Bethlehem grocer sues Sacha Baron Cohen

THE JERUSALEM POST
Dec. 9, 2009

MATTHEW KALMAN
Special to The Jerusalem Post

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's attempt to pretend that he interviewed a notorious terrorist leader in the film Bruno may cost him $110 million in damages - 80 percent of the movie's gross box office earnings.

That's the sum demanded by Ayman Abu Aita, a Palestinian grocer and peace activist from Bethlehem who says his life has been ruined by Baron Cohen's movie.

Abu Aita has filed a suit against Baron Cohen, US talk-show host David Letterman, Bruno director Larry Charles and NBC Universal Studios, demanding $110m. in libel damages.

In the film, Baron Cohen's gay character claims to travel to a refugee camp in Lebanon to meet a leader of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and tries to provoke his host into kidnapping him before a translator has Abu Aita saying, "Get out!"

In the movie, a caption describes Abu Aita as "Terrorist group leader, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade."

In an interview on The Late Show with David Letterman last July, Baron Cohen said his production team had found this "real terrorist" through a CIA contact, and he had taken extra security to the "secret location" because of the threat to his personal safety.

"What could people see that they've never seen before on film?" Baron Cohen told Letterman. "We thought one thing would be a comedian interviewing a terrorist.

"We called up a contact we had at the CIA and said, 'Can you help us? We're looking to find a terrorist.' After a few months, we found somebody who actually lived in a town that had a terrorist from a pretty nasty group called the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, who are kind of the No. 1 suicide bombers out there… The guy picks a secret location."

In fact, the scene was filmed at the Everest Hotel - a well-known tourist spot in Beit Jala, on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the West Bank, in an area under Israeli control and right next to an army base. There was no need for bodyguards.

"At no time was Cohen in any danger," says Abu Aita. "Nor was the interview at a 'secret location.' In fact, the interview took place at a spot selected by Cohen - the Everest Hotel - which, although located in the West Bank, is in an area designated by the Israeli military as 'Zone C,' which is under full Israeli military control."

Abu Aita is a well-known peace activist who lives in the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Sahur - and contrary to the translation, he never says "Get out!" in the film. He claims he was tricked into meeting Baron Cohen, thinking he was a German filmmaker producing a film about the Palestinian cause.

More seriously, he says he is a firm opponent of the terrorists, and the depiction in Bruno is a harmful slur against his character.

In the libel suit, filed last Wednesday in federal court in Washington, Abu Aita describes the Aksa Martyrs Brigades as "a notorious terrorist group, culpable in the wanton slaughter of dozens of innocent people and in the targeted assassination of many others."

The father of four, who is a Greek Orthodox Christian and Treasurer of the Holy Land Trust - a peace charity that promotes reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians - says he has received death threats and suffered from depression and anxiety since the movie's release and Baron Cohen's interview on Letterman's talk show. Abu Aita says he now fears for the well-being of his wife and family, both in the West Bank and in the US.

Abu Aita was imprisoned by Israel, but never found guilty of any offense. He says he is "a peace-loving person who abhors violence" and a regular visitor to the United States - something that would be impossible if he were on a terrorist watch list.

Sasha Baron Cohen facing a multi-million pound lawsuit over his film Bruno

DAILY MAIL
7th December 2009

By MATTHEW KALMAN

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is being sued for £70million in libel damages over his film Bruno.

Ayman Abu Aita, a Palestinian grocer and peace activist from Bethlehem, says the depiction of him in the movie has ruined his life.

In Bruno, Cohen's gay character claims to travel to the Ein El-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon to meet a leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades. A caption describes Abu Aita as 'Terrorist group leader, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade'.

Libel: Sasha Baron Cohen, pictured here with fiancee, actress Isla Fisher, is being sued for £70m over his film Bruno

In fact, the scene was filmed at a well-known hotel on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the West Bank in an area under Israeli control, next to an Israeli army base.

On American TV last July Cohen told talkshow host Letterman his production team found this 'real terrorist' through a CIA contact.

Abu Aita has filed a suit against Cohen, NBC Universal Studios and Letterman demanding £70 million - equal to half the movie's gross box office takings.

