trouble spots after opposition groups called for mass demonstrations to mark the first Friday prayers of the Arab League mission.

The team is in Syria to verify the government's compliance with an Arab League plan to end the violent crackdown, which includes the removal of tanks from the streets.

Human rights groups have accused the government of hiding artillery from observers. Yesterday activists in Idlib said tanks had been concealed. "They have moved the tanks out of main streets," said a member of the opposition Local Co-ordination Committee.

Comments from the head of the monitoring group, the Sudanese general, Mohamed Mustafa al-Dabi, who said he saw "nothing frightening" during his visit to Homs this week, have raised concerns among the opposition.

"70,000 people were shot with tear gas as they approached Clock Square. How can you not see anything?" said Rami Abdulrahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

While the remarks by General Dabi met with disbelief in the West, the Russian foreign ministry yesterday described his statement as "reassuring".

The comments came as government forces opened fire on demonstrators after Friday prayers in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, the southern city of Deraa and elsewhere. In an indication of the diminishing levels of confidence in the Arab League team, protesters in Damascus chanted: "The monitors are witnesses who don't see anything."

The Local Co-ordination Committees said at least 130 people, including six children, have been killed in Syria since the Arab observers began their one-month mission on Tuesday.

In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman said that violence was continuing. "It's not only a matter of deploying the monitors," she said. "It's a matter of the Syrian government living up to its commitments to withdraw heavy weapons from the cities and to stop the violence everywhere."

Meanwhile, the Turkey-based commander of the anti-government Free Syrian Army said he had ordered fighters to stop offensive operations pending a meeting with the monitors.

Colonel Riad al-Asaad said his forces had so far been unable to talk to them. "I issued an order to stop all operations from the day the committee entered Syria last Friday," Colonel Asaad said.

Arab League: The Observers

The Arab League mission in Syria descended into farce almost as soon as it began. Despite video footage showing Syrian forces continuing their bloody crackdown on protesters in Homs on Wednesday, the man overseeing the League's observation of the unrest described the situation as "calm", adding "there were no clashes".

Mustafa al-Dabi, a Sudanese general, was head of military intelligence following the 1989 coup led by Omar al-Bashir (subsequently accused of war crimes). It is alleged that General Dabi encouraged a brutal crackdown on rebels. He also cultivated Sudan's links with Syria.

Even as General Dabi spoke on Wednesday, the body of a child allegedly murdered by Assad's forces was placed on the bonnet of a white Arab League 4x4. He went on to say that there was "nothing frightening" in the town.

Syrian protesters die as Arab group tours cities

2011-12-30T09:53:00.000-08:00

Friday 30 December 2011

Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

Syrian opposition activists have called for the removal of the head of the Arab League monitoring team, just two days after the monitors started their mission to gauge if the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was complying with a peace plan which it signed.

Syrian forces opened fire again yesterday, killing more than 30 people, despite the presence of the 60 monitors who spread out between several of the flashpoint cities in the nine-month uprising against the al-Assad government.

As monitors arrived in the Damascus suburb of Douma, troops opened fire, killing 13 people, according to the Local Co-ordination Committees, an opposition group. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said people were killed when soldiers shot at protesters gathering near the Grand Mosque in Douma as the observers were arriving at city hall. More deaths were reported in Hama, Homs and Idlib, despite the presence of the observers in all those cities.

Opponents of the Syrian regime say the arrival of the Arab League team led by General Mustafa al-Dabi of Sudan has done nothing to quell the violence. General Dabi was head of military intelligence and then external security in the regime of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, now under an international arrest warrant on charges of committing genocide in Darfur. His appointment has also been criticised by independent human rights observers.

Omar Idilbi, an activist with the Local Co-ordination Committees, said Dabi was a "senior officer with an oppressive regime that is known to repress opposition". Haytham Manna, a prominent Paris-based dissident, also urged the Arab League to replace General al-Dabi or reduce his authority.

Israel hints that Turkey was guilty of its own 'holocaust'

2011-12-26T22:28:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

In a step that will further inflame already fraught relations between Israel and Turkey, parliamentarians in Jerusalem have publicly debated for the first time whether to recognise Turkish responsibility for the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.

The Knesset session yesterday followed a French vote last week outlawing denial of the massacres, a step that angered the Turkish government.

"Denying a holocaust is something that history cannot agree with," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said during a discussion in the Knesset's Education, Culture and Sports Committee, breaking a decades-long taboo on public debate by the Knesset on the issue – and a longtime avoidance of the use of the word "holocaust", which most Israelis prefer to apply only to the Nazi massacre of six million Jews. "We believe that as humans, as Jews and as citizens of the State of Israel – along with members of Knesset that are not Jewish – we must put the subject on the national agenda," Mr Rivlin said.

In the past, successive Israeli governments had suppressed discussion of the issue for fear of offending Turkey, a rare Muslim ally of the Jewish state. Academic symposiums have been held at Israeli universities and the former Education Minister Yossi Sarid attended two Armenian government conferences marking the 85th and 90th anniversaries of the massacre.

Following the breakdown of relations over the killing of nine passengers aboard a Turkish ship trying to enter Gaza in 2010, pressure grew for Israel's parliament to acknowledge the historical suffering of Armenians.

"Acknowledging the horrors that took place in the past should not affect future relations with Turkey," Zahava Gal-On, leader of the left-wing Meretz party, said during the debate. "The moral duty to recognise the Armenian genocide is not a partisan issue.

"As a daughter to the Jewish people, who underwent a holocaust that has no precedent in human memory, we have the moral duty to show sensitivity to the calamity of other nations.

"A million and a half people were butchered. I know this is a sensitive topic and that throughout the years it has been used as a foreign policy tool in the hands of Israel's governments, but we have a moral duty. It is inconceivable that our school curriculums are silent on the Armenian genocide."

Foreign Ministry officials told the committee yesterday that Israel's view should be discussed "by historians, not politicians". Yaakov Amidror, security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urged postponement of the discussion because of the sensitivity of government efforts to repair relations with Turkey.

Egyptian blogger freed from military detention

2011-12-25T23:27:00.000-08:00

Matthew Kalman
Monday, 26 December 2011

A prominent Egyptian blogger and democracy activist was released from military detention yesterday, nearly two months after his arrest on suspicion of inciting violence sparked outcry at home and abroad.

One of the first faces Alaa Abdel-Fattah saw when he emerged from his incarceration was his new son Khaled, born during his time at the Tora jail south of Cairo and named after a blogger killed during the turmoil in Egypt this year.

Mr Fattah was summoned by a military prosecutor in October after an article he wrote for Al-Shorouk newspaper blaming the military for the death of an activist during bloody clashes with Coptic Christians that month. Mr Fattah has always denied the charges and refused to recognise the right of the military court to arrest and interrogate civilians. He is among an estimated 12,000 Egyptians who have been brought before military courts since the army assumed interim power last February.

"I was imprisoned by the military prosecutor as a punishment for insisting on appearing before a civil judge," he wrote in a recent message smuggled from his cell.

An investigative judge ordered his release Sunday without charge. No further details were given.

Crying and spat on, plight of girl, 7, mobilises Israelis against extremists

2011-12-25T22:34:00.000-08:00

Monday 26 December 2011

Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

Thousands of Israelis are expected to march through the city of Bet Shemesh later this week to protest against the treatment of women by ultra-orthodox Jewish extremists, with tensions high after a seven-year-old girl said she had been spat on in the street.

Simmering public outrage over the segregation of women in ultra-orthodox, or haredi, areas erupted into anger after a Channel Two television broadcast on Friday night showed Naama Margolese, a seven-year-old haredi girl from Bet Shemesh, crying after being abused and spat on as she walked home from school.

Hours before the broadcast, women from across the political and religious spectrum met in Tel Aviv to discuss rising intolerance, which has seen them being asked to sit at the back of busses, the removal of women's faces from advertising in Jerusalem, and some streets closed to female pedestrians.

In the film, Naama is seen crying as she holds her mother's hand on the walk to her school. They are both orthodox, dressed in what most people would consider a modest fashion, but her mother wears a skirt that is only knee-length, and sports calf-length boots. Looking closely, you might catch a glimpse of her mother's knees, clad in thick tights.

"Do you want to walk just a little bit?" asks her mother, trying to persuade her to cross the road. "No, no!" screams the little girl.

"Lots of the time they scare me, that I'll get hurt or something like that," Naama told Channel Two. What is it like living in Bet Shemesh, she is asked. "Frightening". Later, the reporter stops an ultra-orthodox man identified as Moshe and asks him if he agrees with spitting at girls in the street.

"Yes, because they don't go modestly," he replies. "It bothers me. I'm a healthy man. It's right to spit on a girl who doesn't behave according to the law of the Torah. A seven-year-old, yes. What's the problem? The rabbis tell us how a woman should behave when she walks in the street and that's how it should be."

A Facebook group launched by the Israeli actor Tsviki Levin minutes after Friday's broadcast had gained more than 8,000 members by yesterday morning.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, weighed in on Saturday, and said law enforcement officials must "act aggressively against violence against women in the public sphere.

"Extremist groups cannot be allowed to infringe on the rights of women in the public sphere, which must remain open and safe for everyone," Mr Netanyahu said.

Israeli police said they had arrested one man interviewed in the Channel Two programme who admitted to spitting at women he felt were not dressed in a modest manner.

Palestinian rapprochement leaves Israel unimpressed

2011-12-24T23:37:00.000-08:00

As Fatah and Hamas bury some of their differences, Tel Aviv says the move is a step back towards terror

Saturday 24 December 2011

Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

A breakthrough agreement between Fatah, Hamas and other radical groups that could unify all Palestinian factions under a single political umbrella was yesterday greeted with scorn by Israeli officials, who said it marked a step away from peace and back towards terror.

Following talks in Cairo with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, and the Islamic Jihad leader, Ramadan Shallah, the Palestinian President and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Mahmoud Abbas, announced that a joint committee with representatives of all the groups would meet in Amman on 12 January to prepare for elections to the Palestine National Council, the ruling plenary body of the PLO.

It may take years to convene the PNC, but presidential and parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Authority have tentatively been set for May.

The agreement formally ends a 20-year stand-off in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad refused to join the Fatah-dominated PLO or participate in any peace talks that recognised Israel's right to exist. After boycotting elections to the Palestinian Authority because of its opposition to the Oslo peace accords, Hamas created a political party called Change and Reform that won the 2006 election. In 2007, Hamas evicted Fatah from the Gaza Strip in a bloody coup, setting up its own regime and ushering in a period of total division between Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank.

Since then, peace talks have been effectively stymied by the fact that Mr Abbas could not claim to represent the Palestinian people as a whole. As a result, Israel has taken advantage of the internal Palestinian stalemate,

Fatah and Hamas have held several rounds of unity talks and even reached a draft agreement in 2009, but Hamas pulled out at the last minute. The Arab Spring, however, has driven both sides to move towards resolving their differences.

Hamas has been weakened by events in Syria which threaten to topple its patron, President Bashar Assad. Fatah, meanwhile, is under pressure from the public to finally unite the Palestinian territories, produce a peace deal with Israel and mend bridges with Hamas.

Israeli officials were far from enthusiastic about the rapprochement between the various Palestinian factions.

"Hamas is not a political movement that resorts to terrorism but a group whose whole vocation is terrorism," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "The closer President Abbas moves to Hamas, the further he moves away from peace," he said. "This is a movement that is terrorist to the core."

Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian commentator, said the agreement by Hamas to join the PLO did not necessarily mean they had finally accepted the idea of peace with Israel. He said the Islamic resistance group had outsmarted Fatah before.

"Joining the PLO does not mean Hamas will necessarily change its strategy or give up on armed struggle, and its leaders have made contradictory statements on those issues while these talks have been going on," Abu Toameh said. "They ran in the 2006 election held under the Oslo peace accords but still refused to recognise the accords."

"They are effectively coming into the PLO without making any concessions. They have beaten Fatah before and they could do it again, replacing Fatah as the largest faction. Then the whole PLO will have to change and everything will be up for grabs."

Syrian 'bloodbath' on eve of Arab League's mission

2011-12-23T23:39:00.000-08:00

Friday 23 December 2011

Turkey warned the violence was in stark contrast to the spirit of the deal that Syria signed up to

Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

A team from the Arab League arrived in Syria yesterday amid an international outcry over a "bloodbath" that saw more than 200 people killed by President Bashar al-Assad's regime in just two days.

Activists have accused government forces of a major escalation in violence ahead of arrival of foreign observers. The advance delegation is tasked with arranging for the arrival of 20 foreign monitors at the weekend and eventually increasing the numbers to 500.

"They are trying to buy time, one hour after another, hoping to gain the upper hand on the ground," said an activist from the village of Kfar Owaid, the scene of one of the most brutal acts in the uprising so far with more than 100 people slaughtered in the village on Tuesday. Eyewitnesses said troops surrounded residents and activists in a valley and unleashed a barrage of rockets, tank shells, bombs and gunfire in an assault that one witness described as an "organised massacre".

At least another 19 people were killed yesterday as government troops in the city of Homs, says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Up to 70 deserting soldiers were reportedly gunned down on Monday as they tried to flee their positions. Since the protests erupted in March, more than 5,000 people have been killed, according to the UN.

Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the Syrian National Council yesterday called on the UN to "urgently intervene". Turkey, once a close ally of Damascus, warned the violence was in stark contrast to the spirit of the Arab League deal Syria signed up to and is raising doubts about the regime's "true intentions".

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said yesterday: "We strongly condemn the Syrian leadership's policies of oppression against its own people, which are turning the country into a bloodbath." The US toughened its rhetoric after the attack on Kfar Owaid, accusing Syria of trying to "mow down" its own people. In the Syrian city of Aleppo, activists tweeted yesterday videos and photographs of thousands of government troops storming the campus firing tear gas on the fourth day of a student sit-down protest.

Elsewhere, independent news channels posted videos of Syrian soldiers who they said had defected to the anti-government side, suggesting Assad is fast losing his grip on his security forces who are transferring their weapons and expertise to the opposition.

Israel denies Anonymous cyber-attack to blame for websites failure

2011-11-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Israeli secret service and army websites disrupted for several hours after video threat from Anonymous hacker group

THE GUARDIAN, Monday 7 November 2011

Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

Israeli security experts have rejected claims that the Anonymous hacker group was behind the failure of several government websites on Sunday. Photograph: Rex

Israeli officials and security experts have rejected claims that a cyber-attack by the hacker group Anonymous was behind the failure of several government websites on Sunday, including those of the Mossad, the Shin Bet secret service, the Israeli army and some government ministries.

The websites were inaccessible for several hours but all were back online again by Monday.

In a YouTube video posted last Friday, Anonymous threatened to "strike back" at Israel if it continued to block vessels attempting to reach Gaza by sea. The video was released shortly after Israeli naval commandos boarded a Canadian and Irish vessel sailing to Gaza and arrested the passengers and crew.

In the YouTube message An Open Letter from Anonymous to the Government of Israel, an electronically generated voice can be heard accusing Israel of "piracy on the high seas". "Your actions are illegal, against democracy, human rights, international, and maritime laws," the statement continues. "Justifying war, murder, illegal interception, and pirate-like activities under an illegal cover of defence will not go unnoticed by us or the people of the world.

"We do not tolerate this kind of repeated offensive behaviour against unarmed civilians. If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza or repeat the dreadful actions of 31 May 2010 against any Gaza freedom flotillas then you will leave us no choice but to strike back. Again and again, until you stop." The message ends with a warning: "Expect us."

The Israeli sites crashed about 48 hours later. An army spokesperson said it was "a coincidence" – a response dismissed by observers who noted that several Palestinian sites were hacked last week, as was the site of the Russell tribunal, currently hearing testimony in South Africa on why Israel is an apartheid state.

But Nitzan Miron, a former member of Matzov, the cyber security division of the Israeli military, responsible for defending networks from hackers, said the breakdown was "a really strange coincidence".

Miron, now chief executive of 6Scan, a website security start-up in Tel Aviv, said there had been a hardware crash rather than a software problem caused by a cyber-attack. "Nothing is impossible but it doesn't look like it [a cyber-attack]," he said. He said a decision to group all the sites in one hardware system had resulted in a chain reaction of malfunctions.

"It's all part of a project called Tehila that puts all of those sites together in one data centre. When one fell, they all fell. The back-ups failed. Hopefully next time they'll have better back-ups and this kind of thing shouldn't happen," he said. "Those were just the front-end sites. They don't contain the actual classified information."

The successful penetration of some of Israel's most prominent sites would be a major embarrassment to the Israelis, who pioneered cyber security and whose algorithms protect large swaths of computerised banking and e-commerce around the world.

Private College's Entrepreneurship Course Helps Generate Successful Start-Ups

2011-10-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION October 18, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Herzliya, Israel

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both famously dropped out of Harvard to start wildly successful technology companies. In Israel, an innovative program is providing undergraduate students the business tools they need to become entrepreneurs, while also encouraging them to complete their degrees.

The Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the Interdisciplinary Center, a private college here, has spawned alumni-created companies that together have attracted nearly $100-million in investments in less than a decade. The Interdisciplinary Center has long sought to cut across academic silos and attract international scholars and students. The Zell program is one of its most successful efforts to distinguish itself from Israel's public-university system.

The yearlong course is free, not for credit, and open to 20 final-year undergraduates chosen from applicants in all departments at the Interdisciplinary Center. It emphasizes practical business skills, networking, and students' interaction with actual entrepreneurs.

"Forty percent of our alumni are working as founding members of start-ups or running their own business," said Liat Aaronson, executive director of the program.

(Continues here)

The Quasicrystal Laureate

2011-10-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

Published by MIT

Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman discusses the potential uses for quasicrystals.

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Wednesday, October 12, 2011
By Matthew Kalman

Dan Shechtman, the Philip Tobias professor of materials engineering at the Haifa Technion Israel Institute of Technology, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week for his discovery of quasicrystals—a form of matter with an atomic structure that was previously thought impossible.

In 1982, Shechtman discovered a new atomic structure when studying a rapidly cooled mix of aluminum and manganese. Unlike a regular crystal, which has an orderly, repeating structure, this material contained a pattern that never repeated. Many other kinds of quasicrystals have been discovered since then.

In 1992, the International Union of Crystallography changed the official definition of the crystal to incorporate Shechtman's discovery.

TR: Are there opportunities to invent new types of materials because of quasicrystals?

Shechtman: There is always something new in quasicrystals. There are so many people working on it around the world, so every month there are new developments. If you use a material for an application, then you need a special property that will be better than other materials—otherwise, why use this material? Quasi-periodic materials have certain properties which are unique, such as electrical properties, optical properties, hardness and nonstick properties. The direction of light through this material is different. Electrically, they behave in a very peculiar way depending on temperature. Some of these properties have been put to use.

What was the first product based on quasicrystals?

The first application was nonstick coating on frying pans and cooking utensils. If you cook on quasicrystals, your omelet will not stick to it, like Teflon. But unlike Teflon, if you use a knife in the [quasicrystal] skillet, you will ruin the knife. When you have Teflon and you use a knife, you ruin the Teflon. Ruined Teflon is not healthy. I have a frying pan which is plasma-coated with quasicrystals and it works fine. It was made by a French company, Sitram. They closed the production line because they had a few problems in the reaction of the coating with salt. If people cook with a lot of salt it will etch the quasicrystalline coating. People didn't like it, so they did not continue.

The Nobel citation says that quasicrystals are brittle but they can reinforce steel "like armor." What are the practical applications?

Sandvik, a company in Sweden, produces a precipitation-hardened stainless steel that has interesting properties. The steel is strengthened by small quasicrystalline particles and it does not corrode. It is an extremely strong steel. It is used for anything that touches the skin, for instance, razor blades or surgery tools. When a material deforms in such a way that it will not spring back, in most cases, the deformation is due to a process called dislocation glide. There are defects in the material that cause dislocations. If they are free to move, then it is easy to bend the material. But if something stops them, then it is more difficult and the material is harder and stronger. These little quasicrystalline particles impede the motion of dislocation in the material.

The citation also says quasicrystals are being used to develop heat insulation, LEDs, diesel engines, and new materials that convert heat to electricity. What new applications do you think are most promising?

Because some of these materials have a low coefficient of friction, and they have nonstick properties and are also hard, imagine what would happen if you produce quasicrystalline powder in tiny little balls by rapid solidification process, a gas-atomizing process, then you can embed the fine powders in plastic. Because these particles are strong and can withstand friction and wear, you can make gears from this plastic and the gears will not erode because of these embedded particles. It's like a protection from erosion. This can serve in ventilators and fans that have plastic gears. Also, the heat conductivity of some of these quasicrystals is very poor. It's almost an insulator. So you can coat with it and it will insulate against heat transfer.

Icosahedrite, a naturally occurring quasicrystalline mineral, has been identified in a sample from the Khatyrka River in Chukhotka, Russia. Will it be useful?

This is an important discovery, because it's the first one found in nature, but there are no practical applications. There are many, many metals, but if you think that all the metals can be used for something useful, think again. Look at construction materials. We have steel, which is based on iron, we have aluminum alloys, magnesium alloys, titanium-based alloys, nickel-based alloys, copper alloys, and that's about all, if I haven't forgotten any. What do all the other metals do? What are the applications of ytterbium? What are the applications of all the other metals? So to have an application for a material is not trivial.

Israeli Palestinian Comedy Tour - Channel 4 News February 2007

2011-09-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

If only Abbas, Netanyahu, Obama and Blair did stand-up...

2011-09-23T01:08:00.000-07:00

Israeli Legal Group Asks American Colleges to Curb Anti-Semitism

2011-09-08T04:09:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

NEWS TICKER September 8, 2011, 12:26 pm

An Israeli advocacy group has warned college presidents around the United States that they may be subject to civil and criminal liability, including “massive damages,” if they do not take necessary measures to ensure the educational rights and safety of their Jewish and Israeli students, reports The Jerusalem Post. Shurat HaDin (the Israel Law Center) sent letters to more than 150 college presidents because of “an alarming number of incidents of harassment and hate crimes against Jewish and Israeli students on U.S. college campuses,” the center’s lawyer, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, told the newspaper.

The letters advise the presidents that they have a legal obligation to prevent harassment and anti-Semitism and have a duty to reasonably prevent university funds from being diverted to unlawful activities directed against the state of Israel.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said last year it would step up efforts to protect Jewish students. This year it started an investigation into anti-Semitism at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

One man's stand against an Israeli settlement

2011-08-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Matthew Kalman reports from Jerusalem on a Palestinian farmer's extraordinary story

Thursday, 18 August 2011

QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM

Said Ayid on his land next to Har Homa, also known as Jabal Abu Ghneim, where he has lived for 73 years

Said Ayid was born under the British Mandate, grew up in Jordan, raised his eight children under Israeli occupation and now lives on the edge of a sprawling new Israeli neighbourhood under the token protection of the Palestinian Authority.

But throughout those 73 years he has not moved an inch.

Two weeks ago, the Israeli government announced the addition of 930 new units in Har Homa, the new neighbourhood built in the past decade on the adjacent hillside south of Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967.

That number might have been higher, but Mr Ayid's tiny farm is the next parcel in line and he refuses to sell. His stubborn reluctance to leave his home has become a solitary stand against the concrete sprawl threatening his land and his livelihood.

"This was my grandfather's house. I was born here. I've lived every minute of my 73 years right here. I never even went to school. As long as I am alive, I will not leave my land," Mr Ayid told The Independent as Israeli bulldozers gouged out another few metres of his property.

In 1998, Robin Cook, who was then the British foreign secretary, provoked a diplomatic dispute with the Israelis when he visited the future site of Har Homa, then a pine-covered hilltop known to the Palestinians as Jabal Abu Ghneim that overlooked Bethlehem and the adjacent village of Beit Sahour. Mr Cook was accompanied by senior Palestinian officials and hundreds of protesters.

The politicians and protesters gave up the fight years ago, and the Palestinian Authority, while praising Mr Ayid's "steadfastness", have lifted neither finger nor chequebook to help him.

"My son went to the President's office in Ramallah to ask Abu Mazen (the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas) for help, but they did nothing," Mr Ayid said. "Thousands of Palestinians used to come here and protest but in they end they achieved nothing."

Mr Ayid inherited 25 dunams (6.25 acres) from his father, but seven years ago a platoon of Israeli soldiers and paramilitary border police arrived, sealing off 1.5 acres of his property that lay within the expanded municipal boundary of Jerusalem. He watched in frustration as bulldozers tore apart the agricultural terraces where he grew wheat and laid the foundations for two large residential blocks. The land was expropriated by an Israeli government order. He fought the decision in the Israeli courts without success.

Israel offered him compensation but he rejected it, refusing even to discuss a figure for fear that it would legitimise the next step: eviction.

"I refused to accept it on principle. If I signed an agreement allowing them to take that part of the land, they will take the rest," he said.

Twice, Israeli officials have appeared on his doorstep offering to buy the remaining property.

"They said 'name your price' but even if they gave me $10m (£6m) what's the use? How could I ever face God if I sold my land? Even if they fill the valley with their money I wouldn't take it," he said. "One day I will die. If I am poor I will die, if I am rich I will die. If I lose my land, the money doesn't mean anything."

Today, Mr Ayid scrapes a living for his extended family of 50 by tending a handful of goats and sheep and growing wheat and olives as the towering blocks of Har Homa form a spreading arc from west to north to east around his land.

To the south, the Israelis built an anti-terrorist security barrier five years ago across a route used by suicide bombers to enter Jerusalem from Bethlehem. Now Mr Ayid is completely encircled.

His grandfather owned another 2.5 acres of olive groves a 10-minute walk away in Beit Sahour. His brothers moved there before 1967. Today they cannot enter Jerusalem, while his Israeli permit allows him access only to his land. For medical treatment, food and emergencies, he must take an expensive half-hour trip through an Israeli checkpoint via Bethlehem.

"Since they built the wall, I have been isolated, cut off from Beit Sahour and Bethlehem. I'm sure they would love to take this land next," he said.

One morning during Ramadan he watched as Israeli surveyors mapped out a new access road and sewage line within the property he still retains. He will not be connected to the new drain, nor to the fresh water supply piped to the edge of his property. Instead he must draw water from a well. An Israeli electricity grid ends a few metres away, but his power comes from a line his father hooked up decades ago.

When the plans for Har Homa were first approved by the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, they seemed uncontroversial to the Israelis. The new project was one of a ring of southern Jerusalem neighbourhoods planned to secure Israeli control of Jerusalem. Located within the newly extended municipal boundary of Jerusalem, one-quarter of it would be built on land bought for Jewish settlement back in the 1930s that was subsequently occupied – illegally, in Israel's view – by Jordan.

But then came the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, accompanied by the rapid northward expansion of Bethlehem, and the Palestinian demand for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. Although Mr Rabin had no intention of ceding land in Jerusalem, the Har Homa plan suddenly seemed untimely and it was shelved.

Under Jerusalem's right-wing mayor, Ehud Olmert, and the right-wing, pro-settler government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the plan was revived and, despite international condemnation, building began in 1999. Today, 20,000 Israelis live in Har Homa and thousands more will populate the homes now being built. Palestinians say that, in addition to being built on illegally occupied land, the completed neighbourhood will form a physical barrier between Bethlehem and Beit Sahour to the south and the East Jerusalem villages of Um Tuba, Beit Safafa and Tsur Baher to the north.

"This plan changes the potential border between Israel and Palestine in Jerusalem more than any other East Jerusalem plan that has been approved in recent years and will make a permanent status agreement on Jerusalem incrementally more difficult," said Danny Seidemann, a human-rights lawyer who is a critic of Israeli policies in East Jerusalem.

Mass protests and tent cities shake Israeli government

2011-08-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Irish Times - Monday, August 15, 2011

Incensed by low pay, soaring living costs, economic inequality and high poverty rates, people have taken to the streets, writes MATTHEW KALMAN in Tel Aviv

DAPHNI LEEF is an unlikely revolutionary. The 25-year-old Israeli film school graduate comes from a comfortable, middle-class home and wants to direct movies.

But last month Leef pitched a tent in the middle of Tel Aviv’s smartest neighbourhood to protest rising living costs, sparking nationwide protests of more than 300,000 demonstrators, rattling the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and turning swathes of Israel’s cities into hippy-style tent communes.

Some Israeli politicians have dismissed Leef as a spoilt, drug-taking, middle-class fake, but she said the past month had changed her view of her country forever.“People seem driven,” said Leef in an interview near the leafy boulevard where she first pitched her tent. “It just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

“I think people feel it just has to work. We demand social justice. We don’t want to negotiate it. We just want it. I am very proud for the first time in 25 years, genuinely proud, to be a part of this Israeli public,” she said. “I am proud to be here. Proud to fight for the social rights that we deserve. And I am very proud to be a part of such a non-violent uprising. I think it’s unbelievable.

“We’re fighting for very basic things,” she said. “Being able to keep a roof over our heads, to have a decent education system, a healthcare system, employment and welfare.” Two months ago, Leef received an eviction order from her Tel Aviv apartment. During fruitless weeks searching for a home within reach of her film-editing job she discovered that rents had doubled in five years.

“I couldn’t find anything in my range. Everything was ridiculously expensive and in a horrible state,” she said.

“Then I started crunching the numbers. I’m supposed to be the best-case scenario. I’m 25 and I do not have a family to support. I have an occupation. And for some reason I can’t find a way to finish the month without going further into debt.” Leef had read about Hooverville, the tent city in New York’s Central Park during the Great Depression in the 1920s. On Bastille Day, July 14th, she invited her Facebook friends to pitch camp on the grassy, tree-shaded median of the elegant Rothschild Boulevard. Ten people turned up and went to sleep. They awoke to a social revolution.

“In less than four days we were 1,500 people. By the end of the week we were 5,000,” she said.

Tent cities sprang up across Israel, accompanied by large, peaceful demonstrations. The protests followed strikes by doctors, social workers and municipal workers over low pay and tough conditions.

Leef said people were incensed by low pay, the high cost of living and confusion about Israel’s supposed economic boom.

“If we’re not making money, but the country is, then where does the money go?” she asked.

At first, the campers were ridiculed by government ministers, but the tents multiplied, questions were raised in parliament and debates erupted on television. Finally, Netanyahu appointed a government committee to negotiate and draft new policies.

But Leef said she would not be negotiating. “This is not two governments, one against the other,” she said. “You have the people demanding to be treated with respect, for the priorities to change, for the system to change, and then you have the government, the people we elected, who we pay to do their job. Being a film student, I don’t think I should be in negotiation with them. I don’t have the knowledge. I can talk to you from the place where I’m aching from, but I don’t know what’s going on in the budget. I have no clue.”

Stav Shaffir (26), a graduate student in history and philosophy and one of the original campers, was clearer about possible demands.

“We feel like the government started a war on its people,” she said, suggesting a tax increase for top earners from 40 per cent to 55 per cent, and a cut in VAT.

“We want to change the economic system from neo-liberal to a welfare state,” she said.

This week there were more than 1,000 tents lining Rothschild Boulevard, symbol of Tel Aviv’s recent makeover from dusty backwater to hip vacation destination. Beneath the billboards offering million-dollar holiday homes, next to the sushi and espresso bars, washing lines hung across the cycle path and the grass verge was covered with mattresses and old sofas. There were communal kitchens, blow-up paddling pools and hundreds of posters demanding free education, cheaper housing, more jobs, better transport and social equality.

Volunteers offered haircuts, legal advice, first aid and childcare. There were tents of religious and secular, Arabs and Jews. People played guitars, smoked water pipes, watched TV on large screens and smooched.

As a tribute to the Egyptian revolutionaries, the meeting-point where the protesters gather each night to debate, listen and hear visiting lecturers is called “Tahrir Corner”. Leef said she admired the Arab Spring but insisted her aim was to change priorities, not the government.

“If you’re an elected public official and for a month it just gets bigger and bigger, people screaming out their pain, how can you ignore it?” she said.

Outside one tent, Dana Turgeman (32), an artist, designer and single parent from Hadera in northern Israel, watched as four-year-old Muoar worked on his colouring book.

“My rent has just been increased from €500 to €600 per month. By the time I’ve paid for rent and kindergarten and babysitters and food and electricity, my bills are more than twice what I can earn,” she said.

“I have debts of €20,000. I’ve borrowed from my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles but I’ll never be able to pay them back. I used to think it was just me. Now I know I’m not alone. Something in this country has to change.”

Since the 1990s, Israel’s economy has been transformed. Rapid privatisation and a high- tech revolution remade Israel as a world leader in information and medical technology. The country sailed through the world economic crisis. Unemployment is below 7 per cent. Last year, the economy grew faster than the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany or France.

But the new wealth has failed to reach the Israeli middle class. The OECD says Israel’s poverty rate is twice the average of other developed countries, while its welfare and education spending is significantly lower. Thirty-nine per cent of Israelis find it “difficult” or “very difficult” to live on their current incomes.

Economic reform delivered wealth into a handful of pockets, replacing creaking socialism with cartel-based capitalism. A 2010 report revealed 10 large business groups controlled 30 per cent of the market value of public companies, while 16 control half the country’s money.

Shaffir said the tent cities were a new beginning.

“We have built a new society, with schools and kindergartens and lectures and kitchens that serve three meals a day and we’ve even developed a special sign language that allows us to hold discussions and vote with over 100 people at a time,” she said . “It has to work, it must work, and it will work, because this won’t happen for another 10 to 15 years.”

Palestinians to apply for UN statehood next month

2011-08-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

THE INDEPENDENT, Monday 15 August 2011

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will present a request for formal recognition of statehood to the United Nations on 20 September, officials confirmed this weekend, saying they have the support of 117 UN member states.

Israel and the US oppose the idea, saying it is a unilateral move in a process that should be negotiated between the parties. European nations have yet to decide their vote.

Officials in Ramallah said Palestine would seek recognition as the 194th member state of the United Nations, echoing UN General Assembly resolution 194 of December 1948, which refers to the return or compensation of refugees following the establishment of Israel.

Mr Abbas will personally hand the request to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who will refer it to Lebanon, the current president of the UN Security Council.

The United States has already said it will cast a veto in the Security Council, depriving the process of any legal value, but the Palestinians hope to win a solid majority and a moral victory in the General Assembly.

Mr Abbas told a meeting of his Fatah faction that the decision to seek UN recognition was "a result of Israeli intransigence and refusal to hold serious negotiations that would lead to ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital," according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.

Mr Abbas added that "seeking UN recognition does not oppose the peace process and does not aim to isolate Israel. Rather, it will reinforce the two-state solution," WAFA reported.

Israeli President Shimon Peres, who held four rounds of secret peace talks with Mr Abbas before they were abandoned in August on the orders of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said: "A UN declaration would be meaningless and only prolong the conflict. I hope that both sides return to the negotiating table before September."

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki said the UN had "a moral, legal, political and historical responsibility to recognise Palestine as a state and grant it full membership".

Some Israeli leaders have voiced strong concerns about the emerging Palestinian bid. They fear that large-scale rallies could turn violent, plunging the region into another bloody intifada. The Israeli daily Haaretz said the tone of Israeli government reaction bordered on "hysteria".

Palestinians attack East Jerusalem settlement approval

2011-08-14T05:51:00.001-07:00

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT Friday, 12 August 2011

The Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has accused Israel of "a total disregard for Palestinian rights" after its Interior Ministry announced the approval for the construction of more than 4,000 housing units in East Jerusalem.

The Interior Minister Eli Yishai said he had authorised the building of 625 homes in Pisgat Zeev, 1,600 in Ramat Shlomo, and 2,000 in Givat Hamatos. The Israeli government says the project had been given the green light to help solve a severe housing shortage.

The neighbourhoods were all built by Israel across the pre-1967 border in territory previously held by Jordan that was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War and annexed to Jerusalem. Legally, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are permitted to live in such suburbs, but very few actually do. Ramat Shlomo is designated as a strictly ultra-orthodox Jewish area.

Last week, Israel was internationally condemned when it announced it was building 930 units in Har Homa, an Israeli suburb built across the Green Line on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem close to Bethlehem. Critics included the EU and the US State Department, which said it was "deeply concerned".

In a statement, Mr Fayyad condemned the decision, describing the areas as "occupied territory that belongs to Palestinians". "The Government of Israel continues to expand settlement activity while it makes claims that it wants to return to the negotiation table," he said. "Their actions clearly demonstrate Israel's intentions to conduct their affairs outside the realm of international law and show total disregard for Palestinian rights. The Palestinian government calls upon the international community to take immediate action to force Israel to comply with international law and cease and desist from its illegal expansion and annexation of Palestinian land."

Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said he was "alarmed" by the Israeli announcement and noted that the Ramat Shlomo plan "was already condemned by the Quartet on 12 March 2010 during an initial planning stage". "This provocative action undermines ongoing efforts by the international community to bring the parties back to negotiations and shape a positive agenda," he said.

The 1,600 units in Ramat Shlomo will be built almost immediately. The project caused a major rift in Israel-US relations when it was announced in the middle of the first official trip to the country by US Vice-President Joe Biden last year. "[The projects] are being approved because of the economic crisis here in Israel. They are looking for a place to build in Jerusalem, and these will help," said Interior Ministry spokesman, Roi Lachmanovich. "This is nothing political, it's just economic."

The Israeli government has been rattled in recent weeks by mass demonstrations demanding a solution to the country's severe housing shortage. Peace Now accused the Israeli government of "cynically using the current housing crisis in Israel to promote construction in the settlements".

Tool Creates Fresh Web Apps from Aging Code

2011-08-14T05:47:00.000-07:00

Visual WebGui makes an application accessible via the Web without altering its code.

Published by MIT

Friday, August 12, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

A tool that lets developers turn existing software into fully functional browser-based applications is becoming an increasingly popular way to make business applications accessible via the Web.

Visual WebGui, an application originally run on a Web server using virtualization software and a layer of code that renders its interface functional in the modern Web standard HTML5, lets companies offer Web access to their applications without completely rewriting the code.

While it is possible to access applications through a browser using just virtualization, this can be slow for data-heavy business applications such as those used by banks and insurance companies. It also requires installing an application on the user's computer.

Made by Gizmox, of Tel Aviv, Israel, Visual WebGui is being used by companies and institutions such as SAP, IBM, Visa, Thomson Reuters, Shell, Texas Instruments, and Goodyear. So far, the company says, 35,000 apps built using its platform are in production. In June, Citrix, a major supplier of remote-desktop software, announced an investment of $2.5 million. The Gizmox platform works with Microsoft's .Net development, and Microsoft is partnering with Gizmox by promoting the software through its marketing platform.

"We decided we were going to look at the basic architecture of the Web and change whatever [was] necessary to reproduce the experience of the desktop in terms of richness, performance, user experience, and security," says Gizmox CEO Navot Peled. "We call it transposition. We can take a code that was written basically for an architecture that was targeting the desktop, put it through some processes and some tools, and generate code from the other side that can run on top of a Web server and be a Web application, cloud application, or mobile application."

Gizmox generates income by charging about 20 cents per line of code to use the company's code-conversion tools. The largest program so far had 7.5 million lines.

The technology requires 10 percent of the bandwidth and 50 percent of processing power of other virtualization-based solutions, enabling it to function on tablets and smart phones with lower-power CPUs.

"Anyone who can take corporate applications built on Microsoft tools and turn them into Web apps in a secure way—that's important," says Jonathan Medved, a venture capitalist turned mobile entrepreneur. "Anything that keeps them in the game relative to the burgeoning world of Web apps is very strategic for Microsoft, and for players like Citrix who have built themselves on Microsoft foundations."

Hamas-Fatah deal in sight after prisoner release agreed

2011-08-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

The Irish Times - Wednesday, August 10, 2011

MATTHEW KALMAN in Jerusalem

PALESTINIAN FACTIONS Fatah and Hamas have moved towards healing a deadly rift by agreeing a mutual release of prisoners and the appointment of joint committees to address outstanding grievances.

The breakthrough after months of stalemate came ahead of a push for UN recognition in September.

After lengthy talks in Cairo, Fatah representative Azzam Al-Ahmad said: “Today’s meeting was very successful and it revived the reconciliation agreement, hindering all attempts to fold it. Our adherence to this agreement was also confirmed in this meeting.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zahri said the agreement was “important, because it is a reassuring message to the Palestinian people and it reflects the seriousness of both parties in implementing it”.

Fatah, the ruling party of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, has been locked in a bitter dispute with the Hamas Islamic Resistance Movement since 2007 when Hamas fighters staged a bloody coup and ejected Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

Hundreds of loyalists were killed in the fighting, most of them from Fatah.

Since then, Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip while Fatah has ruled the West Bank, although it has continued to pay the salaries of thousands of civil servants and prisoners’ and martyrs’ families in Gaza. Each side has arrested the other’s supporters in the territory they control and traded accusations over collaborating with or provoking Israel.

Last May, the two sides agreed to establish an interim government made up of independent political figures that would prepare for long overdue elections.

Mr Abbas met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal publicly in Cairo to seal the deal. However a follow- up meeting planned for June collapsed amid mutual recrimination.

So far, no interim government has been formed and the promised co-operation on security issues has not materialised.

There is disagreement over the future of prime minister Salam Fayyad. Mr Fayyad is seen by many as the architect of an economic boom in the West Bank and one of the few Palestinian leaders trusted by western donors, but Hamas wants him replaced.

To further complicate matters, the unity deal has been attacked by Israel and the United States which say the deal will legitimise Hamas terror tactics. The Islamic resistance movement refuses to negotiate peace or to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

The committees set up during talks in Cairo at the weekend will address remaining grievances over the granting of passports, social reconciliation, institutions affiliated to each side shut down in Gaza and the West Bank and prisoners.

Ma’an News agency reported that there are 70 Hamas prisoners in the West Bank and 37 Fatah prisoners in Gaza.

Khaled Amayreh, a prominent critic of the Palestinian Authority based in Hebron, said that while the renewed commitment was welcome, Palestinians were waiting to see concrete results after years of on-off talks between Fatah and Hamas.

“We hope and pray that . . . we reach the moment when the rift and all its scars, ramifications and repercussions will be a thing of the past,” Mr Amayreh said.

“The release of political prisoners, which is supposed to take place before the end of Ramadan, will be a real breakthrough,” he added.

But Omar Shaban, head of the Gaza think tank Palthink, was more sceptical.

“Political unity is an illusion,” he said.

British aid cash is handed to families of suicide bombers

2011-08-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

LONDON DAILY MAIL, 8 Aug 2011

From Matthew Kalman
in Jerusalem

BRITISH aid cash is being given to the families of suicide bombers, it was claimed last night.

The Palestinian Authority, which gets £86million of British aid a year, has authorised payments of almost £5million to the families of ‘martyrs’.

Another £3million has been given to 5,500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. The payments, using taxpayers’ cash donated from Britain and the European Union, have been described as ‘ludicrous’ by one Tory MP.

The Palestinian Authority, which oversees the West Bank, has introduced a new law which pays the families of suicide bombers out of its civil service budget.

According to the official Palestinian daily newspaper, AlHayat Al-Jadida, payments to the families of ‘martyrs’ – those killed fighting Israel, including suicide bombers – totalled 3.5 per cent of the budget.

‘ Every terrorist in prison, including those whose acts led to the deaths of Israeli civilians, are on the PA payroll,’ said Itamar Marcus, of Palestinian Media Watch.

‘The salary goes directly to the terrorist or the terrorist’s family, and prisoners receive their salaries from the day of arrest.’

Tory MP Philip Davies said the payments were ‘ludicrous’. He added: ‘People think overseas aid is to try to alleviate terrible poverty in places where they can’t afford to look after themselves. But it’s being put to these kind of purposes.

‘It would be bad enough at the best of times, but at a time when we have got no money, it is utterly inexcusable.’

Last month, Britain committed to giving £86million a year in aid to the Palestinian Authority until 2015.

The payments to families and prisoners are on a sliding scale, from £250 a month for prisoners sentenced to less than three years, to a maximum of £2,140 a month for anyone serving more than 30 years. The payments compare with salaries of £515 for a regular Palestinian civil servant and £480 for officers in the Palestinian security forces.

Minister of State Alan Duncan said in February: ‘We are very careful how we spend our money in the occupied Palestinian territories. We would abhor any money falling into the hands of extremists.’

The Government is under pressure for the amount of aid it is handing out at a time of austerity. It plans to increase foreign aid payments by 35 per cent to £11.4billion by 2015. This comes despite several scandals involving aid. Last week, it was revealed that money to Ethiopia was being used as a political tool and those who oppose the government do not receive handouts.

David Cameron has admitted that the controversial pledge to spend billions more on international aid was a ‘difficult commitment’ at a time when spending programmes were being slashed at home.

The Prime Minister admitted that some aid had been ‘ wasted’, but continued to dismiss ‘aid sceptics’.

COMMENT Aid for terrorists

BARELY a week goes by without new evidence that much of Britain’s bloated overseas aid budget is ending up in the wrong hands.

It is simply unacceptable that money that Britain sends to the Palestinian Authority – £86million a year until 2015 – may be going to terrorists and the families of suicide bombers.

Palestinians in Israeli prisons, many of whom are terrorists, have been placed by the Palestinian Authority on its official payroll as civil servants – and the longer their sentence, the bigger their salary. It also makes payments to the relatives of ‘martyrs’ killed fighting Israel, including suicide bombers.

At a time of austerity, as this paper has strongly argued, the Government’s spendthrift attitude to our aid budget is beyond comprehension. It may be right that we should support the Palestinian government. But only if every penny of our aid is monitored to ensure it does not end up in the wrong hands.

Netanyahu may be forced to destroy settlers' homes

2011-07-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT, Saturday, 23 July 2011

The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is on course for its first major clash with Israeli settlers in the West Bank, before a court deadline expires tomorrow to destroy three homes which have been built without permission in a hilltop outpost near Ramallah.

Israel's high court last month ordered the destruction within 45 days of three permanent dwellings in Migron, an outpost of 48 families mostly living in caravans.

The dwellings were built illegally on land owned by Palestinians. If the government complies, it will be the first time Israel has destroyed permanent settler buildings since 2006, when the bulldozing of nine houses in the Amona outpost triggered violent clashes with Israeli police.

Although illegal, even under Israeli law, Migron was given more than $1m (£612,000) by the Israeli ministry of housing and has a road, water, phone lines, electricity and a permanent army patrol. The high court ordered its closure more than three years ago.

Community leaders and politicians, including prominent members of Mr Netanyahu's ruling Likud Party, pledged their support for the settlers.

Young Israelis in tent-city protests over rising prices

2011-07-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT, Friday, 22 July 2011

AFP/ GETTY IMAGES

Israeli demonstrators block a main junction in Tel Aviv

Israeli consumers, frustrated after years of spiralling food and housing prices, burst on to the streets of Tel Aviv this week with a popular protest that has transformed one of the city's smartest neighbourhoods into a hippie-style campsite.

Students and other demonstrators pitched hundreds of tents along Rothschild Boulevard, more famous for its Unesco-protected Bauhaus-style architecture and European-style cafes, to protest about rising prices that they claim are forcing young people out of the city.

The organisers are demanding government action to calm the inflated housing market that has seen rents rise in Tel Aviv by more than 60 per cent in four years. Protestors have also starting camping out in Jerusalem with other tent cities springing up from Beersheba in the south to Haifa and Kiryat Shemona in the north.

News of the protests spread through social media, echoing a successful Facebook campaign last month when consumers forced down the spiralling price of dairy products.

Critics have accused the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being in thrall to a handful of economic oligarchs who effectively control much of Israel's economy.

"The Israeli public – in all fields – is captive to forces with narrow interests," said an editorial in the daily Maariv newspaper.

In Jerusalem, 40 demonstrators occupied the garden of a home in the exclusive Kfar David neighbourhood. One focus of the protests is the large number of city-centre dwellings built for and bought by wealthy foreigners who leave them empty for most of the year.

A rally on Saturday near the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv will be the first test of the movement's political muscle. "Israel's government continues to disappoint us, and we feel betrayed," said Daphni Leef, the founder of the protest movement. "The struggle is moving on to the next level. We call on all the tent cities to arrive at Habima Square for a rally that will make the upper echelon shake."

"It's our nation, and it's time to give it back to the people," she added.

Israelis earn on average about 100,000 shekels (£18,000) a year and spend between a half and one-third of their salaries on housing. Food and other costs have also spiralled in recent years, making Tel Aviv the most expensive city in the Middle East.

Many politicians visited the tent cities to show support for the protest but were turned away. Police intervened after one demonstrator poured a bottle of beer over Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv.

Defying Boycott Vote, U. of Johannesburg Continues Partnership With Israeli Institution

2011-07-08T04:13:00.000-07:00

Defying Boycott Vote, U. of Johannesburg Continues Partnership With Israeli Institution

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

NEWS TICKER July 8, 2011, 2:26 pm

Israel’s Ben-Gurion University and the University of Johannesburg have reinstated a collaborative water-research agreement, defying a vote last March by the South African institution’s faculty senate to cut ties with the Israeli university, reports The Jerusalem Post. The faculty vote had been hailed as the first major success of an international academic boycott campaign against Israel, though the vice chancellor of the Johannesburg university said afterward that the university would not boycott Ben-Gurion.

On Friday, the two universities signed a contract to continue their joint research on water purification and the conversion of algae into energy with the cooperation of scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Ghent.

The senate vote followed a decision in September 2010 to end links with its Israeli counterpart if it found “direct or indirect military implications” to the relationship. The senate had called on Ben-Gurion to form partnerships with Palestinian universities and ordered a review of the ties between the two institutions. University of Johannesburg officials had told the senate before the vote in March that no Palestinian university had been found to join Ben-Gurion in the project. The Israeli university has several joint projects with Palestinian universities, researchers, and students.

A Less Wasteful Way to Deal with Wastewater

2011-07-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

Published by MIT

An Israeli company aims to commercialize microbial fuel-cell technology.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

An Israeli company called Emefcy has developed a process that promises to decrease the energy drain of wastewater treatment. This week, Energy Technology Ventures—a joint venture between GE, NRG Energy, and ConocoPhillips—invested in the company, marking the venture's first-ever investment in a non-U.S. company.

Conventional wastewater treatment consumes 2 percent of global power capacity, some 80,000 megawatts, at a cost of $40 billion per year.

Using conventional microbial fuel-cell technology and its own proprietary engineering, Emefcy harvests energy from wastewater, generating enough to power the entire treatment process. In the treatment of particularly carbon-rich industrial wastewater, the company says, the process produces excess electricity that can be fed back into the grid at a profit.

In microbial fuel cells, naturally occurring microorganisms oxidize wastewater. An anode and cathode, placed a critical distance apart in the water, create an electrical circuit from the electrons gained from this oxidation.

Ely Cohen, Emefcy's vice president of marketing, says the company's process reduces the total cost of wastewater treatment by 30 to 40 percent by eliminating spending on energy, and also reduces the amount of sludge that must be trucked away afterward by up to 80 percent.

Traditional wastewater treatment involves forcing air through the water to aerate it. This is also important to the activity of the microbial cells. Emefcy exposes more wastewater to air but without the energy-intensive process of pumping air through water. Instead, the wastewater flows through a "biogenic reactor" made of tubes 1.7 meters in diameter and four meters high. Inside the tubes, water and air flow alongside each other separated by a membrane.

"The reactor is split into two areas," says Emefcy CEO Eytan Levy. "In one area there is a lot of wastewater but there is no air. In the other area there is air but no wastewater. These two areas are separated by a membrane wall and both areas are connected to an electrically-conductive surface on which the bacteria grows."

The electrons produced by the bacteria flow towards the oxygen in the air through nanowires made of naturally-occurring hair-like projections found on the surface of the microbes. "Under these reactor conditions the bacteria develop the ability to convert these pili to become electrically conductive and it behaves just like a metallic wire," says Levy.

The electrodes used are made of a coated plastic, which makes them cheaper, and easier to maintain.

Each stack can process 10 cubic meters of wastewater a day, and has a planned lifespan of 15 years. Stacks can be added on a modular basis, avoiding the need for a large up-front investment in infrastructure. Emefcy hope to begin industrial production this month, with first sales targeted for early 2012.

Itamar Willner, a professor at the Institute of Chemistry at the Hebrew University, and author of a recent review of biofuel cell technology in the journal Fuel Cells, says using microbial fuel cells for the decontamination of wastewater remains "a challenge."

"There is a tremendous difference between a demo system and upscaling to thousands of tons of wastewater, and a difference between artificially contaminated water used for laboratory testing and the real world, where you have different waste and different materials," says Willner.

Lital Alfonta, an assistant professor in the Department of Biotechnology Engineering at Ben-Gurion University, who develops genetically engineered microbial fuel cells, says there has been growing excitement at international conferences over the progress made by Emefcy.

"They use very cheap materials that still give them the highest possible power output," says Alfonta. "They also immensely improved the approach by stacking their electrodes, giving a much higher surface area."

But Alfonta says that 80 percent of the energy generated by the microbes is lost in the process, because the electrons never reach the electrodes. She is researching whether the microbes can be genetically engineered to improve the efficiency of the electron transfer between the microorganism and the fuel cell's electrode.

For the moment, Emefcy will be content if its stacks prove to be energy-neutral, with a little surplus from the industrial wastewater treatment.

"If you're an organization that's looking for renewable energy, don't come to us," says Cohen. "Go to wind. Go to solar. If you have a wastewater problem, come to us and we'll find a way that is very cost-effective and to a certain extent it could even be an energy-positive solution."

Cost-cutting exercise sees Blair on move – into millionaires' row

2011-06-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT Monday, 27 June 2011

QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM

Tony Blair's new seven-storey site in East Jerusalem

After four years in five-star luxury, Tony Blair is moving out of the American Colony Hotel into a purpose-built seven-storey building now under construction in Sheikh Jarrah: the millionaires' row of East Jerusalem.

The new building will replace the 15 rooms Mr Blair's team rents at the American Colony for more than £1m each year. Since he was appointed as representative of the Middle East Quartet in 2007, his office and accommodation for his dozen-strong staff have been located on the fourth floor of Jerusalem's best known hotel.

The former prime minister's departure will remove a steady source of income from the American Colony just as hotel bookings in the region begin to plummet in response to the wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East.

The lease at the hotel originally expired on 30 June, but has been extended to the middle of the month to allow the completion of building work at the new location on Nablus Road.

When The Independent visited the new building on Sunday it was still under construction. Workers were hanging off the outside of the building fitting aluminium window frames. The site is screened by a high metal fence and at least five CCTV cameras, suggesting that Mr Blair's team have already installed some of the watertight security systems necessary to protect the former prime minister.

The Quartet will lease the new building from the influential Nashashibi family, who have constructed the block from local sandstone and smoked glass on land owned for decades by their family. Mr Blair and his team spend about one week in four in Jerusalem. He spends the rest of his time working for his foundation, and on commercial activities.

Officials say the move is intended to reduce costs and simplify security, though with a lease costing the Quartet about £750,000 a year, the new building will not be cheap. Sub-tenants from carefully-vetted organisations will occupy some of the space in order to offset the cost of the lease.

A spokesman said: "Yes, the Office of the Quartet Representative will be moving out of the American Colony Hotel, to an office building elsewhere in East Jerusalem this summer. This will reduce our office costs and provide more suitable office accommodation."

The move also suggests Mr Blair and the Quartet are digging in for a long haul and may be expanding their operations.

The building will house sleeping accommodation for Mr Blair and his travelling advisers, including the 24-hour security detail provided by the Scotland Yard diplomatic protection unit, but it is not clear who will provide housekeeping and laundry services.

Israel Vulnerable to Cyber Attack, Leaders Warn

2011-06-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

A conference on cyber warfare in Tel Aviv reveals Israel's weaknesses—but a strategy to solve them is already in hand.

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW Wednesday, June 15, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

The outgoing head of Israel's internal security service Shin Bet and the head of the country's cyber task force, among others, warned at a conference on cyber warfare at Tel Aviv University last week that strategic Israeli installations are essentially unguarded against cyber attack.

Around the world, a series of high-profile security breaches have afflicted major government and commercial institutions in recent weeks, including the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin, Sony, and Citibank. Earlier this month, hackers compromised the computer systems at two Israeli diplomatic legations in the U.S. and put them out of service for several hours.