The father of four says says he has since received death threats, he is a firm opponent of terrorists, and that he was tricked into meeting Cohen, thinking he was a German producing a film about the Palestinian cause.

Sasha Baron Cohen in character as the gay Austrian TV presenter Bruno

US Documentary Channel Premiere

US TV Premiere of CIRCUMCISE ME: THE COMEDY OF YISRAEL CAMPBELL on Monday, December 7 at 10.30PM ET

Israel Frees Palestinian Professor After 20 Months Without Trial

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 30, 2009

By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

A Palestinian law professor just released by Israel after being held for 20 months without trial in administrative detention has told The Chronicle that he intends to go straight back to teaching and continue promoting a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ghassan Khaled, 40, a lecturer in commercial law at An-Najah University, in the West Bank city of Nablus, was arrested in January 2008, was held and interrogated using extreme methods that he says amounted to "torture" before being released, and then was rearrested in March 2008.

He was released last Thursday night, on the eve of the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice Eid Al-Adha, and spent the holiday resting with his wife and five children at his parent's home in the village of Jayyous.

Mr. Khaled said he would resume lecturing at An-Najah on Wednesday and thanked his many Israeli friends who had come to court to argue against his imprisonment and offer guarantees for his release — without success.

"Me and my father and all of our family, we have a lot of Israeli friends," Mr. Khaled said in an interview. "They came to court to support me, and they told the judge, 'We know him, we know his father, we are ready to give any guarantee that at any time they will not do anything illegal.'"

He said he had never been told the reason for his detention because his was a "secret file" that neither he nor his lawyer was allowed to see. He was held for four months at Megiddo Prison, in northern Israel, before being transferred to the Ketziot prison camp, in southern Israel, where inmates sleep in tents of 20 men, in walled sections containing six tents, six showers, and exercise space.

"I kept telling the judge that I'm a lawyer, and according to the Geneva Convention I have the right to know why I am arrested," he said. "I told them that according to the Geneva Convention, administrative detention is considered as a war crime because I have the right to know why I am arrested. I have the right to defend myself."

Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention says a conquering army has the right to hold in administrative detention people who pose a threat to the security of the region, but critics say the Israeli authorities' use of the measure far exceeds its original purpose.

In response to an inquiry last month from The Chronicle, the Israeli army denied that Mr. Khaled was in administrative detention.

Mr. Khaled said that during his initial interrogation, in January 2008, he was tied to a chair for up to 22 hours a day and deprived of sleep for more than a week, causing severe swelling in a knee. He said an Israeli judge had ordered immediate treatment, but by the time the prison authorities allowed him to see a doctor, there was no longer any evidence that the problem had been caused by his ill treatment during the interrogation.

Despite his bitter experience, Mr. Khaled said he was more persuaded than ever to continue his work to promote peace and dialogue.

"Not only do I feel that I can continue — now I think that it's more necessary," he said. "I'm thinking that it's true even more than in the past because we have very serious work to convince others that violence is not useful for us, and it's not helpful for us, and through dialogue and through negotiation we can resolve all our problems."

"There are a lot of Israeli people who are peaceful people. They support peace," he continued. "That's why I will use all of my ability, all of my power, to convince others about how we can resolve our problems according to international humanitarian law, to convince others that fanaticism or fundamentalism or extremism is not useful for us and is not useful for anyone."

In His Cave, a Palestinian Farmer Makes a Stand

Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009

By MATTHEW KALMAN / WALLAJEH

Abed Abed-Rabbo doesn't want to live in a cave, but it's the only way he can stay on his farm. The Palestinian farmer, 48, inherited the property in the village of Wallajeh, on the southern edge of Jerusalem, from his father and his grandfather but had to flee amid the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the place. In 1999, he returned to Wallajeh and the farm, risking constant arrest and defying an Israeli decision to annex it to Jerusalem. Most nights of the week, he says, he spends in the cave he slept in as a child. But now, he may even lose the cave.

The planning committee of the Jerusalem Municipality last week approved the expansion of Gilo, an Israeli suburb that straddles the pre-1967 West Bank border. The decision threatens to cover the green valley that includes Wallajeh with a new housing development. That would destroy Abed-Rabbo's dream of returning to his farm full of olive trees overlooking the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo and most likely deprive him of his patrimony forever. "I am one small man," Abed-Rabbo tells TIME. "All I want is to live on my land in peace."