Last year, it was discovered that cyber warfare had broken new ground with the Stuxnet worm attack, which targeted the control systems of nuclear plants. The U.S. and Israel have been accused of designing the worm, which disabled the Iranian nuclear plant at Natanz by causing extreme temperature variations, and which went undetected for months, perhaps years. Several speakers at the conference referred to Stuxnet as a game changer because it brought cyber warfare into the realm of offensive acts against critical infrastructure. But there was no public acknowledgement or even hint that Israel was indeed responsible for the worm. Instead, discussion focused on the country's defense against cyber attack.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the conference, "The more computerized we get, the more vulnerable we become. There is therefore no choice but to deal with this in a more systematic and focused manner."

The outgoing Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, blamed China for some recent computer security breaches around the world and said the Chinese government's cyber command now comprises "the largest number of hackers on earth." He said there was evidence that on April 8, 2010, China diverted 15 percent of U.S. Internet traffic through its routers. (He was referring to an incident described in the report of the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released last November. The attack lasted for 18 minutes and appears to have been a case of IP hijacking or BGP hijacking—the takeover of whole blocks of website addresses by corrupting Internet network routing.) Cyber warfare is already "an existing reality," he said.

Diskin asserted that Israeli networks critical to cell-phone communications, transport systems, finance, and the supply of electricity and water are all wide open to attack, and that this constitutes "a major threat to national security" because Israel, like all modern states, relies heavily on such systems to function normally.

In May 2011 the Israeli government appointed a National Cybernetic Taskforce led by Isaac Ben-Israel, a professor at Tel Aviv University, reserve major general, and former head of the Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure at the Israeli Defense Ministry. The task force submitted a report last month that made a series of recommendations for defending Israel's strategic infrastructure from cyber attack.

The measures recommended include the establishment of a national cyber authority to oversee the protection of Israel's critical systems, the development of an Israeli research supercomputer, protocols to identify attacks in progress and repair any damage caused, and the creation of a simulation center to train and certify engineers who will specialize in system protection.

Ben-Israel told the conference that while Israeli military and intelligence networks are well protected, the country currently has "no defense for critical installations such as the electricity network." He warned, "You have systems that each one by itself is not critical, but someone who wants to attack Israel can attack three or four of these sub-critical systems in parallel and together will achieve the effect of paralyzing the country."

Ben-Israel also hinted that the government may be considering mounting an offense. "It's not enough to remain passive and defend yourself. You also have to do all sorts of things, but I won't talk about that," he said.

Danny Dolev, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the task force, agreed that Israel's civilian computer systems are "wide open, a weak point." He said, "To defend Israel, we need to develop sensing of many things happening at once, which individually may seem unimportant but as soon as we look at their correlation, suddenly something happens."

Other experts urged the adoption of new kinds of security measures, observing that technologies such as the firewall, which identifies potentially malicious inbound network traffic, cannot guard against attacks by people or malicious programs already within an organization's security cordon.

Nimrod Kozlovski, an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University and chairman of Altal Security, said current security protocols were based on the outdated concept of "trusted" and "untrusted" people trying to access a system. But today's threats may come from a "trusted" person within the system—like Bradley Manning, who is accused of downloading thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and passing them to WikiLeaks.

William Beer, director of the OneSecurity Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers London and an adviser to the British government, said, "The current approach to cyber security is failing. People engaged in securing cyberspace face the challenge of continuing to raise their game faster than the attackers."

Despite Promises of Research Funds, Israeli Colleges Feel Slighted

2011-06-08T04:33:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION June 8, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

The announcement in April that Israeli colleges will be allowed to seek government funds for research has ended a decade-long battle, but college heads say the war is not yet won.

Colleges here have been fighting the country's eight research universities for accreditation and public financing since the colleges emerged in the 1970s as satellite campuses of the existing universities. Many colleges chafed at being subservient to their parent institutions, unable to make their own decisions.

But with the rapid expansion of Israel's population came growing pressure to offer more options for higher education. In 1995 the colleges were granted independent status and then were placed under the supervision of the Council for Higher Education, which oversees higher-education policy and financing in Israel. By 2006 there were 21 publicly subsidized colleges that couldn't use those funds to back research.

Meanwhile, there was a parallel development of 14 privately funded colleges, beginning with the College of Management Academic Studies, or COMAS, founded in Rishon LeZiyyon in 1978 as a school of business studies. COMAS has expanded into broader academic programs, and with 12,000 students, it is now the largest college in Israel. Private colleges like COMAS are also regulated—but not financed—by the Council for Higher Education.

The colleges helped nearly triple the number of students in higher education, from 76,000 in 1990 to 237,000 in 2010, and now teach a majority of Israeli undergraduates. But public colleges remain tightly controlled both in student numbers and the courses they can offer, including a ban on teaching law.

Aliza Shenhar, president of the publicly funded Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in northern Israel and chairperson of the Committee of College Presidents, has said the two-tier system is unsustainable.

"Strengthening access to higher education, the goal underlying the establishment of the public colleges, created a binary academic system under which these colleges concentrated exclusively on teaching, whereas universities dealt with teaching and research," Ms. Shenhar wrote recently in the journal Kivunim Hadashim.

The system "puts college faculty members at a competitive disadvantage, while also hamstringing the colleges' development and their ability to develop new fields of study," she wrote.

Competing Interests

The colleges' fight for funds coincided with a decade-long crisis, from 2000 to 2010, in which the Israeli government slashed some 20 percent of the budget for higher education.

Shlomo Grossman, chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education from 2003 to 2009, said the colleges received as much backing as possible at a difficult time.

"The main issue while I was chairman was to keep the system working, mainly to enable the universities to run both teaching and research, and the colleges to establish their infrastructure and facilities and to get a body of students," he said. "Due to the shortage in the budget, we couldn't support research in colleges."

Today, Mr. Grossman said, the government is focused on reversing a brain drain that has caused the country to lose 25 percent of its scientists. "The top priority is to bring back the brains that we lost," he said. "The second priority is to help the colleges to continue developing."

But Seev Neumann, president of COMAS, questioned the government's commitment to research financing for colleges. He said he feared the announcement of as-yet-undetermined research funds for colleges was "lip service."

He noted that another recent project, which will provide some $2-billion over the next five years for 30 "centers of excellence" to lure scientists back to Israel, is off limits to private colleges and some public ones.

"Even within the universities, it will create a system where some researchers who are part of the centers of excellence are getting better terms, better equipment, better laboratories than their colleagues," he said. "It's going to create tremendous tension."

Mr. Neumann said he had the flexibility to decide on acceptable salary ranges and was not bound by issues of tenure. But he said the private colleges still suffered from "discrimination." They are banned from offering doctoral degrees and must wait four to five years for new courses to be approved.

Despite these restrictions, the colleges are attracting growing numbers of students and international recognition. Today nearly 15 percent of Israeli students study at private colleges like COMAS, which has a joint business-studies program with the City University of New York and is pursuing more overseas partnerships. The private Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya has a joint master's program in European studies with Heinrich Heine University at Düsseldorf, and student-exchange agreements with 40 universities worldwide.

Philanthropist Plans to Double $100-Million Gift to Israeli Institution

2011-06-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

GLOBAL NEWS TICKER June 6, 2011, 11:46 am

Alfred Mann, the billionaire Jewish philanthropist, says he is redistributing his billion-dollar pledge to universities around the world, giving more money to fewer institutions, starting with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. He established in 2007 the Alfred Mann Institute at the Technion, which commercializes medical technologies developed at the Technion with a gift of $100-million, but he now intends to double the donation.

“My original plan was to donate $100-million to 12 universities around the world, in other words $1.2-billion altogether,” Mr. Mann told the Israeli business newspaper Globes, “but I now think that I should invest more in fewer institutions, and invest more in each company.”

Some universities in the United States have declined Mr. Mann’s donations because of concerns about the strings attached to them regarding patent rights.

Arabic Social Startup Stays Local

2011-06-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

d1g.com shows the value of building a social networking site around local customs.

Published by MIT

Friday, June 3, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

In Arab culture, a diwan is a traditional ruling council, a social watering hole, and a political forum. A website called d1g.com (pronounced "diwanji") aims to replicate this institution online.

Launched in 2007, d1g.com is a platform for sharing videos, photos, audio, a forum, and a Q&A facility. Users can create new diwans around any subject. While less successful in the region than the U.S. giants Facebook and Twitter, the site is one of the Arab world's fastest-growing social-media and content-sharing websites, with more than 13 million users, 4.8 million unique monthly visitors, and 15 million videos. The company streams more Arabic videos than anyone else—600 terabytes of data per month. Many attribute the site's success to its adherence to local customs.

"People are crying out for quality Arabic content," says Marwan S. Juma, Jordan's former minister of information, communications, and technology. "There is clearly a niche there, a huge opportunity. It's not only the content, it's the culturalization. How can you make your content relevant to a regional audience? It's not a question of taking something in English and translating it."

Almost 100 percent of d1g's content is user-generated, and the small amount produced by the company is developed in Arabic in-house. Early diwans covered everything from movies to motorcycles. But d1g.com became the most popular Arab social-media site (after Facebook and Twitter) when a user created the "Egyptstreet" diwan during the Egyptian revolution.

"We saw a huge spike in our traffic," says Fouad Jeryes, who oversees business development at the company's offices in central Amman. Unique visitors rose from three million to five million per month, and visits per month grew from six million to 13 million.

Although Facebook and Twitter, which both have Arabic functionality, dominate social networking in the Middle East, Jeryes says many users still prefer local sites. "From content to user interface, d1g.com is tailored to address the needs of Arab users and fit our culture," says Jeryes.

The technology is also designed with the local audience in mind. Outside Jordan, broadband in the Arab world is generally capped at 1,024 or 512 kilobits per second, and many users are on dialup modems—a challenge for video streaming.

"If you put a video on YouTube and a video on d1g, and you stream them both to your computer, d1g will actually stream faster—to the Arab region at least," says Jeryes. "We take a hit on the quality in terms of getting the video delivered to the user."

Abdelmajeed Shamlawi, CEO of Jordan's Information Technology Association, agrees that non-English-speaking Arabs remain wary of global sites. "On Twitter and Facebook, I don't think that people are actually going for the Arabic versions," says Shamlawi. "In Saudi, the number of page views of d1g is almost equivalent to Facebook. It's not the Arabic content, it's the Arabic culture. It's user behavior."

Suspicion of foreigners is compounded by concerns about privacy and censorship, both required in traditional Arab societies. Fifty d1g moderators check each upload and remove material that could be culturally offensive or politically dangerous.

Mahmoud Jalajel, a Jordanian blogger and tech entrepreneur, says Arab society is not ready for an unfettered Web. "If you open a forum and your father opens the same forum and finds nudity, he will ban the whole family from the Internet. It's a cultural thing that it has to be this way."

Israel Announces First Grants in $350-Million Program to Reverse Brain Drain

2011-05-31T04:23:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

GLOBAL NEWS TICKER May 31, 2011, 12:15 pm

The Israeli government has announced the first three grants in its $350-million program to create 30 Centers of Research Excellence to lure Israeli scholars back from abroad. The first centers will be established in molecular science, led by the Hebrew University professor Howard Cedar; in cognitive processes, led by the Weizmann Institute of Science professor Yadin Dudai; and in computer science, led by the Tel Aviv University professor Yishay Mansour. The three centers have already signed up 11 Israeli scholars currently at U.S. institutions including Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities and the University of California at Berkeley. “In the framework of the national program to establish centers of excellence, some 300 leading Israeli scholars from the best universities in the world are expected to return to Israel,” said Manuel Trajtenberg, chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Israel Council for Higher Education.

The award caps a good month for the Cedar family. Mr. Cedar’s son Joseph, a leading Israeli movie director and Oscar nominee, just won the award for best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival for his movie Footnote, about competing father-son Talmud scholars at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Retired U.S. Academic Is Arrested in Israel on Suspicion of Antiquities Trafficking

2011-05-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION May 18, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

A retired American college lecturer has been arrested in Israel on suspicion of trafficking in stolen antiquities and attempting to smuggle them out of the country.

John L. Lund, 70, a motivational speaker, author, and tour guide, was detained late Monday by Israeli customs and antiquities agents as he prepared to board a plane at Ben Gurion Airport. Mr. Lund is an expert on Egyptian history, is the author of How to Hug a Porcupine: Dealing With Toxic and Difficult to Love Personalities, and, according to his Web site, has lectured in history as an adjunct faculty member at universities in California, Idaho, Utah, and Washington.

A search of his belongings revealed a stash of ancient silver and bronze coins that he was attempting to take out of Israel without a permit, as well as $20,000 and other evidence from the illegal sales of ancient coins, clay oil lamps, and glass and pottery vessels, said a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority. Mr. Lund had been acting as a guide to two groups touring Israel.

One of the items retrieved by officials was a rare Roman lamp bearing an incised decoration of a seven-branched menorah. Such items are not permitted to be taken abroad without an export license from the antiquities agency.

Mr. Lund was allowed to leave Israel after posting a bond of $7,500. Israeli police expect to file charges in the near future.

"The sale of antiquities without a permit and the export of antiquities from Israel without permission are criminal offenses for which the penalty prescribed by law is up to three years' imprisonment," said Amir Ganor, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery, in the written statement.

Contacted by phone at his home in Utah, Mr. Lund categorically denied that he had trafficked in any stolen antiquities or attempted to smuggle any items out of the country. "I’m not trying to smuggle anything," he said.

He said he had brought coins, the inscribed oil lamp, and a few other items from his personal collection to use as visual aids for his lectures.

Agency officials said they were first alerted to Mr. Lund's alleged trafficking two weeks ago by a sale at a Jerusalem hotel where he offered items to a group of American tourists he was guiding. Mr. Lund was detained, and a search of his room revealed "hundreds of ancient archaeological artifacts in his possession, ... which had allegedly been stolen by antiquities robbers from different sites throughout the country," the agency said in the statement.

He was questioned and released, but officials continued their surveillance. "He resumed his evil ways and continued selling antiquities to tourists—this time to another group that arrived in Israel," said the Antiquities Authority.

On Monday officials searched the luggage of a group that had been guided by Mr. Lund as they prepared to cross the border from Eilat to Egypt. They found 20 of the group carrying dozens of illegally purchased archaeological items, including Roman-era bronze and silver coins, 1,500-year-old clay oil lamps, and ancient pottery and glass vessels. The items appeared to have been stolen from tombs and antiquities sites and most were allegedly purchased from Mr. Lund. The travelers were permitted to leave after the items were confiscated.

Mr. Lund said he had bought items from authorized dealers to pass on to the group at no profit and said that no one in the group had any stolen antiquities.

Israel left reeling after deadly border breach

2011-05-16T23:02:00.001-07:00

THE INDEPENDENT Tuesday, 17 May 2011

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

Palestinian mourners with the body of a protester killed in Sunday's march

Israeli security and intelligence chiefs traded accusations yesterday over who allowed more than 100 protesters to cross the heavily guarded border with Syria, as Palestinians marked the "catastrophe" of Israel's founding in a string of incidents that left 15 unarmed protesters dead and Israel's doctrine of border deterrence in tatters.

Israeli leaders believe that the simultaneous appearance of thousands of civilians marching towards three sensitive borders in different parts of the country suggested a co-ordinated campaign.

Ahead of September's expected approval of Palestinian independence by the United Nations General Assembly, the Israelis fear that the Iranian-backed military efforts that link Gaza, Lebanon and Syria will be supplemented by further mass political action to which Israel currently has no response except gunfire.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is also coming under increased pressure to produce a peace proposal, if only to recover the diplomatic initiative from the Palestinians, who seem to be on a roll.

Palestinian representatives from Hamas and Fatah met yesterday in Cairo to flesh out an agreement to end their mutual hostility and form a unity government to prepare for new elections.

As military engineers repaired the breach in the border fence made on Sunday, Israeli security forces flooded the area, searching for infiltrators who had failed to return to Syria.

Israel police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said police carried out house-to-house searches in Majdal Shams village throughout the night. One man who hid overnight in the village was captured in a taxi en route to Jerusalem.

Israeli military commanders blamed faulty intelligence for the border breach while intelligence chiefs said the local commanders were at fault for failing to prepare their ground forces. Only about a dozen soldiers were on duty when the crowd burst across the border.

Observers pointed out that the protests had been publicised on Facebook for months and it did not take intelligence training to notice hundreds of buses arriving on the Syrian side of the border.

Acknowledging that Sunday's events were "not good", Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, the chief of staff of Israel's armed forces, praised his troops for not inflicting higher casualties in what rapidly developed into an impossible situation.

Alex Fishman, a commentator at the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, said: "What we witnessed yesterday on the Syrian border was a failure." He warned of "more attempted mass marches into Israeli territory... Marches and flotillas to implement the right of return will gather more and more momentum."

"The state of Israel has a systemic problem," Mr Fishman said. "Except for deterrence, it has no means to prevent tens and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – who succeed in getting organised and in realising the dream of return with their own feet – from breaking across its borders."

But Israel's border deterrence was shattered by Sunday's marchers, who simply walked through a minefield thought to be deadly. Not a single landmine exploded. Shaul Mofaz, the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, told colleagues that Sunday was merely a curtain-raiser and was likely to be replayed unless the Government produced a peace plan.

"The Israeli Government is burying its head in the sand. Without any peace initiative, yesterday's events will repeat themselves in September," Mr Mofaz said. "The present Government, headed by Netanyahu, isn't initiating anything."

Protesters shot dead by Israel as Arab Spring crosses borders

2011-05-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

THE INDEPENDENT Monday, 16 May 2011

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

A Palestinian throws stones at Israeli police at a checkpoint near Ramallah

The Arab spring finally found its way to Israel's borders yesterday, with deadly results.

At least eight people were reported killed after Palestinians marched on three different frontier posts with Lebanon, Syria and Gaza to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba ("catastrophe") of the founding of Israel on 15 May, 1948, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Two people were killed and more than 100 wounded after Israeli troops opened fire when 200 protesters broke through the border fence between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and marched to the centre of the village of Majdal Shams. The village has been under Israeli control since the 1967 Six Day War. It was the first time anyone had breached the heavily guarded border fence, which is flanked by minefields and patrolled by the UN, Israeli and Syrian forces.

Syria condemned the shootings as "criminal acts" by Israel, while Israeli officials said the deadly "provocation"bore "the fingerprints of Iran".

"I instructed the Israel Defence Forces to act with maximum restraint but to prevent any infiltration into our borders," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Everyone should know that we are determined to protect our borders and our sovereignty."

The worst incident occurred when thousands of protesters, transported to the southern Lebanese village of Maroun Al-Ras by bus, threatened to break down the border fence after hanging flags on the barbed wire and singing songs. Israeli and Lebanese troops both fired warning shots to disperse the crowd and five people were reported killed.

Eyewitness Matthew Cassel reported on Twitter: "Lebanese army started shooting in air non-stop. There was a stampede, refugees running away."

There were more deaths in Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians marched through a Hamas checkpoint towards the Erez border crossing with Israel. Border guards opened fire with tank shells and machine-guns. Medics in Gaza said one person was killed and more than 40 injured.

There were also violent clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli security forces in Hebron, East Jerusalem, Kalandia and Wallajeh.

Palestinians demonstrated throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The main rally was held in the West Bank city of Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority government. Mohammed Elayan, of the Higher National Committee for Commemorating the Nakba, told thousands of people: "The Palestinian people are today more solid in confronting occupation and the policy of ethnic cleansing. The Zionist conspiracy against our people will be destroyed in the face of our steadfastness."

Earlier, Ismail Haniyeh, the outgoing Hamas prime minister, told thousands of worshippers at a Gaza mosque that Palestinians would mark Nakba Day this year "with great hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine".

Mr Netanyahu retorted that were was "no place... for denying the existence of the State of Israel". "I regret that there are extremists among Israeli Arabs and in neighbouring countries who have turned the day on which the State of Israel was established, the day on which the Israeli democracy was established, into a day of incitement, violence and rage," he told cabinet ministers in Jerusalem.

The mass breaching of the border with Syria left Israeli security chiefs floundering, after weeks of announcements that they were expecting trouble on Sunday. "The Israel Defence Forces were ready," protested Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai. But eyewitnesses in Majdal Shams said only a handful of Israeli soldiers were on duty on Sunday and were taken by surprise when more than 1,000 buses appeared on the Syrian side of the border.

"I don't think they were really prepared for anything to happen on this side. It took more than an hour for the back-up to come," said Majdal Shams resident Shefaa Abu Jabal. "They crossed into the village and not even one landmine exploded, even though we've learned all of our lives that this place is full of landmines."

The local residents greeted the infiltrators like heroes, joining them as they marched towards the main square singing and waving Palestinian flags.

Ahmed, a Palestinian refugee from the Yarmouk camp, denied the Israeli army's claims that the event was planned by Iran. "We didn't really plan," he said. "We got a bit excited and we decided come on, let's do it. We didn't plan to cross. The army said we could stand near the border. The army didn't know. I don't think the Syrian army would have let us in if they knew."

What is the 'catastrophe'?

* Every 15 May, Palestinians commemorate the "Nakba" ("catastrophe") of the declaration of independence of the state of Israel in 1948.

The Palestinians and their Arab allies had hoped to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state by force of arms. But their defeat led to the double "catastrophe" of losing territory and transforming those Palestinians who had fled during the fighting into stateless refugees.

In recent years, protests have been marked by clashes between Israeli security forces and stone-throwing Palestinian youths, but yesterday was the first time the commemorations had descended into such widespread violence. Across the West Bank and Gaza, thousands took to the streets, holding old keys to symbolise their dreams of reclaiming the property they lost when Israel was created.

For the most part, the demonstrations passed off peacefully within Palestinian-controlled areas. But they encountered opposition when they approached checkpoints guarded by Israeli forces.

Thousands of Palestinians staged marches from Gaza City to the Erez border crossing with Israel. At least 15 unarmed marchers were reported wounded after Israeli forces opened fire to halt the crowd's progress. The Israeli warning shots included at least two tank shells and machine-gun fire at open fields close to the protestors.

At the Kalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem, hundreds of Palestinian youths threw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli forces, who fired tear-gas and rubber bullets. There were clashes too in Hebron, Wallajeh and East Jerusalem.

Matthew Kalman

2011-05-15T01:31:00.000-07:00

After Abbas

Faced with upheaval across the Middle East, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called elections for September. But it’s unclear who might run to succeed him, if the aging leader really does step down.

By Matthew Kalman|TABLET March 15, 2011

The day after Hosni Mubarak fell in Egypt, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that elections for the president and legislative council of the Palestinian Authority would be held by September. Forty-eight hours later, he asked for the resignation of the current Cabinet. “The new government should concentrate its efforts on mobilizing its energies to prepare national institutions for the establishment of an independent state of Palestine before the deadline of next September,” Abbas said.

The Palestinian leader has just seven months to reach a working relationship with Hamas, which controls Gaza and which rejects the PA government, or the elections cannot be held in Gaza. Early indications are not promising. Hamas spokesmen flatly rejected the idea of rapprochement, despite an offer from Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Sha’ath to travel there and agree to “any conditions” the group might demand. “I don’t know if there will be an independent state around September and if we will see another president in the coming months or even after September,” Nabil Amr, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister and ambassador to Cairo and Moscow, told me. A confidant of both Yasser Arafat and Abbas, Amr has become a gadfly critic of the leaders he once advised.

While Abbas’ commitment to the September deadline could be dismissed as Palestinian rhetoric in the style of Yasser Arafat’s pledge to declare an independent state in September 2000, this time the Palestinian leadership may have no choice, given the wave of popular revolts rolling across the Arab world and the Palestinians’ own internal problems. A week after the fall of the Tunisian government in January, Al Jazeera began publishing the “Palestine Papers”— a WikiLeaks-style trove of documents detailing confidential peace talks between Palestinian negotiators and Israel that portrayed the Palestinian team as weak and desperate. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat initially denounced the documents as forgeries, but he was later forced to confirm their authenticity and resigned. Meanwhile, attention shifted to events in Egypt, where mass demonstrations led to Mubarak’s resignation on February 11.

The loss of Erekat, a key confidante, was a serious problem for Abbas. Even worse was the fall of Mubarak, a stout supporter of Fatah and opponent of Hamas. “The Palestinian leaders don’t have a good response to what is happening,” says analyst Hani al-Masri at the Palestine Media, Research and Studies Centre. “They are afraid because they lost their big friend and ally.” Al-Masri adds that the only way to achieve the unity with Hamas necessary to conduct elections and a breakthrough in the peace talks that will bring about independence by the September deadline is for the Palestinian leaders to change both their tactics and leadership. “Abu Mazen”—as Abbas is known—“must say seriously that he is not running in the next election,” says al-Masri. “We must prepare ourselves for the future.”

Hafez Barghouti, editor of the semi-official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and a veteran Fatah insider, says the party is failing to prepare for the inevitable generational handover of power. “Abu Mazen is old and he doesn’t want to be like the Arab leaders, to be fired by the people,” says Barghouti. “But I don’t know who will be the new leader. From Fatah I don’t see anybody. I cannot see a good leader or a popular leader now from Fatah. Fatah till now is sleeping.”

Hatem Abdel Kader, a former Palestinian minister for Jerusalem and a prominent leader of the young guard with close connections to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, echoes Amr’s call for Fatah to get its act together while still maintaining his support for Abbas.

“Fatah is the movement of our people, Fatah is the leader of our national project, and only Fatah can achieve our national project—but we need to clean up our home,” says Abdel Kader. “Right now we haven’t any choice, only Abu Mazen. After Abu Mazen, I don’t know.”

The absence of any natural successor to Abbas either now or in the future is likely to spell trouble for Fatah, for the Palestinian national movement, and for Israelis hoping for a peace partner. Observers agree that while Palestinian Prime Minster Salam Fayyad has built enormous political capital with his “Homestretch to Freedom” plan for Palestinian statehood, his closeness to the Americans makes him an object of suspicion, and there is no chance he can win an election as an independent.

“Salam Fayyad is a good man, but he is not from Fatah,” says pollster Nabil Kukali, director-general of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion in Beit Sahour. “If Fatah will support Fayyad I’m sure he will win the elections. But if Fatah have their own candidate it will be very difficult for Fayyad.”

Several members of the Palestinian Central Committee who were elected in 2009 appear to have dropped out of contention for a leadership role. Saeb Erekat’s chances were probably destroyed by the Palestine Papers leaks. Tawfik Tirawi, a former head of Palestinian General Intelligence, prefers to play a backroom role as chief security adviser to Abbas. Jibril Rajoub, former head of Preventive Security in the West Bank, is reveling in his new job as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and Football Association and refuses to discuss anything except soccer and athletics.

Polls suggest that the potential candidate likely to win the largest majority in a post-Abbas presidential election is Marwan Barghouti, currently serving five life terms in an Israeli jail for his part in launching terror attacks against Israelis during the intifada. While Fatah leaders respect Barghouti, they rule out his candidacy as impractical.

“Marwan Barghouti could be an excellent candidate, but he is in an Israeli prison,” says Hanna Siniora, a veteran Fatah leader in Jerusalem. Amr concurs: “I like him and he’s my friend, but who will nominate a president in prison? It will be a joke.”

Recent events also suggest that Abbas, far from encouraging a smooth leadership transition, is working hard to deter would-be successors from staking a claim to the presidency. Until November, one obvious front-runner was Mohammed Dahlan, 49, the feared former commander of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza. Dahlan’s U.S.-trained and -equipped forces were roundly defeated by the Hamas Executive Force and expelled from Gaza in 2007. Some 400 Fatah fighters and activists were killed in that battle. But Dahlan bounced back from that humiliation to secure a seat on the Central Committee in 2009. Dahlan had established close ties with U.S. and British intelligence during his tenure as Gaza security chief and amassed a sizable personal fortune, with which he began to build a power base in the West Bank.

But last fall, Dahlan was suddenly stripped of his official duties and accused of financial and other misdeeds after he criticized the business dealings of the president’s family. An unprecedented attack on Dahlan published by the PLO’s official WAFA news agency announced a full-scale investigation into Dahlan’s alleged corruption and linked him to a plot to overthrow Abbas also involving Nasser al-Kidwa, Yasser Arafat’s nephew and a former foreign minister and PLO representative to the United Nations—and another possible successor to Abbas.

Indeed, al-Kidwa’s name comes up frequently in conversations with senior Fatah officials about successors. Now 57, al-Kidwa was talent-spotted in his teens by his uncle and charged with turning the General Union of Palestinian Students into an international force to help Fatah consolidate its control of the PLO while also serving as a nursery for future Palestinian leaders.

In the modest basement office he now occupies as the head of the Yasser Arafat Foundation, al-Kidwa is clearly caught between a desire to continue his uncle’s legacy, his frustration at the current leadership’s lack of progress in the peace process, and his shock at the public accusation that he was plotting with Dahlan to overthrow Abbas.

Al-Kidwa bears an uncanny resemblance to his late uncle—he favors business suits over military fatigues—but Fatah kingmakers are divided as to whether he has what it takes to fill Arafat’s shoes. His supporters cite his rich diplomatic experience, impressive intellect, and his freedom from the taint of corruption that swirls around many other Fatah officials. Detractors say he is largely untried on the domestic scene and his profile since returning from diplomatic service has been too low to attract much following among the 400,000 registered members of Fatah.

One Israeli diplomat who frequently locked horns with al-Kidwa at the United Nations said he was a force to be reckoned with. “He is very intelligent, extremely slippery, and he can be unnecessarily aggressive,” said the Israeli. Many Palestinians may feel that is exactly the kind of person they could use right now at the helm of their drifting ship.

Al-Kidwa says the conspiracy allegations published by the official news agency are symptomatic of a leadership that has lost touch with its own people and frozen democratic institutions like the legislative council.

“We are seeing a decrease in the amount of tolerance of other opinions, of opposition, of dissent,” says al-Kidwa. “There is an absence of democratic check and balance and a muting of opposition generally, especially after the military coup d’etat in Gaza. This led to more accumulation, more centralization of power. Part of this is not our making. Part of this is a result of the Hamas military coup in Gaza, the situation here, the lack of progress in the peace process. But irrespective of whose fault this might be, the results are not nice.”

He denounces the Hamas regime in Gaza as “authoritarian and merciless” but says the priority must be a power-sharing agreement that will allow Hamas to fully participate in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority without needing to join a government whose peaceful program they would be unable to endorse. He is confident that Hamas can be persuaded to drop its demands for Israel’s destruction.

“They have a really very serious problem,” al-Kidwa says of Hamas. “They don’t have answers either for the Palestinian people or for themselves.”

While he praises Salam Fayyad as “a serious man” and lauds his achievements in recent years, he says the idea that building institutions can bring a Palestinian state into existence is “deeply flawed” in the absence of a coherent political program, both at home and internationally. He says there should be much more pressure on the Israelis from the United Nations and other international institutions to produce an agreement, since direct negotiations have clearly failed.

Evidently, he has thought long and hard about the new policies that could be pursued under a new leader. Will he run in the planned election, if it happens? “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” al-Kidwa replies. “There is total confusion when it comes to whatever might happen next.”

Israeli University Sues Google to Remove Former Student’s Blog

2011-05-06T04:28:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

May 6, 2011, 3:11 pm

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem—The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, has filed suit against Google demanding that it remove a blog by a former student that the institute says slanders the Technion’s program for American medical students.

The blogger posted critical articles and personal denunciations about the Technion American Medical Students program, known as TeAMS, on www.technionteams.blogspot.com, where he warns prospective students not to enter the program, leveling serious allegations of corruption against the university and its staff.

The blog alleges that only 20 percent of students in the past two years have secured residencies in the United States after graduation and says the university is “evasive with information and withholds it from people in order to lure potential applicants from North America.”

“We have brought these issues to the school’s attention since 2006 in e-mails, class meetings, letters, etc., and the school appears not to do anything,” the blog states.

The blogger also filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education against TeAMS. The Israeli daily Haaretz reports that an investigative lawyer for the Oversight Committee of the U.S. Congress recently informed the blogger he was interested in examining the allegations against the Technion.

The Technion responded to the blog allegations on its Web site, declaring them slanderous and inaccurate. On April 17, the Technion filed suit in Haifa District Court against Google, which owns Blogger, the company that hosts Blogspot. The university also filed a motion for a temporary restraining order, demanding that Google “remove published items that defame and insult the Technion in general, its staff, and in particular one of the flagship programs of the faculty of medicine.”

The Technion’s lawyers argued that, as the owner of Blogger, Google is responsible for deleting the blog, which they say is “entirely dedicated to slander.”

Google said the court lacked jurisdiction to rule on the case. But in a hearing on April 28, Judge Menahem Raniel of the Haifa District Court rejected that claim.

“This is the first time an Israeli court determined the responsibility of World Google as a provider of Web-hosting services to remove defamatory statements on the Internet,” the Technion stated on its Web site this week.

By Friday, Google had not yet shut down the site, but in any case the blog has now been transferred to a new site, www.technionteams.com, hosted by another service provider.

“Rather than investing in fixing the corruption at the Technion Medical School, the Technion Medical School has decided to pay lawyers to make a feeble attempt to once again cover up the continued abuses of the American medical students,” writes a blogger who identifies himself as “Joe Caro” in a new post on the controversial blog.

“The plain truth is that the TeAMS program continues to have an abysmal rate of postgraduate placement with an annual revenue stream exceeding $3,000,000/year. Most often, the American students are at the Technion as a hope of last resort to become a physician after being rejected from all American medical schools and the other American programs in Israel. After investing in excess of $100,000/each into their Technion education, most of the recent graduates have nothing to show except loans due to the US Government,” says the writer.

“I can attest to malfeasance that the Technion appears to be engaged in,” a former student told Haaretz. “The environment was abusive, and when wrongdoings were brought to the school’s attention they reacted in a very defensive and threatening manner.”

Cameron threatens to recognise Palestine state unless Israel opens peace talks

2011-05-04T02:37:00.000-07:00

DAILY MAIL 4th May 2011

By Tim Shipman and Matthew Kalman

Britain is prepared to formally recognise a Palestinian state unless Israel opens peace talks with the Palestinians.

David Cameron last night warned Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu that the UK is prepared to recognise an independent Palestine at a United Nations meeting in September.

British diplomats described the threat as one of Britain’s few ‘levers’ to press Israel to join talks with Palestinian officials.

Tough talking: David Cameron (right) last night warned Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu that the UK is prepared to recognise an independent Palestine at a United Nations meeting in September

The two prime ministers met in Downing Street last night after rival Palestinian factions endorsed a unity agreement yesterday.

The deal ends four years of bitterness and violence between the dominant Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that rules Gaza.

Palestinian leaders hailed the deal as a major step towards an independent state. They plan to form an interim government and hold long-delayed elections within a year.

Mr Cameron turned the screws on Israel last night after Mr Netanyahu said: 'What happened today is a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism.'

But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said at the reconciliation ceremony that Israel’s opposition to the reconciliation, was an excuse to 'evade a peace deal'.

Mr Abbas said. 'The state of Palestine must be born this year.’

He is expected to call for unilateral recognition from world powers at a UN meeting in September, a call likely to be backed by Arab countries and Latin America, with the USA opposed.

A senior Downing Street source made clear Britain is ready to recognise a Palestinian state.

‘Our clear preference is for a negotiated settlement where everyone can endorse a two state solution,’ the source said.

‘But if there is no agreement to enter talks that could force the issue.
‘The best way for the Israelis to avoid a unilateral declaration is to engage in peace talks.’

Britain has already beefed up its diplomatic presence with the Palestinians, upgrading its presence in Jerusalem from a delegation to a mission earlier this year.

The Prime Minister told Mr Netanyahu that he understood Israel’s nervousness about the sweeping changes in the Middle East but insisted that the Arab Spring is ‘an opportunity not a threat’.

Resistance: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that Israel's opposition to the reconciliation, was an excuse to 'evade a peace deal'

Mr Cameron warned that failure to engage in talks with the Palestinians would ‘fuel hate and radicalisation’.

He also told Israel that opting for talks on a two state solution was necessary to silence Israel’s critics who say the country is not interested in peace.

Officials said Mr Cameron hoped to influence what Mr Netanyahu says when he makes a speech to the US Congress in a couple of months time.

The prime minister’s spokesman also urged the newly re-united Palestinian factions to do a deal: ‘The Prime Minister made clear we hope Palestinian unity between Fatah and Hamas will be a step forward but we will judge any Palestinian government on its actions.

‘We want the Palestinian government that emerges to reject violence and engage in a meaningful peace process.’

The new government in Egypt helped broker the truce after Hamas had a change in heart and finally accepted a deal first offered two years ago.

Mr Abbas said it had “turned forever the black page of division. Hamas is part of the Palestinian people’.

Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal said the rivalry with Fatah was over. 'Hamas’s only conflict is with Israel,' he said.

Mashaal hinted at a change in policy when he said, 'We want an independent Palestinian state with sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza.'

Hamas has always sought the destruction of Israel. Mashaal has not said whether the new state will live at peace with its neighbour or continue fighting.

Hamas spearheaded suicide bombings against Israel and entered Palestinian politics in 2006, promptly defeating Fatah in parliamentary elections. But the refusal of Hamas to renounce violence and recognize peace agreements with Israel led to the collapse of a unity government.

In 2007, Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza in a bloody coup that left more than 400 Fatah supporters dead. Fatah retaliated by arresting Hamas supporters in the West Bank and stopping funds.

Some of those tensions remained yesterday. The ceremony was delayed nearly two hours when Abbas refused to allow Mashaal to join him on the podium.

Tony Blair, envoy for the Middle East Quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia, said the international community supports Palestinian reconciliation but will demand that the new unity government recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence.

Blair said Hamas must have “a change of heart” for the government to succeed.

Israel delights in Syria's unrest

2011-04-29T06:45:00.001-07:00

Syria, Israel's longtime enemy and a key supporter of Iran, has been weakened by domestic unrest, Israeli leaders say.

GLOBAL POST April 29, 2011

Matthew Kalman

JERUSALEM — Israeli leaders and commentators could not help gloating as they watched Syrian President Bashar al-Assad writhing under the pressure of the Arab world’s latest revolt.

Unlike Egypt, whose leaders were committed to peace with Israel, or Tunisia and Libya, which long ago became minor players in the anti-Israel coalition, Assad’s Syria is regarded as one of Israel’s deadliest enemies.

“Even in our world colored with grays and not only blacks and whites, the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus would be a great blessing for the Middle East and the world,” wrote Mordechai Nisan, a former lecturer in Middle East studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“The list of Syria’s misdemeanors and crimes is legion. From belligerent Soviet ally to godfather and patron of Palestinian terrorism, Hafez the father and Bashar the son crafted a policy strategy that demonized Israel, betrayed the Arab world, consolidated the regional hegemony of Iran, and perpetuated an Alawite sectarian regime in defiance of the Sunni Muslim majority in the country,” Nisan wrote in the Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

“With the Assads gone, the Middle East as a whole will be able to move to transcend the state of terror and tension with which the Syrian regime poisoned the political atmosphere for over four long decades,” he concluded.

Israeli observers were also bemused by the sudden discomfiture of radical Palestinian groups — including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — whose headquarters are in Damascus and who have long enjoyed the financial and political support of the Syrian dictatorship.

The Meir Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Information Center, a clearing-house for Mossad and Shin Bet analysis, said in a commentary that the Hamas leadership in Damascus was “attempting to play both sides of the fence … saying it supported both the Syrian leadership and the Syrian people.”

Hamas was particularly exposed when one of its heroes, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual mentor Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, backed the Syrian protesters in a sermon aired on Al Jazeera on March 25. Calling for all-out revolution in Syria, he lambasted Assad and warned that “those who do not change will be trampled.”

“Hamas has found itself in a predicament over the clash between its solidarity with Muslim Brotherhood elements in Syria interested in toppling the regime, as well as with al-Qaradawi’s attack on Bashar al-Assad, and its dependence on the assistance provided by the Assad regime to its infrastructure and terrorist activity,” observed the center.

But Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli peace negotiator with Syria, warned that the picture was more complex. In early April, writing in Foreign Affairs, Rabinovich said that while Assad is no doubt a ruthless adversary, “Israel itself is ambivalent about the future of his rule.”

“Israeli leaders believe that Syria and the Iranian axis have been weakened by the domestic unrest plaguing Assad’s regime. But like others in the region, they wonder what the alternative to Assad might be. Although they are aware of pro-democracy and human rights groups active inside Syria and abroad, they naturally fear the power of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rabinovich wrote.

In a commentary last week, Rabinovich suggested that Israel open a back-channel dialogue with Assad, offering to help him survive in return for changing the diplomatic dialogue between the two countries.

“People in Bashar Assad’s situation are concerned about their physical survival and Israel has something to offer in this area,” Rabinovich told Israel Radio. “We could change the agenda between us and Syria. The agenda doesn’t just have to be about a peace deal and territorial concessions.”

But for most Israelis the chance to see Assad fall is not to be missed.

“It is difficult to support any position that allows for the Assad regime’s continued rule,” wrote former Justice Minister Tzachi Hanegbi in the Jerusalem Post.

“Syria, via its proxies, spilled Israel Defense Forces blood in Lebanon for three decades,” Hanegbi recalled. “Assad offered a safe haven in Damascus to senior leaders of terrorist organizations and allowed them to continue their terror activities, with unlimited freedom, from his capital. The Syria-Iran alliance has provided Hamas and its satellites with financial aid, training camps, a supply of modern weapons and political backing … Syria’s enthusiastic support for Hezbollah has turned it into Lebanon’s strongest organization.”

Whatever outcome Israel would like to see in Syria, past attempts at interference in neighbors’ affairs are not encouraging. Israel’s effort to foster regime change in Lebanon in 1982 by backing the Christian Phalange movement led to the assassination of its leader, Bachir Gemayel, and the rise of Hezbollah. Israel’s encouragement of Islamic groups in Gaza in the 1980s to counter the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization led directly to the creation of Hamas.

Joshua Teitelbaum, principal fellow of the GLORIA Center in Herzilya, said Israel can do little more than watch and wait.

“All things considered, it’s a good thing,” Teitelbaum told GlobalPost. “Israel cannot affect this outcome in either way. I don’t think we can shore him up and I don’t think we can really bring him down.”

“When all is said and done, if his regime is gone, it has the possibility of being good for us. This is an ally of Iran, one who props up Hezbollah. The people who come into control, and we don’t know who they are, might choose a different policy. They might seek the comfort of the United States for all we know. There are many options.

“What we do know is that this is a very damaging regime — damaging to its own people, damaging to Lebanon and the independence of Lebanon, totally supporting Hezbollah and Iran’s main ally in the Arab world. So the weight of things from Israel’s perspective and also from an American perspective is clearly against this regime,” Teitelbaum said.

But he said it was doubtful the uprising would lead to a sudden flowering of democracy because of the ruthless suppression under the Assad regime — father and son.

“This is an authoritarian regime that’s been there for a long time controlling its people. Economically it’s horrible for them. They are not advanced. They are not sharing the fruits of globalization,” Teitelbaum said. “There’s no civil society in Syria. There’s no way to organize in Syria.”

“I think it’s more likely there’ll be some kind of regime change. There are so many unknowns here. If it’s an Alawi takeover, and they’re going to switch for another Alawi leader, it’s not going to be democracy.”

Palestinians 'confess to Israeli family murders'

2011-04-18T05:50:00.000-07:00

THE INDEPENDENT Monday, 18 April 2011

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

Two Palestinian teenagers linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been arrested by Israeli security forces for the murders of an Israeli family attacked as they lay sleeping.

Udi Fogel, 36, and his wife, Ruth, 35, died in a hail of bullets from a stolen M-16 assault rifle as they fought to protect their children from two men who broke into their home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, near Nablus, on 11 March. Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and three-month-old Hadas were found by their 12-year-old sister, who raised the alarm. Their throats had been cut. Two more children aged eight and two survived because they were sleeping in another room.

Israeli officials said yesterday that Hakim Mazen Awad, 17, and Amjad Mahmad Awad, 19, from the nearby village of Awarta, were captured during a series of raids by the Israeli army and Shin Bet security service and had confessed to the crimes. Last week they led investigators through a reconstruction of the murders at the family's home.

"The murderers are in our hands," Colonel Nimrod Aloni, the localIsraeli military commander, saidyesterday.

Hakim's father, Maazan, a PFLP member, spent five years in a Palestinian prison for killing his niece and burning her body. His uncle Jibril, who was killed during a clash with Israeli soldiers in 2003, took part in an earlier attack on Itamar in June 2002 in which five Israelis were killed.

Israeli officials said the two suspected killers showed no sign of remorse and staged "a chilling re-enactment" of the attack. Shin Bet officers said they offered a "shocking, cold, remorseless and detailed description" of the murders.

Responding to widespread international outrage, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas took the unusual step of going on Israel Radio three days later to condemn the killings as "despicable, immoral and inhuman".

Idealistic blogger 'was more Palestinian than the criminals who killed him'

2011-04-16T01:42:00.000-07:00

Profile

By Matthew Kalman
THE INDEPENDENT Saturday, 16 April 2011

Vittorio Arrigoni's middle name was Utopia, yet he chose to spend most of the past three years in the hell of Gaza, acting as a human shield for Palestinian fishermen harassed by the Israeli navy and reporting to a worldwide audience.

His "Guerrilla Radio" blog about life in Gaza was required reading among radical circles in Italy and he published passionate newspaper commentaries about the plight of the Palestinian people and the "crimes" of "the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv", which he condemned as "one of the worst apartheid regimes in the world". His final post, published hours before his abduction, and subsequent hanging by gunmen in Gaza, praised the "invisible battle for survival" waged by the smugglers in Gaza's tunnel network under the border with Egypt against Israel's "villainous blockade".

Each blog post by "Vik from Gaza City" ended with the entreaty to "stay human" – also the title of his book about living through Israel's Cast Lead invasion in 2009, when he was one of the few foreign journalists reporting from inside Gaza. For Palestinian sympathisers around the world, Arrigoni's trademark curly pipe, rugged good looks and facial piercings became the human face of Gaza.

Arrigoni was born in Besana Brianza, near Milan, 36 years ago and said rebellion ran in his blood. He had the word muqawama – Arabic for "resistance" – tattooed on his right arm. "I come from a partisan family," he said in a recent interview. "My grandfathers fought and died struggling against an occupation, in Italy it was the Nazi-Fascist one. For this reason probably, in my DNA, my blood, there are particles that push me to struggle for freedom and human rights."

He was on the first Free Gaza boat to break the Israeli blockade in August 2008. A month later he was cut by flying glass after the Israeli navy used water cannon on a fishing boat where he was acting as a human shield. In November 2008 he was arrested by the Israelis while out with another fishing boat but managed to return to Gaza before Cast Lead began.

Among his friends in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the Free Gaza Movement (FGM), his abduction and murder have left a bewildering sense of bereavement equal to the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tim Hurndall, two activists killed by Israeli soldiers. Hundreds of ISM activists organised rallies in Ramallah and Gaza yesterday to mourn their friend. Several gatherings were also held in Italy.

"It's unbelievable," said Huwaida Arraf, a co-founder of the ISM. "He was more Palestinian than the criminals that killed him."

Greta Berlin, a founder of the FGM, said Arrigoni's death would not derail the struggle of foreign activists, who would remain in Gaza. The kidnapping came a week after the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a Palestinian-Israeli theatre director in Jenin.

"With Juliano murdered and now Vik, it makes us so terribly sad the killings continue," Ms Berlin told The Independent. "If the people behind these murders think we will quit, they are mistaken. Like the murder of Rachel Corrie, hundreds of us signed on to work for justice for the Palestinians. We will do the same this time."

Activist's murder shakes Hamas's grip on Gaza

2011-04-16T01:40:00.000-07:00

Outrage as first death of foreigner since militants seized power in 2007 underscores rise of destabilising 'outlaw' element

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT Saturday, 16 April 2011

Rex Features

Vittorio Arrigoni mans a boat during the 2008 protest against Israel's blockade of Gaza-bound ships

The Hamas Government in Gaza has vowed to track down those behind the abduction and murder of an Italian activist who had lived in the Palestinian territory on and off since 2008.

Confusion surrounded the identity of those responsible for the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni after the extremist Islamic group that had originally claimed to be holding him denied any involvement.

Arrigoni, 36, was the first foreigner to be killed in Gaza since Hamas seized control of the enclave in 2007. He was active with the International Solidarity Movement and the Free Gaza Group and a well-known commentator in Italy.

He was found hanged in a house in the Mashrou Amer neighbourhood of Gaza City hours after an unknown group calling itself The Brigade of the Gallant Companion of the Prophet Mohamed bin Muslima released a video of him bound and blindfolded. His abductors said he would be released in return for Sheikh Hisham Su'idani, leader of the extremist Salafist Tawhid wal Jihad group who was arrested by Hamas security in March.

"We kidnapped the Italian prisoner Vittorio and we call on the Haniyeh government... to release all our prisoners," the abductors said.

But when Hamas forces stormed the house owned by a member of the group in the early hours of yesterday, they found Arrigoni had already been killed more than 12 hours before a 5pm deadline set by the kidnappers.

"The investigation led to a member of the group who gave away the other members and showed the place where the activist was kept," Hamas interior ministry spokesman Ihab al-Ghussein said in a statement.

"The security services... found the body of the hostage, who had been killed several hours earlier in an awful way," he said, adding that two of the kidnappers had been arrested and a manhunt was under way for co-conspirators.

The Italian foreign ministry expressed "deep horror over the barbaric murder" and denounced "in the strongest manner the act of vile and senseless violence committed by extremists who are indifferent to the value of human life".

Arrigoni's murder highlights increasing concerns that Hamas's influence is crumbling, exacerbated by a violent and intractable split with the Fatah-dominated leadership of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That fear was echoed by Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, who said the "goal of this depraved band of outlaws was to spread chaos and anarchy in the Gaza Strip, a desperate attempt to strike at the stable security situation".

Former Palestine Liberation Organisation negotiator Saeb Erekat said the kidnapping resulted from the "chaos and lawlessness" in Gaza. The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights issues regular reports condemning the chaos under Hamas rule. In recent weeks, Hamas has been unable or unwilling to stop extremist splinter groups from firing hundreds of rockets across the border into Israel, triggering deadly Israeli air strikes.

Latest polls indicate that Fatah would easily defeat Hamas in new elections, but Hamas will not allow them to be held even though they are overdue.

Mr Barhoum condemned the killing as "shameful" and said he suspected Israel might be responsible since the death appeared to be timed to deter foreign activists from joining a flotilla due to sail to Gaza in May to break Israel's naval blockade of the area. Arrigoni was aboard the first blockade-busting boat in August 2008, when he was arrested by the Israelis for providing a human shield to Gaza fishermen.

Tawhid wal Jihad, which claimed responsibility for a series of attacks including the 2006 bombing of hotels in Sinai, denied killing Arrigoni, but said the death was a direct result of Hamas policies against Islamic extremists.

In 2007, the Salafist Army of Islam kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston and held him for four months. In August 2009, 24 people were killed when Hamas forces stormed a mosque in Rafah after a leader of Soldiers of the Partisans of God announced the creation of an Islamist state in Gaza.

"While we, Tawhid wal Jihad, had no role in this kidnapping, we affirm that what happened is the natural result of the repressive policy of Hamas and its government against the Salafists," said a statement from the group.

Bruising political spat cools Bieber's fever for Israel

2011-04-15T01:38:00.000-07:00

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT Friday, 15 April 2011

Justin Bieber, a Christian, had planned to visit religious sites

Israeli teenagers were delighted when singing sensation and heartthrob Justin Bieber arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday ahead of a concert last night for 25,000 fans.

After the cancellation of shows in Israel by Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Klaxons and Gorillaz Sound System due to a pro-Palestinian boycott, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have been expected to treat the pint-sized superstar with care. Instead, Bieber, who at 17 is too young even to vote, found himself in the middle of a petty political spat that sent the singer scuttling for the safety of his hotel room.

Bieber pouted on Twitter that he was "staying in the hotel for the rest of the week" after being "pulled into politics."

"It's been frustrating," he moaned before imposing an uncharacteristic 24-hour Twitter blackout.

The row erupted after the prime minister's office leaked the news that Bieber had refused to meet Mr Netanyahu and young Israelis threatened by constant Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza.

Bieber's camp denied he had snubbed the youngsters, saying that the meeting was never finalised and Bieber had already invited 700 children from the region bordering Gaza to be special guests at his concert.

Gadi Yaron, the concert promoter, told Israel Army Radio that he was unaware of any plans for a Netanyahu-Bieber summit, and anyway it was a bad idea. "There is heavy pressure on artists not to come to Israel," he said. "We are working very hard so they will visit Israel, get to know it, and won't view it as a political place."

But Mr Netanyahu, who fancies himself a master communicator, kept digging. "The idea was to do an event, which these kids could enjoy, to do something for the kids in the south who haven't had it easy. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out," an aide told The Independent. "The initiative didn't come from us. It came from people claiming to be representing the Bieber people."

But Bieber's manager Scooter Braun told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, "We never asked to meet with him nor has anyone connected with us asked to meet him."

A committed Christian, Bieber had planned to tour religious sites but complained that his plans were wrecked by the political row and photographers who pursued him around the country.

He began the week upbeat, evading hundreds of teenage girls camped outside his hotel and hitting Tel Aviv on a motor scooter while providing a running commentary on Twitter.

"This place is beautiful... Amazing place," Bieber gushed.

Then he set off for the Galilee and Jerusalem accompanied by his mother and Mama Jan, head of Jan Smith Studios in Atlanta.

"All I wanted was the chance to walk where jesus [sic] did here in isreal [sic]. I'm in the holy [sic] land and I am grateful for that. I just want to have the same personal experience that others have here," he said.

But things turned sour when photographers pursued him into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the traditional site of Christ's crucifixion.

The Israeli press is notoriously aggressive. They once sent Dallas star Victoria Principal fleeing the country, and forced Jim Carrey to hire a body double. Fights erupted with bodyguards for Madonna and Leonardo di Caprio.

"You would think paparazzi would have some respect in holy places," Bieber tweeted. "They should be ashamed of themselves. Take pictures of me eating but not in a place of prayer, ridiculous. People wait their whole lives for opportunities like this, why would they want to take that experience away from someone. But some people just don't have respect."

He was seen briefly on Wednesday in the McDonalds on Tel Aviv beach.

The ravaged palace that symbolises the hope of peace

2011-04-13T21:09:00.000-07:00

Palestinian businessman is rebuilding his home after it was caught in the crossfire

By Matthew Kalman in Beit Jala

THE INDEPENDENT Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Albert Abu Zgheibreh's home cost $880,000 and took five years to complete

The first remodelling of Albert Abu Zgheibreh's impressive home in Beit Jala on the outskirts of Bethlehem was free of charge, but not to his taste. Hellfire missiles fired from Israeli Apache helicopter gunships left gaping holes in the walls, tank shells smashed through the supporting pillars of the verandas and the stonework was raked with heavy-calibre machine-gun fire.

For nearly a decade, the ravaged beauty towered over the valley dividing Palestinian Beit Jala from the Israeli suburb of Gilo, its blackened holes and shattered stones like broken teeth in a gaping mouth silently bemoaning the folly of war.

It took five years and $880,000 to build the house. It was barely completed before the Palestinian intifada erupted in the autumn of 2000. Taking advantage of Mr Abu Zgheibreh's absence abroad, a group of gunmen decided to use it as a machine-gun nest to fire across the valley at Gilo, triggering the explosive Israeli response.

No one knows how many holes the Israelis punched in Albert's Hall, but now he has begun to fill them. "Last year I decided it was time to rebuild it again. I didn't want the people – Israelis and Palestinians – to have to keep looking at this reminder of what war could do," Mr Abu Zgheibreh, 69, tells The Independent as he conducts a private tour of the premises.

He has recalled the expert craftsmen, stonemasons and engineers and sunk another million dollars into a second remodelling, in the hope this stark reminder of recent violence will become, instead, a symbol of peace.

"This house has entered into history because of the Israeli bombardment. Everyone wanted to know why I wasn't rebuilding," he says. "I'm building for the future and for my family. I hope now there will be peace. It's enough. For the Palestinians, for the Israelis, for everyone, peace will be better."

Mr Abu Zgheibreh's story is almost a parable for the Christian Palestinians who now make up less than 2 per cent of the population and have been reduced to a minority even in the region of Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

Like thousands of Christian Palestinians, his father emigrated to Latin America in the 1920s when Palestine was hit by drought and a severe economic depression. Mr Abu Zgheibreh's grandfather was a textile merchant. His father set up a branch of the family textile business in Colombia and later settled in Honduras. Mr Abu Zgheibreh inherited the family textile business and then moved it to the Free Zone in Panama, where he has lived for the past quarter-century.