The decision to expand dismayed the Obama Administration. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations [between Israelis and Palestinians], these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed. Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations." The Palestinians and the United States say the status of Wallajeh and the rest of East Jerusalem should be held open pending negotiations on a final peace deal.

What is called Plan No. 13157 includes a private development known as Givat Yael that will cover Wallajeh's fields with Israeli homes for more than 40,000 people. Israeli planners arrived on Abed-Rabbo's land recently and began taking measurements for the new development. The 450-mile-long Israeli security barrier that is planned to run through the area will permanently cut off Abed-Rabbo and his fellow villagers from their fields.

Sarah Kreimer, associate director of Ir Amim, a left-wing Israeli pressure group, says that Plan No. 13157 will complete a chain of development projects designed to prevent any possibility that a Palestinian state gains a toehold in the southern part of East Jerusalem bordering Bethlehem. There are a lot of large projects that are now moving through the planning process, Kreimer tells TIME. "They create an urban wedge between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It closes off the option of any kind of negotiations on the whole southern border."

On the same day the municipality approved Plan No. 13157 and opened it for public discussion and debate, Abed-Rabbo was arrested by Israeli police and held until late in the evening. It was his seventh arrest in recent months. Israeli officials explained that in visiting the property, Abed-Rabbo had crossed the Israeli municipal boundary and entered Jerusalem illegally from his legal residence in the refugee camp of Dehaishe, deeper in the West Bank. (There is no checkpoint blocking off the farm from Dehaishe; the Israelis recently granted Abed-Rabbo a permit to visit his land, a permit that has since expired.)

By Wednesday evening, Abed-Rabbo was back in the cave, playing host to dozens of Israeli and Palestinian friends who arrived to celebrate his release. "Many, many Israelis come, and Europeans and many Palestinians," Abed-Rabbo tells TIME. "Here we have meetings of love, of peace, for a new way. We don't just need to talk about peace on television. We also need to sit with people, to get to know them, my kids, their kids, to bring them so they can play with each other. That's what love is. You bring people together. That's how you make peace."

Hebrew U. Urged to End Deal With Disney Over 'Baby Einstein' Videos

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 23, 2009

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which houses the Albert Einstein archive and owns the rights to his image, is being urged not to renew its $2.66-million contract with the Walt Disney Company's Baby Einstein series when it comes up for renewal, in 2010, according to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an American group of educators, health experts, and parents, says the Baby Einstein series and other videos for toddlers are actually harmful. "Parents believe baby media is educational, an impression that was fostered by Baby Einstein's marketing," said Nancy-Carlsson-Paige, a professor of education at Lesley University, in Massachusetts. In 2003 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that children under two years of age not watch television.

Israeli Army Grants Hearing to Palestinian Student, but Only After Deporting Her

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 17, 2009

Berlanty Azzam, the 21-year-old Palestinian student summarily deported last month from Bethlehem University to her family home in Gaza by the Israeli army, was finally given a military hearing today to plead her case to stay two more months in Bethlehem in order to finish her degree -- a hearing that she should have been afforded three weeks ago. The Israeli army, which deviated from procedures set down by Israeli courts when it deported her blindfolded and handcuffed, gave Ms. Azzam a one-hour hearing in a disused office at the Erez crossing terminal building. The army maintained its refusal to allow Ms. Azzam even the minimal rights usually afforded to Palestinian suspects, and initially refused to allow Ms. Azzam to meet with her lawyer. The army is required to reply by Sunday to Ms. Azzam's petition to the Israeli Supreme Court to stay in Bethlehem.

Zionist Group in Israel Urges Students to Report 'Subversive' Professors

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 16, 2009

By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

Left-right tensions are rising on Israeli campuses over the complex legacy of Zionist ideology and the place of Zionism in Israeli society, with a call for students at one university to report on "Thought Police" professors, a campaign that is being likened to "McCarthyite" tactics in the United States.

The tensions pit radical academics, who are being accused of pursuing a political agenda and silencing pro-Zionist views, against Zionist groups, accused of a "witchhunt" against professors who reject the mainstream Israeli narrative.