After the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, Mr Abu Zgheibreh decided it was time to re-establish the family ties with their ancestral homestead. He decided to build a new home which would also secure the family's ownership of an acre of land adjoining his grandfather's home, built in 1929. "I wanted to make something different, something new and really beautiful. I want people to look at this house and remember my family, remember this house, and remember Beit Jala," he says.

With its fine stone carvings, sweeping balconies and soaring arches, the 16,000sqft home on three storeys quickly earned the sobriquet Al Qasr – "The Palace".

"When the Israelis look across the valley they can also see that this is a good place with good people. I want everyone to enjoy the beauty of this house. It's for all the people," he says.

Mr Abu Zgheibreh climbed nearby mountains to look at the house from all angles as it was under construction and added new elements which could be seen from far off. He jokes that he has used enough stone cladding for four houses, and plans to fill the three-quarters of an acre of garden with fruit trees and fountains.

He has brought in traditional artisans like Abu Wa'el, a third-generation stonemason from the nearby village of Beit Fajjar, who on a recent morning was hand-chiselling the final touches to the delicate filigree around the windows.

"I like this artistic, delicate work," says Abu Wa'el. "There are very few people who want this kind of work these days. I learned it from my father and grandfather and I've been working like this for 40 years. I don't imagine my grandchildren will be doing this 40 years from now."

Mr Abu Zgheibreh admits he is gambling on peace to ensure he will not have to build the house a third time. He first found out what was happening to it when he saw it being attacked by a helicopter gunship on CNN. "I couldn't do anything," he says. "It was war, and I was in Panama."

He says the gunmen who first drew Israel's fire to the building in 2000 did not come from Beit Jala – a charge confirmed by Abu Atef, one of the Fatah gunmen who began firing from the building. Abu Atef says it became a right of passage for the most daring gunmen to take their turn behind the group's belt-fed Browning M2 .50-caliber machine-gun. Several gunmen and residents of Beit Jala were killed in the resulting firefights.

"The first time we came, the neighbours were OK, but after their houses began to be damaged from the Israeli tanks, people became very angry and tried to push us to another area to shoot. They didn't give us any help, not even a drink of water when the guys were thirsty. Even now they don't like us," Abu Atef admits.

These days, far from shelling the building, the Israeli army is taking an active role in securing it. Last year, the local Israeli commander made a rare early-morning visit to Beit Jala to inspect progress. A unit of Palestinian National Guard troops is stationed at the top of the road.

"If anybody comes, the Israeli soldiers see through their binoculars and tell the Palestinians to go and check it out. I have protection from both," Mr Abu Zgheibreh laughs.

Most of his five children continue to work in Latin America, but one of his daughters has married a local man and settled back in Beit Jala. He spends about four months of the year here but intends to spend more time once the house is finished. "I'm an old man and I want to retire," he says.

A Bitter Return to Politics at Israel's Bar-Ilan U.

2011-04-12T04:36:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION April 12, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

RAMAT GAN, ISRAEL

Bar-Ilan University has a scarred past when it comes to politics.

In November 1995, Yigal Amir, a Bar-Ilan law student, shot and killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. The assassination cast a grim shadow over Bar-Ilan, Israel's only religious university, whose founding philosophy is to combine "Jewish identity and tradition with modern technologies and research."

Some observers wondered aloud whether the university's religious values had contributed to the killer's extremist politics, and Bar-Ilan immediately banned all political activity on the campus and engaged in a deep soul-searching.

Today, Bar-Ilan is again being roiled by political controversies. A right-wing student group has accused some academics at the university of having connections to anti-Zionist, if not anti-Jewish, elements, while several left-wing faculty members have accused the university of denying them promotion because of their views.

Nasty political debates have affected other Israeli universities, but recent events at Bar-Ilan show that a university that has tried to moderate extreme political viewpoints can still be challenged by them.

For many years after Mr. Rabin's assassination, public political activity remained largely on hold at Bar-Ilan, except for occasional, carefully choreographed public debates on national issues, held just off-campus.

Then, two years ago, the Forum for the Land of Israel, a right-wing student group, demanded the reintroduction of political activity, citing Israel's laws on freedom of speech and political expression. Last fall Bar-Ilan's student union, with the university's tacit approval, said it was reviving political activity on the campus, within carefully supervised parameters, and invited students to join the debate in the pages of the student newspaper. In March, the union sponsored a Political Awareness Week, a fair with booths representing the full spectrum of Israeli politics, and a trip to the West Bank guided by both Peace Now and the Yesha Council, which represents Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

"We believe as a student union that students must be involved in society and the community," Orel Lahav, a student-union spokesman, said in an interview with The Chronicle. "Students must be part of political life. We have to ensure that the discussion is sensible, appropriate, pragmatic—and it shouldn't, God forbid, slide into incitement that could lead to the murder of a prime minister, as happened in 1995."

Student Activism

Ranen Shwartzman, a law student who founded the Forum for the Land of Israel, said his 200-member group wants an open and robust political discussion on the campus.

"We don't want only right-wing groups to act here," he told The Chronicle. "We know that because of the structure of the population here, the right wing will be stronger than the left wing. We are in favor of every political view being heard."

However, the forum has been accused of demonizing and suppressing views, among both students and faculty members, that it deems not Zionist enough. Last June a left-wing professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University pulled out of a symposium organized by the group after it was advertised with a photo montage that replaced his head with that of a hooded terrorist. The forum also objected to Bar-Ilan's giving several hundred Arab students a Muslim prayer room and an Arabic-language exam coach.

More recently the group has begun to extend its campaigns beyond student activism into Bar-Ilan's faculty affairs. In February a private meeting held by the law faculty between Israel's top international and human-rights law professors and Navanethem Pillay, the United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, was canceled by the university after protests by the forum.

"Anything the forum don't like, they try to cancel," said Mr. Lahav. "The forum are on the edge. Not a few times they have been warned that they have gone too far. On several occasions they have crossed the line."

He called the cancellation of Ms. Pillay's visit "an act of cowardice."

In March the forum accused the law faculty of consorting with anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish groups and called for an "in-depth public discussion" of their allegations.

In contrast to the Pillay incident, when Bar-Ilan acceded to the forum's demands, Haim Zisovitch, a university spokesman, condemned the group's "false accusations" and said it was attempting to "defame" the law faculty.

"The forum is doing enormous damage to the university," said Elad Caplan, a law student who heads a moderate political-religious group. "It's creating hate between Arabs and Jews. Bar-Ilan is irrelevant when it comes to left-wing politics. No one in Bar-Ilan is promoting an anti-Zionist agenda. They are manipulating fear and using demagoguery to create conflict between left and right, between secular and religious. It's really terrible."

Controversy Over Job Denials

The revival of student political activity comes at a particularly sensitive time for Bar-Ilan. In recent months, it has been accused of denying promotion to two prominent left-wing instructors because of their politics.

Menachem Klein, a lecturer in political science, was rejected for the rank of full professor for the second time in five years. Ariella Azoulay, a lecturer in cultural studies, was denied tenure last year after 10 years teaching at the university. Seventy prominent Israeli faculty members wrote to Bar-Ilan in protest, accusing it of "political persecution."

In April, Tova Cohen, a professor accused of connections to liberal causes deemed suspect by some university officials, resigned as director of gender studies after the university rejected the recommendation of the dean and a departmental search committee that her term be extended.

"The key positions in Bar-Ilan are taken by very radical people, political rightists," Mr. Klein told The Chronicle. "They are committed to the so-called purification of the university from so-called leftists."

The university said no political agenda was involved in the cases of Mr. Klein and Ms. Azoulay. "The two are convinced that their promotion was declined due to their political viewpoints. Bar-Ilan University adamantly denies this," said Mr. Zisovitch. "The criteria for promotion before the appointments committee are solely of an academic nature and based upon the academic achievements of the candidates in their field of expertise."

But a university appeals committee agreed enough with Mr. Klein's concerns that it recommended a new evaluation of his application. His proposed promotion to professor will be re-examined by a panel of experts in his field.

Mr. Klein's rejection has divided faculty members who know his work. Efraim Inbar, a professor in the political-science department who has made no secret of his opposition to Mr. Klein's promotion, rejects any accusations of political bias. "In our department, in which there is a leftist tilt, it's simply an accusation that doesn't hold water," he said to The Chronicle before the appeal committee made its decision. "Klein is trying to intimidate the university. I thought he hadn't published enough, and not in good-enough journals."

But Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who was an external referee in Mr. Klein's application, called the rejection "simply puzzling."

"I am aware of concerns that it may be politically motivated. I am in no position to judge those concerns, but the outcome is a strange one," he said. "If this decision is based on scholarship, then it appears to me to be an easy one. Indeed, it is both open-and-shut and overdue. The publication record itself is easily comparable to those of more advanced rank. He has a sterling record in the academic field."

It is unclear what effect, if any, those faculty controversies will have on the decision to permit student political activity on Bar-Ilan's campus. Senior officials refused to discuss the issues with The Chronicle, aside from short statements delivered through the university spokesman.

U. of Johannesburg Official: 'UJ Is Not Part of an Academic Boycott of Israel'

2011-03-25T04:38:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION March 25, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

Two days after the University of Johannesburg Senate voted to cancel a research agreement with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, hailed as a victory by the anti-Israel boycott campaign, the vice chancellor of the Johannesburg university issued a statement saying that "UJ is not part of an academic boycott of Israel."

On March 23, 60 percent of the Johannesburg Senate voted to end a joint project with Ben-Gurion University, in Beersheba, involving research to prevent algae from forming in Johannesburg's reservoir.

The University of Johannesburg's Petition Committee, which had led the campaign to cancel the project, called the vote "a landmark moment in the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel campaign,"and said it hoped the move would trigger "a domino boycott effect."

The vote was condemned by many Jewish groups. The Anti-Defamation League in New York called it "misguided and shortsighted," saying it "would ill-serve South Africans, Palestinians, and Israelis, and do nothing to promote reconciliation and understanding."

But Ihron Rensburg, vice chancellor and principal of Johannesburg, issued a statement on Friday saying that "UJ is not part of an academic boycott of Israel. UJ holds the view that given the current situation in the Middle East, the formal institutional agreement between UJ and BGU is an insurmountable obstacle to either institution facilitating a wider dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian academics."

"It has never been UJ's intention to sever all ties with BGU, although it may have been the intention of some UJ staff members," said Mr. Rensburg.

"This Senate resolution does not prevent individual academics from continuing and engaging in research and other partnerships with their peers from BGU and other institutions around the world, as is currently the practice in many cases," he added.

"The UJ Senate vote, in fact, encourages peer-to-peer engagements, and UJ stands ready to assist in facilitating this effort and to put resources in place to support these relationships," he added.

A representative of Ben-Gurion University described the statement as "an interesting twist, although it looks like semantics."

South African University Is First to Open Academic Boycott of Israeli Counterpart

2011-03-24T04:39:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION March 24, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

The international campaign for an academic boycott of Israel claimed its first success on Wednesday when the University of Johannesburg Senate voted to pull out of a two-year-old joint research project with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to battle algae that are infesting the South African city's reservoir.

The vote means that the University of Johannesburg is the first academic institution in the world to formally cut ties with an Israeli university as a result of pressure by supporters of the international boycott campaign.

In a written statement, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel working group lauded the move, saying it set a "worldwide precedent."

The Senate vote followed a decision last September to end links with its Israeli counterpart if it found "direct or indirect military implications" to the relationship. The Senate had called on Ben-Gurion to form partnerships with Palestinian universities and ordered a review of the ties between the two institutions before April.

A fact-finding mission of officials from Johannesburg visited Ben-Gurion in February to see conditions on the Israeli campus for themselves. Ben-Gurion officials believed the visit had been a success. They are proud of the praise heaped on the university by Nelson Mandela when he accepted an honorary doctorate there, in 1997. The university conducts a number of joint projects, particularly on water and desert research, with Palestinian and Jordanian institutions and scholars.

The Ben-Gurion Student Association's chairman, Uri Keidar, who met the delegation from South Africa, wrote to its members afterward, saying, "I find it difficult to believe that BGU, the home of 20,000 free-thinking students of different religious and ethnic backgrounds, is under this brutal attack. These accusations, although faulty, are being presented as scholarly facts, which I find very disturbing."

But University of Johannesburg officials told the Senate before Wednesday's vote that no Palestinian university had been found to team up with Ben-Gurion on the algae project. Sixty percent of the Senate voted to cancel the research agreement in a secret ballot.

The University of Johannesburg's Petition Committee, which led the campaign, said in a prepared statement that the Senate had also found "significant" evidence that Ben-Gurion's research and other projects supported the Israeli military and, in particular, its occupation of Gaza.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but tensions and cross-border violence persist, including rocket fire from Gaza in recent days that was met with Israeli airstrikes.

The University of Johannesburg "is the first institution to officially sever relations with an Israeli university—a landmark moment in the growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel campaign," said the committee, hoping that it would trigger "a domino boycott effect."

Zev Krengel, national chair of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, condemned the vote as "playing to narrow-minded political prejudice and ... a severe setback for constructive intellectual engagement in South Africa."

"Rather than availing itself of a scientific cooperative project in the water-purification field that has enormous potential benefits for South Africa," Mr. Krengel said, the university "has chosen instead to further the agenda of a group of anti-Israel agitators."

Ben-Gurion University officials said they regretted the Johannesburg decision and stood by their record of cross-border co-operation with Palestinian and other institutions.

"Canceling this agreement, which was designed to solve real problems of water contamination in a reservoir near Johannesburg, will only hurt the residents of South Africa," said the university's president, Rivka Carmi. "The only losers in this decision are the people of South Africa."

FROM BRUMMIE LASS TO A BEDOUIN BRIDE

2011-03-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

DAILY EXPRESS
Thursday March 17, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Janice Abu Hani, 42, explains why she ditched her animal-loving life in the Midlands for the Israeli desert....

I HAD a typically English childhood. I grew up in Acocks Green in Birmingham with my parents and elder sister. I was always mad about horses and went riding every weekend. My grandad used to work on the railways with the big shire horses and my dad always kept a couple.

I dreamt of working with animals. Sometimes I used to go up to my dad’s smallholding with a sleeping bag and sleep in the stable.

My dream did come true, my house and yard are full of animals that I use to teach local children not to be violent. However, in all my fantasies of adult life I never pictured myself married to a Bedouin man, speaking Arabic and living in Rahat, a Bedouin town in the Israeli desert.

After I left school at 16 I got a job looking after a deaf and blind girl at the Elizabeth Gunn Centre in Birmingham.

I expected to spend the rest of my life in the city, working with the disabled, clubbing with friends in the evenings and riding horses at the weekend.

However, everything changed in 1988 when I turned 19 and went to Eilat, Israel, on holiday and met a waiter at a hotel. Talab was so good-looking and we hit it off.

After two weeks I came back home and we started writing to each other. After a month, I returned to Israel. I sold my horse and car and bought a one-way ticket. I didn’t know if it was going to be serious with Talab but I wanted to give it a try.

My friends thought I was nuts. My mum was worried but everyone said I could always come home if it didn’t work out.

Talab was different to my other boyfriends and the whole experience was like a big adventure.

Talab, now 48, got me a job as a chambermaid and we lived in the hotel. I experienced discrimination from a few Israeli workers and guests who asked me how I could go out with an Arab.

I was brought up a Catholic but I never had any reservations about being with someone from such a different background.

We stayed in Eilat for almost two years but after a few months I knew I wanted to marry Talab. We started talking about going to England but the British embassy said Talab could only stay for three months unless we married, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to get a visa or work.

M Y family had already met him when I took him home for my 21st birthday but his family was a different matter. Their plan was for him to go home and marry a good Bedouin girl. They knew he had a girlfriend but I hadn’t met them because Talab hid me from them.

In January 1990 we went to England and got married without telling Talab’s parents, though we sent them the photos. We stayed for three years and I continued my work with deaf and blind people while Talab worked as a waiter at the Metropole Hotel in Birmingham.

Our three sons, Michael, 18, Sammy, 17, and 16-year-old Adam were all born in Birmingham. When Sammy was six months old he was diagnosed with asthma and we thought the climate in Israel would be better for him. The night we arrived in Rahat, Talab’s family sent a convoy of cars to meet us at the airport and threw a huge party to greet us. They were really happy about our marriage. In Bedouin culture, having three sons is like hitting the jackpot so they welcomed me like one of their own daughters.

I finally met my mother-in-law and learned a few things about my new family. I noticed a woman hanging around the house who was really helpful but she didn’t seem to go home. Talab hadn’t told me his dad had a second wife. I knew Talab had two sisters and a brother but they were his own mother’s children. He also had six brothers and three sisters from his father’s second wife.

Talab, now a manager at a nearby hotel, has become more religious recently but he won’t be taking a second wife. Not if he wants to keep breathing!

I became a Muslim in a simple ceremony and we had a Muslim wedding but I didn’t change my clothes or my habits. It was difficult to adjust in the beginning because of the language. Some objected to me riding a horse because women don’t do that here but I insisted. My children were so young when they moved here they don’t recall any other lifestyle. Today I speak Arabic like any Bedouin woman but I don’t cover my hair or wear long robes. I don’t pray or fast at Ramadan.

The family don’t say anything about it and I’m very close to them. I try not to drink alcohol which is forbidden under Islam. I can put any animal I want in the garden and nobody complains. I have a horse called Prince, which I rescued from near death, Molly the goat, Shula the dog and a donkey called Shrek who has only one-and-a-half ears.

Sometimes when I walk through Rahat, people gossip and the kids tease me. I’m the only woman in the village who rides a horse and some people mind. Many have told me I’m not going to go to Heaven. I tell them I’ll get there first. I’ve done nothing wrong, I help animals and I help people. I’m sure God will make an exception that I didn’t cover my hair.

Rahat is a Bedouin town on the edge of the Negev desert. There are about 200,000 Bedouin in Israel. They were semi-nomadic but they have been forced to settle in a few towns. It has created a lot of problems.

There is high unemployment so there are lots of young men just hanging around and there is a lot of violence. Arguments and disputes escalate quickly to guns and knives. That’s what I’m trying to address with my animal classes for children.

I’ve long been concerned about the violence towards animals in Rahat. If it’s got four legs and it moves, the kids will just kill it so I hold sessions in the house teaching children how to treat animals and be kind to them. We have a whole menagerie in the front room: ferrets, rabbits, mice, doves, gerbils, budgies and a disabled cat.

Violence is part of the culture here and it’s something that really needs to be addressed. If we can get in at nursery level and go into schools and teach them non-violence and respect for each other by being respectful to the animals, I think we have a good chance to change things. It’s better to start young than trying to change their attitudes later.

I opened my own daycare centre to provide good nursery education in 1996. In 2002 I worked in a residential home in Rahat with mentally and physically challenged Arab-Bedouin children and I saw how they were treated.

We decided to save at least one child from going into a home. That’s when we started fostering children with disabilities.

We then adopted a girl with developmental problems. I try to make real positive change in the lives of the most vulnerable children.

In 2008 I became director of the early childhood resource and training centre at the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace, a non-profit organisation promoting peace and development. I also co-ordinated its community education and family literacy project.

The violence and crime rate in Rahat is extremely high. Families fight and even shoot at each other. There are a lot of guns around and any dispute quickly gets violent but when friends from home ask if it’s hard to live here, I tell them: “Not at all.” I love Israel.

I don’t know what it is: there’s more time here, a slower pace to life and my Arabic is fluent.

When I speak Hebrew people laugh because I sound like a Bedouin. I speak English to my children although I’ve lost some of my Brummie accent.

Ultimately, if I weren’t happy, I wouldn’t stay. I’d never go back to England which is hard because my parents live there but I talk to them on the phone. This is my natural place. I’m a Bedouin and that’s that.

Janice Abu Hani is featured in the new documentary Back And Forth (Ruth Diskin Films, 2010). Visit ruthfilms.com

For Einstein’s Birthday, Hebrew U. Unveils Online Archive of Physicist’s Work

2011-03-18T04:30:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

WIRED CAMPUS March 18, 2011, 12:09 pm

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem—To mark Israel’s National Science Day on March 14, which by no coincidence is also Einstein’s birthday, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced that his entire archive of 80,000 documents held as a bequest by the university will be digitized and put online, thanks to a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation of London.

“Our goal is to build a user-friendly, inclusive digital database,” said Menahem Ben-Sasson, president of Hebrew University and a professor of history.

The project will make the full archive accessible for students and researchers everywhere, as well as ensure its preservation for future generations.

Einstein’s papers were originally housed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was appointed to a professorship in 1933 after fleeing Nazi Germany and remained until his death in 1955. Einstein was among the founders of Hebrew University and left his entire archive to the university in his will.

The Einstein archives are considered one of the most significant resources in the world for the history of modern physics. They contain many of his original scientific manuscripts and Einstein’s personal correspondence to and from family and friends, as well as writings on political and other matters during his lifetime.

The digitization project is expected to be completed in about one year, when it will be readily accessible on the Albert Einstein Archives Web site.

“This project unites the Hebrew University Library with digitization projects of the Polonsky Foundation recently launched at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library,” said Leonard Polonsky, executive chairman of Hansard Global PLC and head of the foundation that is backing the digitization.

Since 2003, the Einstein Archives Online has allowed viewing and browsing of 3,000 digitized images of 900 documents selected from Einstein’s writings, together with a Finding Aid allowing access to descriptions of the entire repository of Einstein papers at the university.

An archival database has allowed direct access to approximately 43,000 records of Einstein-related documents, but not to their content. Until now, Internet users have been only been able to access images of Einstein’s handwritten manuscripts. Facsimiles of correspondence, typewritten manuscripts, photos, and audio material have not been available online.

Debate erupts over Middle East peace talks

2011-01-25T03:47:00.000-08:00

Revelations in leaked documents that Palestinians made major concessions spark anger.

GLOBAL POST January 24, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

JERUSALEM — In June 2008, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, warned a conference at Tel Aviv University that time was running out for a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"This is the time for both of our leaders to decide,” Erekat said. "No one else will make these decisions for us. Not the United States, not Europe and no one else. I hope action will be taken. Every issue on the negotiating table has a solution."

“If we don't reach a settlement, there is a chance Hamas will take over the West Bank too and we will disappear,” he warned at the time.

On Sunday night, Al Jazeera revealed just how far Erekat and his colleagues were prepared to go to achieve that elusive peace deal with the publication of 1,600 documents leaked from Erekat’s own Negotiations Affairs Department office in Jericho.

The revelations were greeted with uproar from critics of the Palestinian leadership and accusations of forgery from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Some commentators said Abbas had been exposed as a cowering weakling unable to match the Israelis’ negotiating pressures. Others said the concessions revealed in the documents were old news and represented a Palestinian stance that had remained virtually unchanged for a decade.

Observers wondered who could be behind the leak and whether it was connected to an investigation announced last month into the activities of Mohammed Dahlan, a former Gaza strongman and leader of Fatah.

According to the leaked notes, maps and charts from secret meetings between Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. negotiators held between March 2008 and January 2010, dubbed the “Palestine Papers” by Al Jazeera, Palestinian leaders were prepared to cede large areas of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees, as well as allowing the continued presence of more than 300,000 Israeli settlers, in return for a peace deal finally granting Palestinian independence.

Hamas denounced Erekat for making “free concessions” and “unprecedented compromises” over Jerusalem.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the documents revealed attempts by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority to undermine the rights of the Palestinian people and its compliance with Israel’s attempts to crush armed resistance.

"We consider these documents are further evidence of the security and political decadence which the PA stooped to," Abu Zuhri said at a press conference.

Erekat hit back by denouncing the trickle of documents planned by Al Jazeera in the coming week as “theater.”

“This is part of a campaign targeting President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority at a time when we are going to the U.N. Security Council regarding the settlements," Erekat said, challenging Al Jazeera to name their sources.

"We have not gone back on our position,” he declared. “If we had given ground on the refugees and made such concessions, why hasn't Israel agreed to sign a peace accord?" he said, according to Al Jazeera.

As hundreds of enraged Fatah loyalists marched on the Al Jazeera bureau in Ramallah, Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo called a press conference to denounce the Doha-based TV network and the Emir of Qatar, who he accused of orchestrating a politically motivated campaign.

Ironically, in a meeting at a Jerusalem hotel in May 2008 included in the documents, former Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei told Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni: “Iran is against us. Qatar is against us.”

Further controversy is expected as Al Jazeera rolls out more notes of talks on refugees and security coordination with Israel, including evidence that the Palestinians downgraded their demand on refugees from the right of return for up to four million people to just 100,000, and that Israeli officials gave Ramallah advanced warning of their attack on Hamas in Gaza in December 2008.

That accusation was swiftly denied by Amos Gilad, the Israeli defense ministry official who handled contacts with the Palestinians at the time.

“This is an example of imprecision,” Gilad told Israel Radio. “Our towns were being murderously attacked. We warned Hamas there would be consequences and we briefed everyone in the world. The Palestinians received a general briefing that Israel could not continue to tolerate these attacks and one of the responses that could be expected would be a resort to military measures. We never conveyed in any manner any concrete plans to any foreigners as far as I am aware.”

After reading the entire trove of documents, retired CIA officer Robert L. Grenier told Al Jazeera that the Palestinians’ “failure to make any long-term, tangible gains for their people — despite their complicity in the process, despite their documented willingness to make far-reaching concessions, and despite having accepted American and Israeli support to repress their enemies and maintain themselves in power with at best threadbare legitimacy.”

But some local observers doubted that the uproar would have any long-term effect on the secure power base of the Palestinian leadership.

Professor Thiab Ayyoush, president of Palestine Ahliya University in Bethlehem and a veteran member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, told GlobalPost that while many Palestinians would be shocked to learn that Erekat was prepared to cede parts of Jerusalem, most of the positions expressed in the documents were well-known to insiders.

“I am familiar with most of what I heard. But many of our people and even many members of the Fatah Revolutionary Council do not have an idea about what has been said, so it will be embarrassing for sure,” Ayyoush said. “The position of Abu Mazen is very strong now. It is better than at any time before.”

Ron Pundak, one of the original architects of the Oslo peace process who is now director-general of the Peres Center for Peace, said the Palestinian position shown in the records was almost unchanged from the Camp David and Taba talks in 2000 and 2001.

"What Al Jazeera is trying to do is to smear the PLO negotiators,” Pundak told GlobalPost.

“These positions were the same positions that the Palestinians were conveying since Camp David, through Taba. The only issue here is that the resolution is a bit finer. It’s amazing to see how close the two sides were to an agreement," he said. "This is the real conclusion.”

After failed peace talks, US aid to Israel questioned

2011-01-20T05:05:00.000-08:00

GLOBALPOST January 20, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

An Israeli soldier prays on his tank during a military exercise near the Israeli town of Katzrin, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, on Nov. 10, 2009. (Menaham Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

JERUSALEM, Israel — The role of the United States as the largest single donor to both Israel and the Palestinians was thrown into sharp relief last November when the Israeli government rejected 20 U.S. F35 Joint Strike Fighter jets worth $2.75 billion in return for extending a West Bank settlement freeze by 90 days.

The offer — some called it a “bribe” — of military material equal in value to nearly an entire year’s worth of U.S. aid to Israel, renewed questions about the purpose of U.S. aid in the region and whether it might be more effectively deployed to better serve American strategic interests.

Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than any other country, now around $3 billion every year. It is used only for military purposes — Israel voluntarily gave up U.S. civil aid more than a decade ago. Seventy percent of the aid is earmarked for purchases from U.S. companies.

According to the State Department’s latest budget justification for foreign operations, “U.S. assistance will help ensure that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge over potential threats, and prevent a shift in the security balance of the region. U.S. assistance is also aimed at ensuring for Israel the security it requires to make concessions necessary for comprehensive regional peace.”

This alliance is expressed in regular joint military training exercises, intelligence-sharing, a free trade agreement between the two countries, regular White House visits by Israeli leaders and frequent top-level consultations at all levels of government and the military.

In a secret cable setting the scene for a visit to Israel by Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg in November 2009, published by WikiLeaks, James B. Cunningham, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv, reported that “Israelis from the prime minister on down to the average citizen are deeply appreciative of the strong security and mil-mil cooperation with the U.S. The U.S.-Israeli security relationship remains strong … The United States remains committed to Israel's Qualitative Military Edge.”

The United States, meanwhile, is also the single largest donor to the Palestinian Authority — a point underlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she pointed out recently that wealthy Arab states had failed to honor millions of dollars in pledges to the Palestinians made at donor conferences. In 2010 the United States earmarked $500 million in direct assistance and a further $228 million for Palestinian refugees through the United Nations.

“U.S. aid is important in terms of size and also in political importance,” a Palestinian Authority official told GlobalPost, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The money that we receive from the U.S. is almost 30 percent of the donor aid that comes to Palestine.”

The official welcomed U.S. President Barack Obama’s tougher policy on settlement building and his efforts to push Israel to conclude a peace deal, but said it seemed hampered by the “domestic complications” of being firm with Israel.

“The American administration is pushing with all of its strength to try to reach a settlement and basically achieve some progress at the political level. Unfortunately all of these efforts have been unsuccessful so far, but we continue to be hopeful,” the official said.

After the F35 debacle in November, Andrew Sullivan suggested in the Huffington Post that it was time to end the aid “because a) Israel doesn't need it and b) we need the money and c) it doesn't seem sensible to me to keep rewarding an ally that refuses to offer minimal cooperation.”

“It's time for the U.S. to assert its own interests and goals,” Sullivan argued.

Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman who relocated from Ohio to Ramallah to help build the Palestinian economy, said U.S. aid is simply “underwriting the occupation.”

“Instead of putting the burden of cost of being an occupier on the lap of the Israelis, they are underwriting them and allowing the Israelis to perpetuate occupation, almost cost free,” Bahour told GlobalPost.

“The U.S. national interest is to end the occupation. They’ve said it’s in the U.S. national interest to have a Palestinian state. So what are they waiting for to use their leverage — financial as well as others — to make that happen?”

But New Jersey Congressman Steve Rothman said, “the argument that American military aid to Israel is damaging to the United States is not only erroneous, it hurts the national security interests of this country and threatens the survival of Israel.”

Israeli leaders say U.S. aid to Israel should be seen as the most effective part of the U.S. defense budget.

“Since Israel is the most dependable and strongest ally of the U.S. here in this very unpredictable region, we save America a lot of troops and material,” Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, told GlobalPost, adding that $3 billion was about 2 percent of U.S. military spending in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

“To serve the same interests and objectives of the U.S. in the region without Israel would either have been impossible or it would have taken enormous resources, multiplying U.S. aid to Israel by one hundred times or more. The return on the investment in Israel is very evident and very big,” Ayalon said.

Critics of Israel have long argued that it is time the United States used the aid money to greater diplomatic effect.

But Gerald Steinberg, professor of politics at Bar-Ilan University, said U.S. presidents since John F. Kennedy — who threatened to stop all financial transfers in 1963 over Israel’s refusal to permit inspection of its nuclear program — have learned that financial threats will not budge Israeli governments on vital policies.

“For core issues, the threat to withhold U.S. aid will only make Israel more reluctant to take risks and increase the sense of Israeli isolation,” Steinberg told GlobalPost.

“The only way that Israel is going to be convinced to take security risks like withdrawal is by convincing Israel that those risks are offset, that Israel’s security is guaranteed. That will make Israel more willing to take the risks on the ground that will advance the peace process.”

In Jerusalem, Students Hold a Rare Conversation Across Checkpoints

2011-01-16T04:52:00.000-08:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
January 16, 2011

Yael Gidanian for The Chronicle

Students from Bethlehem U. and the Hebrew U. of Jerusalem meet in a program organized by the Interfaith Encounter Association.

By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

The distance between Bethlehem University, in the West Bank, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is only about four miles, but it has not been easy to traverse for a group of 20 students from the two institutions. In trying to meet to spend time in each other's company, they have had to navigate military checkpoints, a demanding bureaucracy, and a deep cultural divide.

Against a backdrop of increasing tension and threats of boycotts between Israelis and Palestinians, the students have started a rare effort to pursue dialogue across the political and religious chasm.

On a recent afternoon, dusk is gathering in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City as the students meet in the Austrian Hospice here. Outside, the fruit and vegetable merchants on the Via Dolorosa offer the last of the day's produce, their cries mingling with the muezzin's call from the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque and the hymns of Christian pilgrims retracing the last steps of Jesus.

It's an appropriate setting for a cultural exchange. Today the students are comparing the place of the olive tree and olive oil in their religious traditions.

At this, their fourth meeting, the participants greet each other like old friends, chatting easily in a mix of English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The young Israeli men favor slightly longer hair, but otherwise the two groups—to an outsider, at least—are indistinguishable. As they chat, they share coffee, cold drinks, and baklava from a local shop. The participants learn, with nods of recognition, that the olive tree, its wood, and its oil feature prominently in all three religious traditions, as well as in the history of the surrounding countryside.

The meetings consciously avoid politics, covering religious and cultural ideas instead. Those give each meeting a focus and allow the students to plan projects together. Today they decide to organize the joint distribution of olive oil from West Bank farmers.

The only division emerges as they take their first break: The smokers congregate outside, on the balcony, and the nonsmokers remain inside. Each group is about half Israeli, half Palestinian.

Following months of planning, the first meeting, early last year, was canceled after days of fighting and riots that had left the Bethlehem students facing strong objections from their friends to the idea of meeting Israelis.

Traveling to Jerusalem is no easy matter. Each West Bank student must submit an application to the Israeli military two weeks in advance, then travel to the regional military headquarters, several miles from Bethlehem, to receive a permit—if it is granted—and then pass through a grim military checkpoint of electric gates, barbed wire, and metal turnstiles.

Two meetings were canceled because the military had issued permits for the wrong date, and another for the wrong time. Nour Abu Katta, 22, a Muslim in the first year of a master's program in European studies at Al-Quds University, says it's worth the hassle. He was enrolled at Bethlehem University when the group started and still coordinates the Palestinian participants.

"I believe in negotiations. I believe that if we don't break this ice, if we don't meet and talk, we won't reach the point where we can end this conflict," says Mr. Abu Katta. "If guns and those ways had a point, they could have achieved something 20, 30 years ago. They have been struggling for 60 years, and they have achieved nothing except violence and more violence."

The Oslo peace process, started in 1993, spawned dozens of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups, but many fell victim to the violence of the second intifada, which erupted in September 2000. After several Israelis were killed in Palestinian-controlled areas, Israel banned its citizens from going there and denied most Palestinians entry to Israel, in an effort to halt suicide bombers. Now the construction of a security barrier between Israel and the West Bank has sealed the division between the two peoples.

Attitudes on both sides have hardened. Involvement with Israelis has been branded as "normalization" by many Palestinian groups—a searing insult in the local political lexicon—suggesting that such meetings are akin to collaborating with the Israelis. Among many Israelis, meetings with Palestinians are dismissed as a waste of time.

The students at the Austrian Hospice represent a tiny vanguard of young people on each side prepared to challenge those taboos. Only a handful of dialogue groups still operate regularly. This one meets under the auspices of the Interfaith Encounter Association, a nonprofit group based in Jerusalem. Of its more than 20 active interfaith-dialogue groups, only six bring together Israelis and Palestinians. Three of those are student groups.

"Some people say it's a good thing we are doing, that it's worthwhile looking for peace," says Mr. Abu Katta. "Other people say this conflict will not end with dialogue, that it is not beneficial at all. I am hopeful that if it doesn't end the conflict, it might make it easier to be ended."

Sally Zaghmout, a Christian who is a second-year student in business administration at Bethlehem, says none of her friends will come along with her to meet Israelis.

"They say there's no purpose doing all this," says Ms. Zaghmout, 19, whose grandfather fled Haifa during Israel's war of independence, in 1948, and whose parents waged a 10-year battle to return a decade ago. Her friends, she adds, "say we're trying to send the picture that everything is good while the real situation is not like that."

"I try to convince them," she says. "It's true we're small, and we're not really affecting the government, but we're growing slowly. At least we're trying to do something instead of not doing anything at all."

Netta Hazan, 24, a Jewish student of Middle East studies at Hebrew University, says her eyes were opened to the Palestinian narrative through her courses. And working as a waitress in a Jerusalem hotel, she met Palestinians for the first time as equals.

"It's very unusual for Israelis of my age to have Palestinian friends, I'm like one in a million," says Ms. Hazan, who has learned Arabic and is involved in several groups connecting Israelis and Palestinians. "Because of it, I don't have a lot of Israeli friends. When my Israeli friends saw I was becoming more and more in relations with Palestinians, they didn't accept me and my activities. I lost most of my friends from high school or the army."

"My family is very right-wing." she says. "I have five brothers and sisters, and to speak with them about the occupation or the Palestinians—they just don't care." Ms. Hazan travels regularly to Palestinian areas, but many Israelis are scared to go. "They think it's the Wild West," she says.

Yehuda Stolov, coordinator of the Interfaith Encounter Association, says only half the number of Israelis who normally register for events held inside Israel do so when they have to cross the security barrier, even with permits from the army.

But students, he says, are especially suited to these activities, for both intellectual and practical reasons. "Students are more active, they are more willing to do things, they are more willing to go out of their way," he says. "Their routine life is less routine, so it's easier for them to do new things."

"It's very important that we are students," Ms. Hazan agrees. "You can speak more openly with students because they have some basic education, their minds are more open, they are more open to new things. It's easier."

She also believes it is worthwhile: "I think that peace will come from us, from the people. Not from the politicians, not from anyone else. Only from us."

Company Sues for Right to Sell Einstein Disguise

2011-01-16T04:41:00.000-08:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION January 16, 2011

Reg Speller, Fox Photos, Getty Images

In 1935 a dance troupe used a mask to portray Albert Einstein, among other celebrities, as part of a revue. No lawsuits were filed, but then the physicist was still alive at the time.

Enlarge Image

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

More than half a century after Albert Einstein's death, companies continue to challenge Hebrew University of Jerusalem's tight grasp on the physicist's likeness.

In the latest effort, Forum Novelties Inc., a costume wholesaler in Melville, N.Y., filed a lawsuit last month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the university and its licensing agent, GreenLight LLC, asserting the company's right to sell an Einstein costume as part of its "Heroes in Disguise" line.

Retailing for $11 to $26, the costume was described by one online shopper as a good value and a "perfect fit for elementary-age mad scientists."

Einstein died in 1955 and bequeathed his intellectual property to Hebrew University, where he was a founding governor. In 2009, Einstein's image earned $10-million in royalties, down from $18-million in 2008, according to Forbes, which listed him as the eighth-highest-earning dead celebrity. Last year, the university sued General Motors over ads with a raunchy Einstein image in People magazine and denied permission for the dead scientist's picture to appear in vodka ads or at a Madonna concert. But GreenLight said it was pleased to help when Chrysler wanted to use a photo of Einstein in a television commercial "to imbue the rugged but intelligently designed Ram truck with human attributes like 'brain' and 'brawn.' "

According to its court filing, Forum argues that the university "cannot 'inherit' rights from Albert Einstein that did not exist at the time of his death." The company maintains that Einstein's bequest could not have included his image because in New Jersey, where he died at age 76, he would have had a right of publicity only if he had exploited his name commercially before he died. Forum also claims a First Amendment defense, saying the costume is "intended to be worn by children acting in historically based school plays and in every day play."

Lloyd J. Jassin, an intellectual-property lawyer in Manhattan, observed on his firm's blog, Copylaw: "Forum is hoping that the court will see its Einstein disguise kit not just as a commercial product, but as an expressive or communicative work, like a biographic book or film conveying some historical fact."

"The case ultimately turns on New Jersey law," Mr. Jassin wrote. "New Jersey was the place where Einstein last lived. As such, that state's law governs the post-mortem right-of-publicity issue."

The university said that while it was confident it would prevail in court, it was disappointed that Forum Novelties had rejected negotiations and pursued legal action.

Israel planned to push Gaza Strip to 'brink of financial collapse' in bid to shatter Hamas, diplomatic cables reveal

2011-01-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

DAILY MAIL 5th January 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Israel told America it hoped to push the Gaza Strip to the 'brink of collapse', leaked diplomatic cables reveal.

Hamas, which won a parliamentary election in 2006, seized control of the narrow coastal strip in 2007 in an armed coup, leading both Egypt and Israel to seal their borders with the territory and impose a crippling economic blockade.

The resistance group is shunned by the international community for its refusal to recognise Israel, renounce violence or accepting existing Israeli-Palestinian peace deals.

Protest: Leaked diplomatic cables have revealed the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip was designed to bring it to the 'edge of financial collapse'

Diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks site reveal that Israeli policy was designed to cripple Hamas, stop daily rocket fire at the south of the country and secure the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, who remains in captivity more than four years after his abduction.

One cable, dated November 3, 2008, was issued seven weeks before Israel launched an attack on the territory that left more than 1,000 dead and thousands more homeless.

It said: 'As part of their overall embargo against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to (U.S. embassy economic officers) on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.'

It added that Israel wanted the territory's economy 'functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis'.

Tough: A Palestinian man inspects damaged to a smuggling tunnel on Rafah, Gaza, after an Israeli air strike last night

Shunned: Israel launched an attack on Hamas in Gaza in December 2008 and has kept up tight economic sanctions in a bid to clampdown on the group

Israel allowed basic foodstuffs and medicines into the territory, but humanitarian groups said the policy pushed thousands of people below the poverty line and left them depended on UN handouts.

U.S. diplomats reported that Israel's designation of Gaza as a 'hostile entity' had led to a clampdown on economic cooperation, including the transfer of banknotes in shekels - the official currency in both Israel and Palestinian activities.

The cable added: 'Decisions on shekels in circulation in Gaza and the territory's economy in general are treated by the government of Israel as security matters.

Captured: The cables, released by WikiLeaks, also reveal Israel wanted to secure the release of soldier Gilad Shalit being held by Hamas

'The National Security Council (NSC) abides by the principal that Gaza should receive just enough money for the basic needs of the population, but is not interested in returning the Gazan economy to a state of normal commerce and business.

'The agency... will not permit any large scale transfer of assets from Ramallah-based banks to their branches in Gaza for fear of improving the purchasing power of entities wishing to harm Israel.'

A subsequent cable, dated December 4, 2008, reported a phone conversation between the U.S. Embassy economic affairs officer and Udi Levi - Counterterrorism Finance Bureau Director at the NSC - which the American used 'to press for release of 250million shekels to the Gaza banking system'.

It added: 'Mr Levi said continued rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza, stalemate in negotiations on release of Hamas-held Israeli Defence Force soldier Gilad Shalit, and new information on Hamas access to the Palestinian Authority salary payments funded by the requested transfer all made it unlikely that the GOI would honour the request.'

Mr Levi said banks in Gaza were being forced by Hamas to pretend they had a liquidity crisis in order to pressurise Israel into allowing more cash into the territory.

'He offered to share all GOI information on the topic in a meeting with relevant U.S. government officials at their earliest convenience.

'We will take him up on that offer and report,' the cable added.

Israel arrests two staff members at the British consulate office in Jerusalem on terror plot charges

2011-01-04T22:19:00.000-08:00

DAILY MAIL 4th January 2011

By Matthew Kalman

A Hamas spokesman speaks during a news conference in Gaza City in September last year. Two staff at the British consulate in Jerusalem were arrested yesterday on terror charges, accused of working with two Hamas operatives

Two staff members at the British consulate in Jerusalem were arrested yesterday on terror charges.

Israel’s Shin Bet security service accuses them of supplying weapons for a planned attack on the city’s Teddy football stadium.

The unnamed Palestinians were allegedly working with two Hamas operatives detained in November.

Musa Hamada and Bassem Omeri were indicted in the Jerusalem district court on Sunday and charged with planning a terror attack and membership of a terrorist organisation.

The Shin Bet said the suspects were ‘systematically checking how best to launch a rocket while the stadium was crowded with people during a game’.

‘The two visited a hillside across the stadium in order to survey the area for their attack,’ it said.

Israeli officials said the pair acquired a number of rifles from contacts in East Jerusalem, including the two members of the staff of the British consulate general there, which represents UK interests with the Palestinian Authority.

The Shin Bet said all the suspects were arrested, questioned and confessed to their involvement in buying the weapons.

A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed last night that two local members of staff at the consulate had been arrested.

He said: ‘We are aware of reports that they may be charged with the illegal sale of weapons. We are urgently seeking confirmation of the charges.

‘We have been told by the Israeli authorities that the investigation into our two employees is unrelated to the work they do at the consulate. It is not appropriate to comment further on what is an ongoing legal process.’

The Shin Bet said the terror plot was connected to a larger terror network.

Hamada has allegedly visited Saudi Arabia a number of times, where he met up with a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood radical group.

Eugene Perchikov, suspected in deaths of mistress & Manhattan widow, commits suicide in Israeli jail

2011-01-03T11:58:00.001-08:00

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, January 3rd 2011

By Matthew Kalman
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

JERUSALEM -- A man wanted by New York prosecutors in the unexplained deaths of his Brooklyn mistress and a Manhattan widow committed suicide in an Israeli jail, authorities said Monday.

Eugene Perchikov, 62, was found dead in the cell he shared with seven other prisoners at the Russian Compound police jail in central Jerusalem, where he was being held as he fought extradition to New York.

The families of both women believe Perchikov, who had medical training, offed them with the same "perfect murder" method he described in one of several creepy mysteries he wrote more than a decade ago -- fatal drugs that leave no traces in a victim's body.

Perchikov, a Russian emigre, had taken hefty life insurance policies out on the two -- and fled the U.S. after collecting $1 million for the death of his mistress, 48-year-old dressmaker Larysa Vasserman.

The suspect is also believed to have used his medical training in his own demise: Jailers say he cut himself with a disposable razor in a place on his body that would have fatal results.

The Daily News reported last October after Perchikov's arrest that he had been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in connection with the double murder mystery.

The nature of the charges were under seal, but Israeli authorities say that extradition papers filed in Jerusalem District Court described him as wanted for the murders of both Vasserman and Tatiana Korkhova, 54.

Vasserman, a lonely divorcee who met Perchikov through a personal ad, died in her Brooklyn apartment in 2002. Korkhova, a widowed bookkeeper who knew Perchikov from Russia, was found dead in her Manhattan home in 2004.

In both cases, the medical examiner could not determine the cause of death.

Both women had been persuaded by Perchikov to take out multiple life insurance policies - using fraudulent information - naming him as beneficiary, court papers charge. Perchikov was only able to collect on one of the three policies taken out by Vasserman.

He was arrested by Israeli police at Ben-Gurion airport in October after a three-year manhunt. He apparently lived with his wife in Herzliya, Israel but she had denied any knowledge of his whereabouts.

Perchikov wrote his eerie murder mysteries under the pen name Eugene Pepperou.

A suit filed by Korkhova's estate claims she was given "an overdose of norepinephrine, a method of murder which Perchikov described in detail in the short story."

The lawyer representing both women's estates hired prominent pathologist Cyril Wecht to review their deaths.

He found a scenario Perchikov described in his self-published volume of short stories - in which a murder victim is killed with an undetectable injection of norepinephrine - was plausible.

A suit filed by Vasserman's family against Perchikov and the insurance companies was dismissed.

The Israeli Prison Service and the police have opened an investigation into his death. His lawyer, Mechael Ironi, told the Haaretz newspaper that he believed Perchikov stood a good chance of beating the extradition request.

Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man

2010-12-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

DAILY MAIL 27th December 2010

By Matthew Kalman

Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains.

Until now, researchers believed that homo sapiens, the direct descendants of modern man, evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and gradually migrated north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia.

Recently, discoveries of early human remains in China and Spain have cast doubt on the 'Out of Africa' theory, but no-one was certain.

Professor Avi Gopher, a researcher from Tel Aviv University's Institute of Archaeology, holds a pre-historic tooth at Qesem cave, an excavation site near the town of Rosh Ha'ayin

The new discovery of pre-historic human remains by Israeli university explorers in a cave near Ben-Gurion airport could force scientists to re-think earlier theories.

Early humans: Middle Awash Aramis, Ethiopia, where the first 'modern' human beings were thought to have been discovered

Archeologists from Tel Aviv University say eight human-like teeth found in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin – 10 miles from Israel’s international airport - are 400,000 years' old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, making them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered anywhere in the world.

The size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. Until now, the earliest examples found were in Africa, dating back only 200,000 years.

Other scientists have argued that human beings originated in Africa before moving to other regions 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens discovered in Middle Awash, Ethiopia, from 160,000 years ago were believed to be the oldest 'modern' human beings.

Other remains previously found in Israeli caves are thought to have been more recent and 80,000 to 100,000 years old.

The findings of Professor Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, published last week in the American Journal of Physical Anthroplogy, suggest that modern man did not originate in Africa as previously believed, but in the Middle East.

The Qesem cave was discovered in 2000 and has been the focus of intense study ever since.

A group of international and Israeli researchers have discovered pre-historic artefacts and human remains at the site that may prove the earliest existence of modern man was about 400,000 years ago.

Along with the teeth – the parts of the human skeleton that survive the longest – the researchers found evidence of a sophisticated early human society that used sharpened flakes of stone to cut meat and other impressive prehistoric tools.

The Israeli scientists said the remains found in the cave suggested the systematic production of flint blades, the habitual use of fire, evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat, and mining raw materials to produce flint tools from rocks below ground.

'A diversified assemblage of flint blades was manufactured and used,' the Tel Aviv scientists wrote, describing the tools they found in the cave.

'Thick-edged blades, shaped through retouch, were used for scraping semi-hard materials such as wood or hide, whereas blades with straight, sharp working edges were used to cut soft tissues.'

The explorers said they were continuing to investigate the cave and its contents, expecting to make more discoveries that would shed further light on human evolution in pre-historic times.

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Armageddon Fortress May Hold Keys to History

2010-12-26T22:52:00.000-08:00

AOL NEWS, Dec 26, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

MEGIDDO, Israel -- The Book of Revelation says the biblical fortress of Armageddon will be the site of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil at the end of time. Scientists believe it could also be the place where time begins -- at least for archaeology.

In a groundbreaking new project, scholars are using the rich archaeological remains that soar more than 50 feet above the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel to synchronize the clocks of the ancient world and create the first definitive calendar of human history.

Wikimedia Commons

The ruins atop Megiddo in Israel may look like just another hill, but the mound is man-made, containing the remains of 29 cities built one on top of the other from 3,000 to 300 B.C.

The word "Armageddon" comes from the Hebrew Har Megiddo, which means mountain of Megiddo, where Revelation says the final battle will take place. To the untrained observer, the modern-day site of Megiddo looks like one more hill in the Carmel mountain range near Haifa. But the vast mound is entirely man-made, containing the remains of 29 separate cities built one on top of the other by a succession of civilizations from 3,000 to 300 B.C.

More than a century of excavations has revealed a complex network of houses, stables, temples and palaces protected by massive fortifications and watered by two natural springs.

The treasures discovered at the site have posed as many questions as they have answered about the history of the ancient world. A vast, centuries-old temple deep within the mound is the largest yet discovered from that period in the Levant but its purpose and rituals -- including several large, perfectly round black stone altars just a few inches high -- are unknown.

It was around this time that stone inscriptions and records on clay tablets and papyrus began to record human history in the area. The Bible, the most monumental work of all, emerged during this period. Early archaeologists used the Bible as a guide, relating their finds to events described there and allocating them to biblical figures.

The Megiddo Expedition

Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University looks over the archaeological dig which is located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel. Finkelstein is the current director of the excavation.

The legendary Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin identified one impressive Iron Age gateway as the remains of a city built by Solomon in the 10th century B.C., but the current director of the excavation, Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, rocked the scholarly world when he declared the remains to be at least 100 years later. Finkelstein's theory threw the traditional view of the Davidic and Solomonic kingdoms into disarray and cast doubt on whether the biblical giants had ever truly been "kings" at all.

Now Finkelstein, together with Tel Aviv University physicist Eli Piazetsky, is spearheading an international effort to settle the chronology once and for all. A scientific conference at Megiddo, "Synchronizing Clocks at Armageddon," launched a project to analyze 10 separate Iron Age destruction layers using four state-of-the-art scientific techniques: radiocarbon dating, optical luminescence, archaeo-magnetism and rehydroxilation -- a new method pioneered in Britain within the last two years.

Megiddo is the only place in the world with so many destruction layers -- archaeological strata resulting from a calamity such as a fire, earthquake or conquest -- that resulted from a specific event in history.

Finkelstein told AOL News that the site provides "a very dense, accurate and reliable ladder for the dating of the different monuments and the layers."

"These destruction layers can serve as anchors for the entire system of dating," Finkelstein said. "Megiddo is the only site which has 10 layers with radiocarbon results for the period 1300 to 800 B.C.E."

Scientists hope that by analyzing the archaeological strata they can nail each layer to a specific year or decade, using the physical data from Megiddo to set the clocks of history and create a definitive timeline that can be used as a basis for accurately dating all archaeological sites.

The Megiddo Expedition

Part of the Tel Aviv University team work on some of their discoveries at the archaeological dig which is located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel.

It's an ambitious undertaking and one with profound implications for historical scholarship. A definitive timeline for the Levant could also unlock the secrets of ancient Greece, where specific historical dates before about 600 B.C. are basically guesswork. One conundrum that has perplexed scholars for years is a major discrepancy between the dating of sites in the Levant and those with similar pottery and other artifacts in the Aegean Basin.

"For many years the traditional dating of strata in the Levant were about 100 years earlier than that of the Aegean. There was similar pottery that we date to the 10th century and they date to the ninth. The question was, who's right?" said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, director of the excavation at Tell es-Safi, believed to be the ancient city of Gath, home of Goliath.

"The problem is that the Aegean does not have an independent chronology for the Iron Age," Finkelstein said. In the absence of a historical record, dating of pottery from ancient Greece has relied on Greek pottery found in Middle East excavations. New doubts cast by Finkelstein about the dating of sites in Israel have thrown the ancient Greece timeline into further disarray.

The new project will take samples from Megiddo and other sites where dates are fairly certain and subject them to a battery of four different scientific tests:

Radiocarbon, or carbon-14 dating, measures the decline of a naturally occurring radioisotope to fix the date it was deposited at the site. It can be used for animal remains, plants and even olive pits. But it cannot determine the age of inorganic material like pottery; some materials, including wood, can give false results; and it requires a complex statistical calibration that on 3,000-year-old items produces inaccuracies of up to 300 years.

Archaeo-magnetism measures changes in the Earth's magnetic intensity and magnetic north over centuries to date pottery and cooking ovens. Optical luminescence is in its infancy. It measures the effect of the sun's rays on quartz particles to determine when certain minerals were last exposed to sunlight.

Rehydroxilation is a method recently developed in Britain that measures the amount of moisture absorbed from the atmosphere by oven-fired clay. Experiments suggest that it can accurately date bricks and pottery from 50 to 2,000 years old. The team has taken some 5,000-year-old pottery samples back to the lab at Manchester University to see if they get similar results.

They believe the method has the potential to become as important for ceramics as radiocarbon dating is for organic materials.

"Making the various tools for dating archaeological finds more accurate is very important," said Maeir, whose own excavation is part of the project. But he warned that rehydroxilation may not provide magic answers. Like carbon-14 dating, it involves a statistical manipulation that is likely to result in similar disputes between scholars.

"If they did reach a clear-cut model which would be agreed upon by the overall majority, it could have a whole slew of historical implications," he said. "It changes your understanding of what was going on from a political, from an economic point of view at these various sites. This could in theory have very broad implications for our ability to interpret the historical scenarios."

Slum-Touring Millionaires Put Off the Ritz in Israel

2010-12-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

AOL NEWS Dec 19, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

JERUSALEM -- Ronald L. Gallatin is a retired attorney, a CPA and a former managing director at Lehman Brothers credited with creating some of Wall Street's most ingenious investment instruments. His wife, Meryl, is a prominent philanthropist in Florida charity circles. But when they visit Israel, they prefer hanging around soup kitchens and drug addict drop-in centers rather than fancy restaurants.

Over the past seven years, the Gallatins have given more than $2 million of their own money and raised more than $4 million from friends for a charity they set up "to fill in the cracks" left by social services in the U.S., Israel and Latin America. They also promise donors that 100 percent of funds will be donated to the causes listed on their website for Hands On Tzedakah, so the Gallatins also absorb all the administrative costs of their charity, including one or more trips each year to Israel.

They use their own money to seed all the projects and then encourage their donors to identify one where their donation should be applied.