Things came to a head at University of Haifa with the publication this fall of an advertisement in the new student calendar by IsraCampus, a watchdog modeled on Campus Watch in the United States.

Under the heading "Warning! Academic Fifth Column!," students are alerted to "professors and lecturers in Israeli universities and colleges who are involved in subversive activities." The ad alleges that the professors "openly support terrorist attacks against Jews, initiate an international boycott of Israel, make use of their status in the classroom for anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Zionist brainwashing, collaborate with known anti-Semites, denounce Israel as a fascist-colonialist state and an apartheid regime."

Meanwhile, a campus poster published by Im Tirzu — a movement seeking to reinvigorate Zionism — invites students to call a special hotline to "Stop the Thought Police in Academia" by reporting anti-Zionist lecturers or syllabi.

David Newman, a professor of political science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba, called the naming campaigns "McCarthyite."

An internal memorandum written recently by the head of the department of curriculum and instruction at Tel Aviv University said some students feared that left-wing lecturers might penalize them for their political opinions.

"There are no small number of students of lecturers with left-wing views who complain bitterly that they are extremely offended by the presentation of materials that oppose their views, but are fearful of expressing contrary viewpoints in class, lest it harm their grades," wrote the official, Nira Hativa.

Israeli universities have always been proud of hosting a robust debate in a society that perceives itself as constantly under threat of war and terrorism, but recent moves by a small group of academics to advocate an international boycott of Israeli universities have sparked an angry backlash.

"There's a group of Israeli professors who are misusing the classroom for political indoctrination," said Steven Plaut, an associate professor of business administration at Haifa, who paid for the IsraCampus advertisement. "They are using their positions within Israeli academia to basically promote an anti-Israel political agenda. Other people have the right to know what they're doing."

But Menachem Klein, a political-science professor at the right-leaning Bar-Ilan University who feels his left-wing views are stifled there, said those who categorized professors according to their political views do not understand the purpose of academic life.

"Academic research cannot be measured according to loyalty to a policy or to nationalism," said Mr. Klein. "The question is not whether I am a good Israeli scholar but whether I am a good scholar, period. I feel that Israeli academia is losing its universal humanistic base because of what's going on in general society and the conflict with Palestinians."

Lecturing Aboard the 9:04 to Tel Aviv, Israel's Train of Thought

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 15, 2009

Jonathan Nackstrand, AFP, Getty Images

Israeli rail commuters get a lecture about Einstein's love letters from Hanoch Gutfreund, a professor emeritus of physics at Hebrew U. of Jerusalem.

By Matthew Kalman

Albert Einstein, who explained his theory of relativity using the metaphor of a sealed railway carriage, probably did not foresee the day when professors would turn a commuter train into a lecture hall to convey his ideas.

But this month, Israeli commuters on the 9:04 from Platform Four at Modiin Central to Tel Aviv were treated to an academic lecture on Einstein's love letters to his two wives and various mistresses. It was the first in a series of railway lectures titled Scientists on Trains.

Hanoch Gutfreund, a professor emeritus of physics and a former president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, donned a microphone headset and stood in the aisle as he delivered his half-hour lecture.

He warned that love letters like Einstein's, which are stored at the Jewish National and University Library on the campus, are dying out in the age of Twitter and text messaging.

Half of Mr. Gutfreunds listeners had their backs to him, but he took that in stride, along with interruptions from the ticket collector and stops at intermediate stations.

Hebrew University started the lectures in an effort to shed its ivory-tower image as Israeli institutions struggle to convince the public that they urgently need more government support.

Its always a pleasure to find a very responsive and attentive audience, and I was surprised to find it in a passenger car on a train, Mr. Gutfreund said afterward. Einstein himself used the metaphor of trains, and next time I have a chance to do it, I will give a whole lecture about that.

One woman asked how long it would take her to get a degree based only on train lectures. Mr. Gutfreunds response was worthy of Einstein himself: It depends on how fast the train is going.

Detentions Leave Palestinian Students in Limbo

David Blumenfeld for The Chronicle

The Ofer military base, near Ramallah, where Ashraf Abuiram, a student at Birzeit U., says he was interrogated. There are 85 Birzeit students still sitting in Israeli jails.