The Gallatins are just two clients of Arnie Draiman, a travel guide with a difference. Draiman takes tourists off the beaten track to show millionaires and other would-be donors the darkest underbelly of Israeli society, helping them target their charity where it will have the most effect.

Arnie Draiman shows would-be donors the darker side of Israeli society, helping them target their charity where it will have the most effect.

"I want to teach them how to give their money away efficiently and effectively," Draiman said.

He said there was an increasing interest among tourists to Israel in welfare and assistance projects -- the flip-side of the sun-drenched beaches, nonstop nightlife and centuries-old religious culture projected by official government advertising.

"Our trips aren't about museum hopping," Meryl Gallatin told AOL News during a recent visit to Crossroads, a cash-strapped drop-in center for at-risk youth in downtown Jerusalem. "We're here to do due diligence on behalf of our donors. This is a different kind of tourism."

Not all of Draiman's tourists are millionaire philanthropists. Parents bring their bar mitzvah boys and bat mitzvah girls to tour projects as part of the preparation for their coming of age as a lesson in social responsibility. Newly married couples, flush with their own good fortune, want to engage with people less fortunate than themselves. American religious and community leaders also come to Draiman to see the reality of Israeli society so they can better understand the country.

At first, some projects didn't understand why they should host visitors who weren't about to make a donation. Over time, they have adopted Draiman's long-term view.

"I have countless examples of people who have visited a place and later gone back and included it in their wedding registry or a bar mitzvah boy has included it in his bar mitzvah project," Draiman said.

He said the key to the attraction of his tours is the term "tzedakah" -- an ancient Hebrew phrase that combines "righteousness," "charity" and "justice."

"I use the word in the broadest terms possible to include not only money but your time and your effort and anything that goes into making the world a better place to be," Draiman said. "A lot of it revolves around the money, the financial end, but it's more than that. Tzedakah is translated best as 'righteous giving' or 'giving rightly.'"

Draiman's work has brought him into contact with people he labels "heroes" -- ordinary individuals who help the people around them in an extraordinary way.

"If someone calls me up on the phone and says, 'I've got this really great place I want you to hear about,' I'll listen. But if you call me up and say, 'I want you to meet this incredible person,' my ears really prick up," he said.

Some of Draiman's favorite heroes include Bracha Kapach, the wife of a Jerusalem rabbi who feeds more than 1,100 poor people every week and more than 20,000 at Passover; the "chicken lady" who provided a fresh chicken every week for several hundred poor families even when she was well into her 90s; and Avshalom Beni, who uses dogs and cats to provide therapy for Holocaust survivors and children with behavioral problems.

When Draiman introduces philanthropists like the Gallatins to these unsung heroes, lives can be changed on all sides.

One recent afternoon, the Gallatins arrived at Crossroads, a cause they have supported for several years, for their first meeting with its new director, Robbie Sassoon. A skeptical Ron Gallatin grilled Sassoon about the center's projects and finances with a ferocity that would not have been out of place in a Manhattan boardroom.

"We treat making the decision of how our donors' money is spent as the highest level of fiduciary responsibility," Ron Gallatin said. "Our donors give to HOT [Hands On Tzedakah] because they trust us to have meetings like this one and know that we are making sure that every one of their dollars goes directly to help someone in profound need. Our donors know that HOT has no expenses and that we do not permit our partners to charge any administrative charges on any project we support. The donor is truly seeing his whole dollar helping the people he wants helped."

After a half hour, the former Wall Street guru sat back, pronounced himself satisfied and proceeded to write out a check that was much larger than the one he had planned. Then they were off to their fourth meeting of the day, in a five-day trip that contained no tourist visits at all.

"This is not depressing," Meryl Gallatin said. "It's the feelgood of making a difference. It's being able to go back after seeing a success story."

None of it, the Gallatins said, could be achieved with confidence without having someone like Draiman to advise them.

"Arnie comes with us on many of our site visits and interprets far more than the language. He helps us understand cultural nuances that can only be understood by someone living in Israel," Meryl Gallatin said. "You cannot have absentee management. We hold all of our Israeli partners to a very high standard of accountability and use Arnie to monitor them when we aren't here. What we are trying to do doesn't work without someone like him on the ground."

"I'm in their face, much more than if they filled out a form once a year," Draiman agreed.

New Stars Light Up Bethlehem Nightlife

2010-12-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

AOL NEWS, Dec 19, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- For as long as anyone can remember, young people have had nothing much to do in Bethlehem after nightfall. When the Israeli army and Palestinian gunmen finally quit the streets in 2005, restaurants and cafes continued to observe an unofficial 10 p.m. curfew, and anyone seeking some action had to head north to Ramallah, a tortuous, hourlong journey through military checkpoints and death-defying mountain roads.

"I spend my evenings at home on the Internet because there is nothing to do here for people our age," said Sally Zaghmout, 19, a student at Bethlehem University. "There are no bowling alleys, no cinemas, no big fields where you can go and play sports. It's really hard. If people of my age go to discos some gossip will start because it's a really conservative country and everybody knows everybody."

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Twin brothers Firas and Ruslan Mukarker opened Taboo, the first venue in Bethlehem to stay open every night until dawn.

But this season, something is happening in Bethlehem. In recent months, a growing number of hip nightspots have opened around town, drawing packed crowds until well past midnight -- a signal, perhaps, of a new confidence on the part of young entrepreneurs and a shift toward some kind of normality after a decade of violence and economic privation.

Bethlehem's economy fell to pieces after the outbreak of the intifada uprising in September 2000. Tourists, who provide the city's main source of income, stopped coming. On Star Street, the traditional gateway to the old city, 88 of the 102 shops are still shuttered. Thousands of residents emigrated.

When the intifada ended in 2005, Bethlehem, recognized by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, was surrounded by an Israeli security barrier and military checkpoints that cut off its residents from nearby Jerusalem and deterred all but the most determined pilgrims.

The first signs of life after dark appeared in 2006 when a local entrepreneur opened a late-night disco, discreetly situated on the upper floor of a failed holiday complex in Beit Jala, a suburb of Bethlehem. A hefty entrance charge and a couples-only policy kept out troublemakers. Now renamed the Layal Lounge, the club attracts crowds from all over the West Bank from Thursday to Saturday nights.

The same year, twin brothers Firas and Ruslan Mukarker opened Taboo, the first venue to stay open every night until dawn. Taboo's chill-out music, tiger-skin wall-hangings, soft red lighting, display of African masks and nude paintings announced a new generation of Christian Bethlehem nightlife.

"In 2006 it was the first place called a bar in Bethlehem, it was something really new," Firas Mukarker told AOL News. "We called it Taboo because there was pork and alcohol. No one had the guts to put pork on the menu. We were the first in Palestine."

But the successes in Beit Jala didn't catch on inside the city itself. The Palestinian economy remained depressed and unemployment in Bethlehem stayed close to 40 percent. In 2008, Mike Canawati, a prominent local businessman, opened the Square on Manger Square, opposite the Church of the Nativity. Spread over three floors and with an international menu, the Square brought the new nightlife into the middle of town for the first time.

"We started this new trend of staying open until 1 a.m.," Canawati said. "Two years ago there was nowhere else in this area open until that late. Now there are a few. We serve European food -- Italian, French. Our menu was the first of its kind in Bethlehem. We wanted to make something new. Not everybody wants to eat kebab and lamb chops and hummus."

Now the tourists have returned. Khouloud Daibes-Abu Dayyeh, the Palestinian minister of tourism, said that nearly 1.5 million people will have visited Bethlehem by the end of 2010, up 60 percent over last year and an all-time record.

Unemployment in Bethlehem has fallen to 22 percent. A dozen new souvenir shops have opened in recent months, and property owners are scrambling to turn every available building into accommodation for tourists.

Samir Hazboun, chairman of the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told AOL News the number of hotels has grown from six in 1995 to 31 today, with three more under construction and four others in the planning stages.

The new investors have benefited from a series of economic reforms that have made bank loans widely available to Palestinians for the first time in living memory. The result has been a massive 9 percent growth in gross domestic product over the last year and rising employment across the West Bank.

Jihad al-Wazir, head of the Palestinian Monetary Authority, said the new regulations had freed up some $750 million in loans for individuals and the 94 percent of local businesses that have four employees or fewer.

"There was a tremendous increase in lending," said Wazir. "The Palestinian economy is dependent on these very small-scale enterprises that are the drivers of the economy. It's great that the entrepreneurial spirit is catching up. People see other young kids doing the new projects and so they emulate it and so it starts a chain reaction where the overall impact is very positive."

Sami Matar and his business partner, David Salti, secured a loan to transform a shop wrecked in intifada gun battles, in the shadow of an Israeli military watchtower in the security wall, into the Divano Cafe and Restaurant, a classy new nightspot with a European menu that boasts the largest aquarium in the West Bank and the most extensive cocktail menu in Bethlehem.

"I wanted a mixture of something elegant and cool," said Matar, 27. "We wanted it to be friendly. The classic restaurants here aren't cool. I lived in the U.S. for two years. I wanted to create something like you would find there."

The result is a youthful mix of soft couches, subtle red lighting, dark wood paneling and European-style wall paintings where the elegant presentation of the food matches the ambiance. It appears to be a winning formula. Divano is packed every night, mainly with locals, and it's impossible to get a table after 6 p.m. without a prior booking. Divano serves about 200 every day and has to turn away another 50.

Outside the restaurant, the grim concrete wall and watchtower across the street surrounding the shrine at Rachel's Tomb is a reminder that the venture could be destroyed at any moment by a new outbreak of violence.

"It's a risk," Matar acknowledged. "I know that and my partner knows that, but we couldn't find a better place than this. We will trust in God."

Harry Potter and the Deeply Appreciative Professor

2010-12-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION REVIEW December 5, 2010

By Matthew Kalman

More than a decade has passed since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, by an unknown author through a minor London publisher. It is hard to recall that before the blockbuster movies, before the chocolate frogs, before the Wizarding World of Harry Potter Theme Park, in Orlando, Harry Potter was neither a Warner Bros. franchise nor a commercial cliché but a series of fantasy stories that transported an entire generation of kids away from their TV sets and video games and into the delights of the old-fashioned printed word.

The sensation in Britain was so great that by the time J.K. Rowling's third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published, in July 1999—two years before the release of the first movie—booksellers were asked to keep it off their shelves until late afternoon for fear that thousands of children would skip school to buy it. The British edition had an initial printing of a quarter of a million copies. In 2000, The New York Times created a new list of children's best sellers so the Potter series wouldn't crowd adult authors out of the coveted top 10 spots.

Not everyone was impressed by this youthful literary revival. Harold Bloom famously described the books as "rubbish." "The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible," he said.

Shira Wolosky disputes that assessment in The Riddles of Harry Potter: Secret Passages and Interpretive Quests (Palgrave Macmillan). Wolosky, an English professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sees in the works genuine literary depth, invention, construction, and imagination...

(Full article here)

In Biblical Valley, 'David vs. Goliath' Battle Rages Over Oil Shale

2010-12-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

AOL NEWS Saturday, Dec 4

Matthew Kalman Contributor

AOL News

ELAH VALLEY, Israel (Dec. 4) -- A baron from the prominent Rothschild family is teaming up with media mogul Rupert Murdoch in an attempt to break Israel's foreign oil dependency by mining vast amounts of oil shale in the unspoiled Elah Valley, where the Bible says David fought Goliath.

But their business plan has morphed into a family battle all its own because of some unexpected opposition from Lord Jacob Rothschild's second cousin, a celebrated eco-campaigner.

David de Rothschild gave up the chance to enter his family's multibillion-dollar banking business and instead has emerged as a "green" leader lauded by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. He describes his cousin's plans to heat up rocks beneath the Judean Hills as "very serious" and has promised to investigate.

Andreas Rentz, Hubert Burda Media / Getty Images

David de Rothschild disagrees with his cousin's plan to mine oil shale in Israel's Elah Valley.

Oil shale mining involves heating the ground to transform buried, tar-like organic compounds into oil, and then extracting it. But the process is criticized for being an inefficient way of getting energy, because it takes so much energy to heat up the ground and create the oil, and then drill for it. Al Gore has described the practice as "utter insanity."

Such technology is economical only when the price of oil is very high, as is the case right now. And Lord Rothschild has said he believes oil shale mining "could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world."

His cousin David disagrees. "I as an individual actively discourage environmentally harmful activities," he wrote in a letter to Green Prophet, an environmental website focusing on the Middle East. But he acknowledged that he's "part of a large family with many diverse opinions."

"I cannot be held responsible for other people's actions despite my best efforts, even family members," David de Rothschild wrote.

Aside from concerns about the Rothschild project's energy efficiency, it would also involve bulldozing dozens of deep trenches, each more than two miles long, through some of Israel's most picturesque and archaeologically significant landscape.

The Elah Valley is where tradition holds that the young shepherd boy who would become King David faced off against the Philistine giant Goliath, and vanquished him with a slingshot and a pebble. In addition to disfiguring the biblical site, the oil mining project's trenches would cut through farms, vineyards and a network of 1,000 historic underground caves where the rebels of Bar Kochba hid from the Romans in the first century.

In August, the Israel Union for Environmental Defense filed a petition with the Israeli High Court demanding that the drilling license be revoked, charging that it was issued "without any plan and without any indication of the resulting effect on the environment."

The valley is zoned in the Israeli National Master Plan as green space. But under Israel's 1952 Oil Act, oil companies can bypass planning and other regulations in the hunt for energy resources. Israel's minister for environmental protection, Gilad Erdan, has promised to change the antiquated law.

Hagit Teshler, 44, a college lecturer who lives in the tiny community of Srigim-Li-On at the foot of the valley, was among more than 1,000 residents and campaigners who gathered Friday on a hill overlooking a test-drilling site late last month, to protest the venture.

"The industry that they want to build is an experimental industry that doesn't exist in any other place in the world," Teshler told AOL News. "In the U.S., it's very hard for them to get past the laws, so they come here. We don't know anything about the ramifications of this experiment, what damage it will do. They are heating the ground to very high temperatures. We don't know what gases will come out of this, or what damage will be caused to the air and the water.

"Most of the ministers, except for Gilad Erdan, are very much in favor of the oil industry because they believe that it will free Israel energy-wise from all our neighbors. But the oil that is produced is very low quality that will need a whole other industry to make it available as fuel for cars. Israel doesn't know what it's getting into," she said.

Mining the reserves of shale oil embedded in the rock would require a huge amount of electrical power -- equivalent to half of Israel's entire national supply, plus millions of cubic feet of water in a country entering its worst drought in modern history.

Lord Rothschild, based in London, is one of Israel's largest benefactors. He donates millions of dollars a year to social, educational and cultural projects in Israel through Yad Hanadiv, a family foundation founded by his ancestors. Major gifts include university fellowships, the Supreme Court building and a new National Library currently under construction.

Last month, Lord Rothschild and Murdoch, the American-Australian media tycoon, jointly acquired 11 percent of the Genie Energy Corp. unit Genie Oil and Gas Inc. for $11 million. Genie Energy, a subsidiary of the huge IDT Corp., owns 89 percent of Israel Energy Initiatives, which has an exclusive shale oil exploration and production license from the Israeli government for 238 square miles of the Judean hills southwest of Jerusalem, on the border with the West Bank.

This area, known as the Adullam district, was a major population center in biblical times and boasts a rich variety of significant archaeological sites from the cave network and Roman amphitheater of Bet Guvrin in the south, to the Elah Valley where David fought Goliath in the north. Today, it is an area of pastoral stillness, home to several small rural communities known as moshavim, with vineyards, olive groves, forests and farmland.

Israel Energy Initiatives believes that its shale oil cracking technology can free the world from dependence on Arab oil and turn Israel into an energy powerhouse able to produce 300 billion barrels of non-conventional oil at a cost of up to $40 per barrel.

Effie Eitam, a former minister of national infrastructure who is now president of Israel Energy Initiatives, told Haaretz that Lord Rothschild had "a strong history of supporting the environment. He asked a great many questions on this point, and was persuaded that when the pilot is completed in two years, very few question marks will remain."

But after a series of protests organized by local residents, Tafline Laylin, a Cairo-based analyst with Green Prophet, contacted David de Rothschild, urging him to persuade his cousin to withdraw from a deal that she believes could "unleash a miserable chain of ecological and social reactions."

"The in-situ technology requires that 5-kilometer-long trenches are dug in order to reach the underlying rock. This is then heated to 350 degrees Celsius and in part releases a gas that is converted to sulfur-rich fuel. Three hundred such trenches will be necessary to produce 300,000 barrels of oil (per day). Also, the safety of heating up the rock has yet to be established and could release at least 15 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere," Laylin warned.

"We urge the Rothschild family, and you as its eco-diplomat, to rescind its shares in what could be one of the most devastating projects to hit Israel's soil," she wrote.

The response from the young Rothschild was swift, setting the stage for a family showdown.

He wrote that he would "continue to write to not only family members but also other individuals and business about how their actions influence the world environmentally in the hope that they will place a greater significance on this area and seek clean alternatives that can help us tread more lightly."

"I do consider the 'Oil Shale Exploration' to be a very serious and pressing matter and something that I will look into further as a priority," de Rothschild wrote. "[I] promise to explore this matter further."

Pioneering Medical Researcher Is First Woman to Lead Israel's University Presidents

2010-11-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 28, 2010

Dani Machlis for Ben-Gurion U. of the Negev
Rivka Carmi

By Matthew Kalman
Beersheba, Israel

Rivka Carmi's new role, as the first woman to chair the Committee of University Presidents in Israel, has brought her tough challenges along with acclaim. Israeli faculty members are, on average, among the oldest in the developed world. The ratio of faculty to students is dismal. And now pro-Palestinian activists are calling for an academic boycott of Israel that she says threatens to destroy the last remnants of co-operation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Add to that a problem she has encountered throughout her own life: that universities are not sufficiently accommodating to the needs of women.

In her new job representing the country's higher-education institutions to the public and the government, Dr. Carmi, 62, who is also president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, must recommend resolutions to those issues and more.

(Full article here)

Israel Unleashes Gold Rush for Solar Power

2010-11-28T07:23:00.001-08:00

AOL NEWS 27 November, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

AOL News

JERUSALEM (Nov. 27) -- The race is on to tap into a potential $20 billion solar energy bonanza in Israel's southern wilderness that could transform the nation into the first in the world to power its electric grids through renewable energy.

The starting gun sounded Sunday with the signing of a historic agreement between the Israel Electric Corp. and a solar energy producer based on Kibbutz Ketura, a tiny collective farm in the barren Arava desert on the Israel-Jordan border. For years, Israel has been exporting its cutting-edge solar technology for use abroad, but it has never been applied at home -- until now.

The so-called power purchase agreement, signed under a special permit from Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of national infrastructure, marks the first time that any electric company in the Middle East has agreed to purchase electricity generated by renewable energy. Israel has pledged to generate 10 percent of its annual electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020.

Uriel Sinai, Bloomberg / Getty Images
Yosef Abramowitz, president of the Arava power company, visits the company's experimental solar site at Kibbutz Ketura, in the Arava Desert in Israel, on June 17.

"This agreement is very important," Landau told AOL News during the signing ceremony Sunday at his ministry in Jerusalem. "This is the first time we have signed such an agreement with electricity producers in the renewable energy field, in the solar field. This is an important first step forward, and I hope it will be a breakthrough to many more similar agreements."

A disused 20-acre field in the kibbutz will be covered with 18,000 photovoltaic panels that convert light to electricity, generating 4.9 megawatts of power -- little more than one-thousandth of the four gigawatts that Israel aims to produce from such sources by the end of the decade.

The agreement signed Sunday is modest: a commitment by the Israel Electric Corp. to purchase approximately $65 million worth of power from Ketura Sun over the next 20 years at a government-regulated price of about 40 cents per kilowatt hour. It is just the start. There are plans for a large-scale 40-megawatt field on Ketura by the end of 2012.

Some 100 corporations and investors led by Siemens and other major international players are expected to fuel the country's solar energy industry in the next five years, a development that could put Israel at the forefront of clean energy production.

For Boston native Yosef Abramowitz, Sunday's signing marked the end of a tough four-year mission to bring solar power to Israel and turn the country into "a renewable light unto the nations."

Abramowitz is the president and co-founder of Arava Power Co., a partnership with Ed Hofland of Kibbutz Ketura and David Rosenblatt, a former partner at BlackRock venture capitalists.

Abramowitz and his partners can be credited with developing Israel's solar power industry from the ground floor. In 2006, after decades of Jewish community, multimedia and environmental activism that saw him nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize three times and a Pulitzer twice, Abramowitz arrived with his wife and five children for a two-year sabbatical at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel's southern desert, where he had first served as a volunteer 25 years earlier.

Emerging from their air-conditioned van into the baking desert sun, Abramowitz said his first thought was that the kibbutz must be powered by solar energy. He soon discovered that not a single watt of electricity was being generated from renewable energy sources -- neither on the kibbutz nor anywhere else in Israel.

"It was a no-brainer. The great Israeli solar companies were producing technology for export, but not for the home market," Abramowitz told AOL News. "I thought, you've got to be kidding. So together with a couple of guys from the kibbutz, we put together a plan to set up solar panels in a field opposite and power Ketura with sunlight. We quickly ran into a whole bureaucratic battle with Israel's energy regulator. After six months, I realized that if we could win this fight for the kibbutz, we would win it for the whole country."

Abramowitz spent the next four years locked in battle with a dizzying array of government departments, electricity professionals and regulators.

One major headache was that although the Israeli government decided in 2002 to introduce renewable energy into the electricity sector, it created no legislative or regulatory framework to implement the decision.

"It was a question of extreme incompetence," Abramowitz said. "We had to overcome more than 25 separate battles with various government departments, including the introduction of new legislation through parliament and a government decision. There are17 government ministries involved in the issue that have no communication, no coordination whatever."

The next problem was finding land. Although 60 percent of Israel is vacant desert, four-fifths of that space is designated for military use, and the remainder is a protected nature reserve.

Using the model originally inspired by the sun-drenched fields at Kibbutz Ketura, Arava Power contacted other kibbutz and moshav collectives in the area that had available land and signed up half of them. Along the way, they persuaded the Israel Land Administration to change the zoning regulations, allowing them to use 10 times more land in each kibbutz than before.

At that point, competitors who had dismissed solar power as a cottage industry suddenly realized there was big money to be made. At least 100 other companies appeared on the scene, trying to cut their own deals with the kibbutzim, including some of Israel's largest development companies. Two years ago, Arava Power walked away from a bid worth more than $130 million. In August 2009, Siemens bought a 40 percent stake in the company for $15 million.

Abramowitz said Arava Power now has about half the available kibbutz land locked up and expects to emerge with a 40 to 50 percent market share. The landowners include five Bedouin tribes who have leased land they own to Arava Power for 20 years. That investment alone will help create wealth and jobs in the poverty-stricken Bedouin community for the first time since Israel was founded.

Abramowitz's ambitions are not modest. He sees solar energy as the catalyst for transforming Israel into a clean-tech economy and promoting cooperation that will contribute to Middle East peace. He is already in discussions with the Jordanian government, just over the border next to Ketura.

"This should be the first industrial-based economy in the world to go from a carbon-based economy and switch it to a solar-based economy. We can do that, and [Sunday] was the beginning," Abramowitz said. "It could be a powerful impetus to regional peace-making. To realize that the same sun shines equally on all of us, is owned by none of us, and can supply our energy needs in abundance, inherently promotes peace. The sun doesn't recognize borders."

Despite Controversy, Israeli University in West Bank Attracts Arab Students

2010-11-19T04:54:00.000-08:00

Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) - ‎Nov 17, 2010‎

Matthew Kalman

The Ariel University Center of Samaria aspires to become a fully accredited university. Dozens of graduate students conduct research in ...

Israel Withdrawal Plan Stirs Lebanese Village

2010-11-17T09:03:00.001-08:00

AOL NEWS, Wednesday, November 17th

Matthew Kalman Contributor

JERUSALEM (Nov. 17) -- Residents of Ghajar, a tiny village straddling the Lebanon's border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, were once renowned throughout the Ottoman Empire for their talents as soothsayers.

But they failed to predict today's decision by Israel's Security Cabinet to withdraw from the northern part of the village, home to some 1,500 of its 2,100 residents, and hand control over to United Nations forces.

The decision to withdraw to the "blue line" delineated by U.N. mapmakers after Israel's pullout from southern Lebanon in 2000 has been telegraphed by Israeli leaders for weeks, but it still caught skeptics by surprise.

Dror Artzi, JINIPIX / AFP / Getty Images

Israeli forces stand guard in the disputed village of Ghajar, which sits on Lebanon's border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel's Security Cabinet has backed plans to withdraw troops from the northern part of Ghajar and hand over control to a U.N. peacekeeping force.

Only last Sunday, the Lebanese daily Ad-Diyar cited "well-informed diplomatic sources" who said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "resorts to maneuvering on the issue of withdrawing from Ghajar every time he wants to attract more U.S. military and financial aid." They "did not expect such a move to take place in the near future."

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, called for a full return of all forces to the international border, but Israel held out. Under nominal U.N. security control, the village, with access to both Lebanon and Israel, had become a gateway for all manner of shady dealings, from espionage and drug running to terrorism. The Israeli government finally buckled today to U.N., Lebanese and American pressure and decided to return to the U.N.-mandated international border.

The timing of the move and the final deployment of forces in and around Ghajar will be negotiated between Israel and the U.N.

Israel Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AOL News the village would not be divided.

"There will be no checkpoints inside the village, no barrier, no fence, no checkpoints, no roadblock," Palmor said. "That's the problem from the security point of view. That's something we need to solve with UNIFIL [U.N. Forces in Lebanon]. It is deployed on the northern border of the village, and it will need to adopt very tight security measures not to make this a very porous border the way it was between 2000 and 2006."

Villagers told AOL News they were dismayed by the decision, despite Israeli assurances that "both the security of Israel's citizens and the normal life of the residents of Ghajar, which remains undivided, will continue to be maintained while the new arrangements are being put in place."

Ghajar is perched on a rocky promontory that plunges into a ravine where the fresh waters of the El Wizani spring bubble into the Jordan River to the south. Its residents say the Hasbani River, 50 yards to the north, is the natural border and also the source of their water.

Israel has occupied the Golan Heights since the Six Day War in 1967. Residents of Ghajar insist they are proud Syrians from the tiny Alawite sect of President Bashar Assad's ruling circle. Some even fought for the Syrians and still have army papers issued in nearby Kuneitra. But when Israel seized the area, villagers took Israeli citizenship and have been living quietly ever since. They tend their cows and sheep in land now controlled by Israel, study in Israeli universities and work in nearby Israeli towns and kibbutzim.

"In 1967, when our people tried to cross the Hasbani River, they were beaten back by the Lebanese army,'' Hassan Fatali, a 39-year-old English teacher, told AOL News. "Israel thought Ghajar was Lebanese, but Lebanon wouldn't accept us. They said we were Syrians, which we are."

The village used to be on the south side, but it expanded in the 1950s when residents began building new homes on agricultural land to the north, Fatali said.

"It was before 1967, when this was Syria. We have documents for the buildings from 1957. The border was further north. The documents are signed by officials from Kuneitra, the Syrian region that we belong to," he said.

"We are a small village, and we live as a family. We marry each other within the village. We are all related. There are many people who live on this side and have sons on the other side. In Berlin, the wall was destroyed. Now they are going to build a wall in this small village that will divide families. It's a shame," he said.

Hilal Khashan, a political science professor at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, told AOL News he discerned two reasons for the Israeli decision: to boost the Lebanese government, which faces a major threat from Hezbollah, and to assuage Washington.

"The village in itself is unimportant," Khashan said. "The Israelis have been adamant when it comes to settlement construction in the West Bank, and they embarrassed President Obama. This is designed to show the Obama administration that the Israelis are not recalcitrant, that they may be tough on one issue yet they can be accommodating of American interests on other issues."

Khashan added, "This will not have a tangible effect on the balance of power domestically. Hezbollah was quick to respond, saying that Israel's decision to pull out from Ghajar village is important but the Israelis need to follow it up by other withdrawals, and also they are demanding that Israel discontinues its flights over Lebanese airspace. These are demands that the Israelis are unlikely to act upon. So in this regard it will have no impact on internal Lebanese politics."

Khashan said he had some sympathy for the villagers. "To tell you the truth, I think under Israeli control they receive better benefits than they would be getting under Lebanese control. I heard protests from the people of the northern Ghajar village. They don't want to be returned to Lebanon," he said.

DiCaprio Brings Mom to Meet Refaeli's Parents

2010-11-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

AOL News, Monday, November 15th

Matthew Kalman Contributor

AOL News

JERUSALEM (Nov. 15) -- Leonardo DiCaprio and his longtime girlfriend, model Bar Refaeli, arrived in Israel for their second holiday in Refaeli's birthplace -- and this time he brought his mother to meet Refaeli's parents, stoking rumors of an impending marriage.

DiCaprio swooped into Tel Aviv last week, scooped up Refaeli in a private jet and swept her off for a weeklong holiday on the Nile in Egypt and then Jordan to celebrate the actor's 36th birthday.

They were joined by his mother, Irmelin, and close friends supermodel Naomi Campbell and "Entourage" star Kevin Connolly.

Noah Graham, NBAE/Getty Images
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and model Bar Refaeli, seen here in April during the 2010 NBA Playoffs, are on holiday in Israel. The couple landed at Ben-Gurion Airport on Sunday in a private jet and sped off to the presidential suite at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv -- occupied last week by Pamela Anderson.

Israeli commentators said the security surrounding the couple -- including fast-track VIP treatment at Ben-Gurion Airport, a convoy of armored cars with darkened windows and walkie-talkie-whispering security goons armed with umbrellas to shield the stars from waiting photographers -- would not have embarrassed a visiting head of state.

Suites were booked at four different hotels in Tel Aviv to try to throw the paparazzi off the scent. DiCaprio's last trip to Israel with Refaeli three years ago was marred by violent encounters between the notoriously pushy local snap-pack and Refaeli's father, a former Mossad agent, who punched out a photographer.

They are due to stay in Israel until Thursday, with plans to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the world's lowest spot at the Dead Sea, and generally hang out with Refaeli's family at their ranch-style home, complete with horses, in Hod HaSharon north of Tel Aviv.

Refaeli, 25, and DiCaprio have remained famously tight-lipped about their four-year relationship.

"I see myself being a mum, going to university and definitely doing some kind of work to help people, whether it's hospitals or sick kids or peace projects," she told this reporter soon after her first trip home with DiCaprio. "I want to have at least three children. I hope I will be able to bring them up in Israel. I had a very beautiful childhood, and I hope that my kids will be able to experience the same thing. But I don't know. It depends on the circumstances. It depends who you decide to have your children with. Maybe it will be in Japan, because I'll choose a Japanese guy. You never know."

The couple went through a six-month break in 2009, but Refaeli said she found it difficult dating other men. They reconciled in December. Afterward, she said the split was what they both needed, as it made their relationship even stronger.

Engagement rumors began swirling after the couple were spotted at a romantic dinner in Berlin on Valentine's Day, when Refaeli wore an impressive diamond ring.

"I am not thinking about getting married," she said soon after. "I'm still young. And when I do get engaged, I might even hide the ring. I want it to remain private."

Her mother, Tzipi Levine, a former model and glamour girl who once dated Warren Beatty, told this reporter she had no objection to DiCaprio as a son-in-law.

"This is her choice. I'm happy for her when she's happy. Any man is lucky to be dating my daughter," she said.

There is one skeleton in Refaeli's designer closet: her first husband, 23 years her senior, whom she married to avoid serving in the Israeli army. Her mother said she was ill, but she walked away from an army inquiry held to clarify her medical condition.

Refaeli married Ari Weinstein, a wealthy friend of her father, in October 2003. The tiny ceremony, attended by just a dozen people, took place in secret in Petach Tikvah, northeast of Tel Aviv. They divorced in March 2004 and apparently never lived together, but her ex-husband remains ambiguous about the nature of their relationship to this day.

Haim Etgar, an Israeli show business reporter who has produced a documentary about the country's entertainment and glamour industry featuring Refaeli, managed to secure a rare interview with Weinstein, who now lives in New York.

"What was the purpose of the marriage? How did it occur? Some people, including high-ranking army officers at the time, say it was a fictitious marriage. There was a lot of dismay about using the marriage to get out of the army. It's still a hot issue," Etgar told AOL News.

Etgar says Refaeli is a "test case" of how a determined mother can help her daughter to become famous, even lining up her teenage dates with the sons of the rich and famous.

"Her mother is a brilliant person, her promoter and her agent. She's done all the right moves, she hasn't left anything to chance. But there are some people who are outraged by their behavior," he said.

twitter.com/MatthewKalman

Wedding bells for Bar and Leo?

2010-11-10T10:50:00.000-08:00

Marriage rumours sweep Israel as Leonardo DiCaprio's mother prepares to meet the future in-laws

By MATTHEW KALMAN

JERUSALEM (Nov 10) - Leonardo DiCaprio is on his way back to Israel with Bar Refaeli, and this time he's bringing his mum Irmelin. Last Saturday, Leo swooped into Tel Aviv on a private jet, scooped up supermodel Bar and swept her off to Egypt. The three of them are currently holidaying in Cairo with Naomi Campbell and Leonardo's buddy Kevin Connolly of Entourage fame, celebrating Leo's 36th birthday.
Leo, Bar and Irmelin are due back in Israel this weekend.
The family get-together has re-ignited rumors of a possible engagement - and even a snap wedding.
Leo was spotted last week eating dinner at the Lion restaurant in New York City with Gossip Girl star Blake Lively, prompting a slew of reports that the two were an item. But they were accompanied by five other people and did not leave the restaurant together.
Bar has been stuck in Israel for the past few weeks after what were described as bureaucratic problems renewing her US visa paperwork.

Israeli Settlers Threaten to Topple Netanyahu

2010-11-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

AOL NEWS November 8, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

JERUSALEM (Nov. 8) -- Israeli settler leaders said today they would topple the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he agrees to renew a building freeze demanded by the Palestinians as a precondition to restarting peace talks.

Netanyahu, who is in the United States for talks with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, appears to have abandoned an unofficial moratorium on new construction in east Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state. Israelis consider all of Jerusalem their capital.

Tara Todras-Whitehill, AP

The Israeli government is moving ahead with plans to build nearly 1,300 apartments in disputed east Jerusalem, an official said Monday, a move sure to escalate frictions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American officials during his visit to the United States.

On Friday, with little fanfare, the Israeli government published advertisements in a Jerusalem newspaper announcing plans for 1,352 new housing units in Ramot and Har Homa, two Israeli suburbs of Jerusalem built beyond the pre-1967 Green Line border.

The news will seem like deja vu for Biden, whose trip to Israel in March was wrecked by a similar announcement of new housing units, also in Ramot. The vice president met Netanyahu over the weekend at a Jewish community conference in New Orleans and then delivered a speech seen as strongly supportive of the Jewish state.

The plan for Har Homa "C" is particularly significant since it extends the built-up area of that neighborhood to the southeast, creating a further barrier between the Arab neighborhoods of Umm Tuba and Sur Baher inside Jerusalem, and the town of Bethlehem about half a mile to the south. The construction of Har Homa, which began in 1998 during Netanyahu's first tenure as prime minister, created the first permanent Israeli presence on the empty land between Bethlehem and east Jerusalem.

Settler leaders said the new plans for east Jerusalem are the start of a burst of construction after a 10-month freeze that did little to advance Middle East peace.

The Palestinians refused to start direct peace talks until nine months into the freeze and broke them off when the moratorium ended. Since then, the Obama administration has been trying to find a formula that will bring both sides back to the table but still save face -- an apparently impossible task.

The Yesha Council of Israeli settlers in the West Bank -- which the settlers call by the biblical names Judea and Samaria -- has demanded the immediate approval of tenders for 4,321 new units in nine West Bank settlements.

Danny Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council, told AOL News today that if Netanyahu buckled to U.S. pressure and renewed the freeze, the prime minister would be ousted.

"I think it will be the beginning of the collapse of Mr. Netanyahu's government, and we will make an effort to make that happen," Dayan said, referring to the settlers' supporters in several of the parties in the government coalition, including Netanyahu's own Likud.

"Regardless of our efforts, I think that if Netanyahu makes such a decision, ultimately his government will collapse," he said. Netanyahu's first term as prime minister ended when right-wingers brought down his government over a similar dispute about concessions to the Palestinians.

Two key allies in Netanyahu's coalition -- Eli Yishai of Shas and Daniel Hershkowitz of the Jewish Home Party -- have already publicly said they will not support a renewal of the moratorium.

"The issue of extending the settlement freeze is nonnegotiable. For 10 months Israel made gestures above and beyond what was required, and now it's the Palestinians' turn," Hershkowitz said.

Peace Now, the Israeli group that monitors settlement activity and campaigns for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, said the new plans for Jerusalem had to have received Netanyahu's personal approval.

"This is a huge provocation by Netanyahu, at a very sensitive time in the negotiation process. The timing of this depositing is not accidental," Peace Now spokeswoman Hagit Ofran said. "It seems to be a calculated attempt by Netanyahu to torpedo peace talks and also avoid blame, by forcing the Palestinians to be the ones to walk away from the negotiation table."

Last March, Netanyahu said he was surprised by the announcement that tripped up Biden's visit. Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney specializing in Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem and the founder of the co-existence group Ir Amim, said this time Netanyahu himself had chosen "the timing and the context of these moves."

As Netanyahu Heads to US, Israel Keeps Building

2010-11-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

AOL NEWS, November 5th, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

JERUSALEM (Nov. 5) -- A page of gray, text-heavy official announcements published in an Israeli newspaper could torpedo President Barack Obama's strategy for the renewal of Middle East peace talks.

The announcements came on the eve of a crucial visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S., where he will meet with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while Obama is traveling in Asia.

In the Hebrew daily Maariv, the Israel Lands Administration detailed tenders inviting contractors to bid for the construction of 238 new homes in two Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem -- on the same day Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Israel's "ferocious" building in the occupied territories.

Tara Todras-Whitehill, AP

The East Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev is seen behind a section of Israel's separation barrier. The Israel Lands Administration has asked for contractor bids for construction of new homes in the neighborhood.

The tenders are for 80 housing units in Pisgat Zeev with development costs of nearly $4.5 million, and for another 158 units in Ramot on land valued at nearly $14 million.

The publication, prefigured but not detailed in a Housing Ministry announcement in October, finally ends an unofficial freeze on Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. The Palestinians have demanded that freeze, along with a halt to settlement construction in the West Bank, as a condition for direct peace talks with Israel.

While it agreed to the 10-month freeze in the West Bank that expired in September, Israel has officially refused to halt construction in East Jerusalem, which it regards as Israeli sovereign territory. The Palestinians consider the area, occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War, to be the capital of their future independent state.

These are the first Israeli housing tenders published for East Jerusalem since a similar announcement last March dropped a diplomatic bombshell in the middle of a visit to Israel by Biden. Netanyahu blamed the poor timing of that announcement on bureaucratic bungling at the Housing Ministry and said he would improve coordination to ensure that similar embarrassments did not occur in future.

So the timing of Thursday's advertisements, just days before Netanyahu arrives for talks with Biden and Clinton, is likely to be perceived as a test of the administration's diplomatic strength after the Democrats' poor showing in the midterm congressional elections.

An official in Netanyahu's office, speaking to AOL News on condition of anonymity, said there was no message in the timing of the tenders, which, unlike the announcement during Biden's visit, did not come as a surprise to the Israeli prime minister. "Israel is transparent on these issues," said the official.

"In every peace plan that's been put on the table since the peace process started, the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem remain part of Israel in a final-status peace agreement. Building inside those neighborhoods in no way contradicts the goal of moving forward in the peace process," the official said.

Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney specializing in Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem and the founder of the co-existence group Ir Amim, told AOL News, "This is not random, but what it indicates about Netanyahu's intentions is very much in question.

"There are three possibilities. Netanyahu is either testing how far he can go, he's signifying the end of the moratorium or he's letting off steam protecting his right-wing flank in anticipation of a continued moratorium," Seidemann said. "I see these tenders as extremely detrimental, extremely problematic, but I don't think this is the final word. There is skirmishing going on, and this is part of it. It's a probe."

Seidemann said that if all Israeli construction plans currently in the pipeline were implemented, they would scupper the chances of both Israelis and Palestinians sharing Jerusalem and establishing their capitals in the city.

Meanwhile, Clinton said there was still hope for reviving the direct talks, which began nine months into the 10-month freeze and then were halted by the Palestinians as the freeze ended.

"We are working on a nonstop basis with our Israeli and Palestinian friends to design a way forward in the negotiations," Clinton said Thursday during a trip to New Zealand. "I am very involved in finding the way forward, and think we will do so."

But in an interview with CNN, Abbas said that unless Israel stopped all building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the talks would stop and the Palestinians will unilaterally seek recognition from the United Nations.

"To ask us to continue with negotiations while settlement activities are under way is unacceptable, because the time will come and we will have nothing to negotiate for," said Abbas, describing all settlements as "illegal."

"I know that they have built so many settlements, but this is enough, we cannot take that anymore. We cannot continue with the negotiations because the way they are building those settlements now is very ferocious," he said.

Abbas also blamed Hamas and its Iranian sponsors for trying to derail peace talks.

"Hamas and whoever is standing behind Hamas, meaning Iran, is slowing the process," Abbas told CNN. "Iran is pressuring Hamas not to be part of any agreement, so that they can use Hamas as a negotiations card in their talks with the international community and especially with the United States."

Adding to the mix ahead of Netanyahu's flight to Washington, the Haaretz newspaper said it would publish an expose on Sunday showing that the Israel Lands Administration, which supervises government-controlled land, has transferred sensitive properties in Arab-populated areas in and around the Old City of Jerusalem to nationalist Israeli groups "for low prices, without issuing a tender as required by law."

"The state and the groups involved concealed the transactions and refused to give any information about them," Haaretz reported today.

News of Government Guidelines on 'Pluralism' Alarms Israeli Academics

2010-11-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Nov 4, 2010

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

Israel's education minister, Gideon Sa'ar, has reignited a debate about academic freedom in Israel by announcing the imminent publication of a "document of guiding principles" for faculty at Israeli institutions of higher education...

Israel's deputy prime minister forced to cancel UK trip after warning he could be arrested for 'war crimes'

2010-11-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

Daily Mail, 2nd November 2010
By Jason Groves and Matthew Kalman

Israel's deputy prime minister Dan Meridor was forced to cancel a visit to London this week following warnings he could be arrested for alleged war crimes.

Mr Meridor, the Israeli minister for intelligence and atomic energy, pulled out of an event in London on Monday night after the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Justice warned him he could face an arrest warrant from pro-Palestinian activists.

The incident is an embarrassment for Foreign Secretary William Hague, who was due to arrive in Israel tonight for talks with president Shimon Peres.

Mr Meridor, 63, is the latest high-profile Israeli politician to cancel a visit to London because of concerns about possible arrest.

Embarrassment: Dan Meridor (left) was due to be in London this week while British Foreign Secretary William Hague is on a visit to Israel

In November last year the former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni pulled out of a trip to the UK after a British court issued a warrant for her arrest over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

At the time the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband ordered an ‘urgent’ review of the law, which allows members of the public to bring private prosecutions for alleged war crimes. Unlike most offences war crimes carry a so-called universal jurisdiction in British law, which means that foreigners can be arrested in the UK for alleged crimes committed abroad.

Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced in March that the law would be changed to end private prosecutions for war crimes.

The new Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke said in July that the coalition Government was also determined to act. Mr Clarke said the law would be changed to require the approval of the Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer before any private prosecution for war crimes could be brought. He said the change in the law would be brought forward at the ‘first opportunity’.

Critics claim the move would send a dangerous signal about Britain’s attitude to war crimes.

But Education Secretary Michael Gove, who was at the dinner Mr Meridor was due to attend, told fellow guests that ministers remained determined to change the law.

Ministers are concerned that the current law makes it too easy for activists to launch politically-motivated proecutions.

Controversial: Mr Meridor was allegedly part of the group who discussed storming an international aid flotilla which tried to reach Gaza in May

Israeli leaders say that Britain cannot play a meaningful role in the Middle East peace process if senior officials cannot travel to Britain without fear of being arrested.

Mr Meridor is a member of a tight-knit group within the Israeli government which reportedly discussed the planned arrival of an international flotilla in Gaza in May. The incident ended with a raid by Israeli commandos, which led to the deaths of nine Turkish activists and brought worldwide condemnation.

It is thought that activists planned to ask a British court to issue an arrest warrant relating to Mr Meridor’s alleged involvement in the planning of the raid.

He had been due to speak at a conference organised by the Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre. Chief executive Lorna Fitzsimons said: “Israeli law officers did not think they should take the risk. Foreign Secretary William Hague intervened and the British government tried to make it work. They are committed to changing the law and it cannot come soon enough.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: ‘This was Mr Meridor’s decision to take.’

Can Housing Preserve Mideast's Christians?

2010-11-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

AOL News Monday, November 1st, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

AOL News

JERUSALEM (Nov. 1) -- Only days after a special Vatican Synod on the Middle East ended a week of deliberation about the rapidly shrinking Christian communities in the Arab world and Israel, Christians faced a massacre in Baghdad and renewed troubles in Jerusalem.

Fifty-eight people including a priest were reported dead Sunday after Iraqi troops stormed the Catholic Sayidat al-Najat church in Baghdad where gunmen linked with al-Qaida had taken dozens of hostages and begun killing them. It was just the latest bout of the anti-Christian violence that has sparked a massive wave of emigration from the troubled country in recent years.

In Jerusalem, it remained unclear what caused a blaze early Friday morning that swept through the Alliance Church on Prophets Street, next door to the Jewish ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. The use of the church by evangelical and Jewish messianic groups aroused suspicions that the fire could have been started deliberately, but Jerusalem police said their initial investigation did not appear to suggest arson.

Decades of discrimination, poverty and occasional violence have taken their toll on the Christians of the Middle East. Tens of thousands have left the region in recent years. Reversing the decline of the rapidly shrinking Christian communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and the Holy Land were high on the agenda of last week's Vatican Synod.

While the problem of violence in Iraq and elsewhere seems intractable for many Christians, in the Holy Land, church officials have hit on a novel solution: real estate.

Churches in Jerusalem and the West Bank, alarmed by the rapid rate of Christian emigration and the creeping loss of some church-owned land to Palestinian gangsters, have initiated a major building program to provide affordable housing to Christian families.

A 2006 survey carried out by Sabeel, a Christian think-tank in Jerusalem, showed that the 2005 Christian population of 160,000 in Israel and the West Bank had barely grown since 1945 due to massive emigration caused by continuous warfare, occupation and discrimination. More Palestinian Christians now live in Chile than in the Holy Land, where Christians account for less than 2 percent of the population. In cities like Bethlehem and Ramallah, which a generation ago had Christian majorities, they are now outnumbered by Muslims.

"There is a glaring shortage of houses in Jerusalem, at least at affordable prices," said Father Ibrahim Faltas, bursar of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land. "We really want to help halt Christian emigration by making these houses available. Having a space of one's own and a house of one's own is an encouragement to put down roots and stay in this land."

The Custody owns 500 homes in the Old City of Jerusalem and more than 200 outside the walls. A recent ceremony handing over the keys to 68 apartments in 20 three-floor buildings of three- to six-room apartments near Jerusalem went on until 5 a.m.

"It was a magnificent night," said the Custos, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, lamenting only that there was a waiting list of 700 families who had hoped to receive one of the 68 homes.

The Custody project "Jerusalem: Stones of the Memory" has completed 100 refurbishments since 2007 at a cost of about $2 million. It has another 320 housing units in the pipeline at an estimated cost of about $10 million. Similar projects have been initiated by the Armenian, Lutheran and Orthodox churches in Jerusalem, Bethany, Bethlehem and Ramallah.

"The real danger is that immigration has become the easy solution for all problems, a trend followed by the young and in many circumstances endorsed and encouraged by the older generation," notes the Arab Orthodox Charitable Society in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. "Beit Sahour, home to the largest Greek Orthodox community in the Holy Land, is at stake of losing its strong Christian identity, preserved by the community against all odds thus far. Bethlehem and Beit Jala have succumbed long ago to the temptation of immigration and lost their Christian majority." The society has its own building project, "Dwellings for Newly Married Young Couples."

Monsignor William Shomali, auxiliary bishop at the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, chairs a monthly gathering of Catholic church and charitable affiliates to monitor developments in the Catholic community. Among the projects under construction are 80 apartments in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Safafa being built with the legal and technical assistance of the Patriarchate.

"These people came to us and said, 'We are homeless. We can not own a house.' They were young, either newly married or about to get married, and they had a problem of housing. It is cheaper to build a housing project than for everyone to build his own house because of the land and building license. So they put the project under our care," Shomali told AOL News.

Christian families traditionally were not landowners in the villages that have now become suburbs of Jerusalem, Ramallah and other major cities. That put them at a disadvantage when the population began to grow and land prices started rising.

Israeli restrictions on granting building permits to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have exacerbated the problem. Church figures show that while Palestinians make up 35 percent of the city's population, they receive only 7 percent of building licenses granted each year -- a policy that the church describes as "demographic control."

"The Christian families used to live in the Old City where there was not a lot of space to expand," Shomali said. "They were satisfied. They were in houses owned by the Franciscans or the Greek Orthodox Church. So they didn't think to buy outside the Old City when land was less valuable than it is today. Fewer people thought of it. This is the error committed by our community."

Jack Amer, 27, is hoping to move to his new home in the Beit Safafa project with his wife of two years and their infant son in 2012, thanks to a $150,000 mortgage from the Arab Bank. Amer, a native of Jerusalem who is now chief accountant at the Latin Patriarchate, told AOL News that it would have been impossible to raise a mortgage without the backing of the church.

"No banks can give us the loans that will help us because we have no guarantees," Amer said. "The church is helping Arab people to stay in Jerusalem and to let their sons and daughters stay here also.

"The Patriarch and the priests are taking all their time to help people stay in this place. We need to stay in Jerusalem. It's like you are in a war. You have to protect your rights," he said.

New Fund Will Try to Revive Humanities Departments in Israel

2010-10-19T05:02:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

19 October, 2010

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

As part of an overhaul of higher-education financing in Israel, a newly created $9-million fund for the humanities will try to attract more students and top faculty members to the field and encourage cooperation among humanities departments at Israeli universities.

(Full article)

Repair of War-Scarred Palestinian Landmark Yields Hope

2010-10-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

AOL News October 18th, 2010

Matthew Kalman Contributor

AOL News

JERUSALEM (Oct. 18) -- Even before it was finished, Albert Abu Zgheibreh's majestic new home in Beit Jala earned a special name in the neighborhood: Al Qasr -- The Palace.

With its fine stone carvings, sweeping balconies and soaring arches, the three-story, 16,000-square-foot house stood on a promontory with commanding views across the valley from Bethlehem to the southern Jerusalem suburb of Gilo.

But in 2000, before its owner had even moved in, the opulent building was used as a snipers' nest by Palestinian gunmen and shelled to pieces by Israeli tanks. For nearly a decade, the ravaged beauty has stood abandoned in silent testimony to the brutal violence that engulfed this lazy town for years on end.

Now Palestinian and Israeli security chiefs are helping the millionaire owner rebuild the building. Some find grounds for optimism in the fact that a site that epitomizes the intifada is being restored with the quiet blessing of the gunmen and soldiers who brought about its destruction.

The Palestinian Authority is providing an armed guard of a dozen policemen every night to guard the site until a sophisticated electronic security system can be installed. And the commander of Israeli army's local Etzion Brigade, Col. Eran Markov, made a rare entrance into Palestinian-controlled territory to visit the site one recent morning and see how work was proceeding.

"It is a symbol of hope," said Fakhri Ghneim, a friend and business partner of Abu Zgheibreh who is supervising the 40 workers on the five-month, million-dollar repair program on behalf of the absent landlord. "We ask for peace. We pray for peace. We want to live in peace. We have had enough of living in terror. It will be good for both Palestinians and Israelis."

When the intifada uprising erupted in the autumn of 2000, the house was still bare on the inside and Abu Zgheibreh was away in Panama tending to his business interests. Taking advantage of its strategic position, Fatah gunmen sneaked inside and began shooting at the houses in Gilo, just half a mile away. At first they used their Palestinian police-issue Kalashnikov AK-47 semi-automatics and stolen Israeli army M-16s, but they caught the Israelis unawares when one night they began firing with two heavy machine-guns -- a belt-fed Browning M2 .50-caliber and a Russian-made BKC.

It was the first time that Jerusalem had come under sustained attack since the 1967 war. The Israeli army responded with tank shells and heavy machine-gun fire from three directions. The Israeli fire smashed in the roof, punched holes in the walls, destroyed many of the second-floor balconies and shattered most of the hand-carved stonework around the windows. An anti-sniper wall was hastily erected across the southern edge of Gilo to keep the residents safe. It was only taken down a few weeks ago.

For the residents of Beit Jala, the intifada was a catastrophe. Though Muslims had become a majority in Beit Jala and neighboring Bethlehem, the town's original Christian inhabitants generally wanted no part in the uprising and its suicide bombings. Many of the town's residents had close personal and business ties in Jerusalem, which the intifada brought to an end.

One of those who lost his business as a result was Fakhri Ghneim. "I have a quarry in Gilo, just over there," he told AOL News, pointing at the nearby Israeli neighborhood. "Now it's forbidden for me to enter Jerusalem. I haven't seen it for 10 years."

Abu Atef, a leader of the Fatah shabab ("youth") gunmen who later joined the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, told AOL News that they actually stopped shooting from the house itself after a few days because it was too dangerous, but they managed to draw the returning Israeli fire back to the palace again and again. As a result, none of the gunmen were killed inside the house, although several were hit nearby. He said it became a rite of passage for the most daring gunmen to take their turn behind the M2. Among those who gained their spurs in the nightly gun battles were at least three members of the Abayat family, the shabab leaders. Two were later killed in attacks by the Israeli army. Another is serving several life sentences in an Israeli prison.

Several residents of Beit Jala were killed in the firefights sparked by the gunmen, but the neighbors always divided the blame between the Israeli army and the Fatah fighters who had invaded their quiet neighborhood.

"The first time we came to shoot, the neighbors were OK, but after their houses began to be damaged from the Israeli tanks, people became very angry and tried to push us to another area to shoot," Abu Atef admits. "They didn't give us any help, not even a drink of water when the guys were thirsty. Even now they don't like us."

He said he welcomed Abu Zgheibreh's imminent return to the newly renovated palace as a natural development, but saw it as a sign that the sacrifices made by him and his friends had passed into history.

"They forgot the shabab," said Abu Atef. "They forgot the intifada, everything. Now the Palestinian Authority and Israel have cleaned everything out. All the weapons are gone. Does it mean there'll be peace? Maybe."

Program in Israel Pays Single Moms to Go to College

2010-10-17T05:06:00.000-07:00

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION October 17, 2010

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

A college in Israel has been swamped with applications after it advertised a special deal that is aimed specifically at new students who are single moms: free babysitting, free tuition, special study hours, and an annual stipend. As a result, 48 mothers, most of them over 30, will begin studying this semester at Tel Hai Academic College for their bachelor's degrees in human resources, with an optional elective of interdisciplinary studies.

The course work is spread over four years instead of three, and classes are concentrated into a single day so the moms need be away from jobs, homes, and children for only one day each week. Students who volunteer at a community child-care program will provide free babysitting, and an organization that helps underprivileged people, the Rashi Foundation, is covering the tuition and providing each student with a cash grant of about $1,600 per year.

Yona Chen, president of the college, says the program arose from community-outreach projects that involve two-thirds of Tel Hai's 3,200 students.

"Our social workers identified the population of single mothers as a group in the society facing more economic difficulties and challenges in allocating time to study," he says. "It seems to be a great success."

The college is situated in a low-income region near Lebanon that came under extensive rocket fire in the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

In Israel, Mr. Chen notes, salaries for government jobs are tied to level of education, and private employers are more willing to give management roles to college graduates.

"There's a big jump in salary between a high-school graduate and a university graduate," he says.

Inbal Arad, a 37-year-old holistic therapist and the single mother of a 5-year-old girl, says she had not been able to consider pursuing a degree until she saw the Tel Hai advertisements.

"Financially and practically, it's not been possible," she says. "For me it's an opportunity to study and get a B.A., but in a way that actually fits into my life. Otherwise I can't afford it. I can't be a full-time student."