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 8, 2009

By Matthew Kalman
Birzeit, West Bank

Ashraf Abuiram should have graduated from college long ago, but his life took an unexpected turn.

In late 2005, when he was a second-year student pursuing a degree in sociology at Birzeit University, 20 jeeps carrying 100 Israeli soldiers showed up at his home in the dead of night. He was arrested, detained without a trial, and spent a year in a prison camp in the south of Israel before being released and allowed to return to college.

Mr. Abuiram was suspected of aiding terrorist organizations but never charged with any crime. His story is not an uncommon one.

Anan Quzmar, director of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit U., tries to keep updated on the cycle of arrests and releases. Former prisoners "are weakened on the inside," he says. "I can see them defeated."

David Blumenfeld for The Chronicle

Anan Quzmar, director of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit U., tries to keep updated on the cycle of arrests and releases. Former prisoners "are weakened on the inside," he says. "I can see them defeated."

Sahar Francis, director of Addameer Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association, in Ramallah, says the broad use of administrative detention orders makes it nearly impossible for detainees to enjoy legal protection.

David Blumenfeld for The Chronicle

Sahar Francis, director of Addameer Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association, in Ramallah, says the broad use of administrative detention orders makes it nearly impossible for detainees to enjoy legal protection.

David Blumenfeld for The Chronicle

Ashraf Abuiram, a Palestinian student who was detained by the Israelis for a year without trial, says that he has never engaged in terrorist activities but that his empathy for Palestinian militants has grown.

Interviews conducted by The Chronicle with students, former prisoners, activists, and faculty members at universities in the West Bank suggest that a number of Palestinian students have been held for long periods of time without trial and with no evidence provided that they committed any crime. A senior Israeli military prosecutor interviewed for this article adamantly rejects this argument, saying that all detainees are held based on solid evidence and are provided multiple reviews and protections during their imprisonment.

Palestinian-student involvement in terrorist activities has been well documented. Still, the continuous threat of arrest by Israeli security forces in the West Bank, who frequently detain Palestinian students and faculty members for questioning, has led some students to switch majors and has persuaded many students and professors to stay away from even the most innocent political involvement.

Mr. Abuiram is one of 411 Birzeit students who have been detained by Israeli security forces since the university began keeping detailed records in November 2003. Right now, 85 Birzeit students are sitting in Israeli jails. Of those, 44 have been convicted of various terrorism-related charges; 26 are awaiting trial; nine are in "administrative detention," which allows a local military commander to detain prisoners without trial; and six are undergoing interrogation following their arrests. The most recent arrest was on November 3.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Information, some 720 Palestinian students have been detained by Israel in the nine years since the outbreak of the second intifada, in September 2000. Birzeit appears to have been a particular target. Its students account for more than half of all student detentions, and its past three student-council heads were all arrested and held for months on end.

The Israeli Security Agency, more commonly known by its Hebrew initials, Shin Bet, says it has good reason to focus on students in its efforts to prevent Palestinian terrorism. Contrary to the perception of Palestinian suicide bombers as desperate refugees, a study of 87 attackers from 2000 to 2004, published by the U.S.-based research group Economists for Peace and Security, found that 38 percent were university students or graduates at the time of the attacks.

The Shin Bet also believes that students and universities provide the leadership-and-planning infrastructure for terrorist operations—most notably through the Hamas student organization Kutla al-Islamiya.

"Terrorist organizations perceive the universities in the territories and their students as an attractive target for spotting and recruiting of activists, since the students are intellectual, politically aware, motivated young people who possess leadership skills," says a 2009 Shin Bet report.

A Pattern of Involvement

Many of the Palestinian students arrested by the Israelis were clearly involved in murderous attacks. They include Ahlam Tamimi, a communications student from Ramallah sentenced to 16 life sentences for escorting a suicide bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in August 2001. The bomber detonated a guitar case filled with explosives, killing 15 and injuring more than 100. Five weeks earlier, Ms. Tamimi had planted a bomb concealed in a can of beer at a Jerusalem supermarket.

At the height of the intifada, when An-Najah National University, another West Bank institution, produced eight suicide bombers in less than a year, the Hamas student society's Web site hailed them as "heroes," describing them as "leaders who spread the light with their blood and chart with their lives the annals of glory."

The Shin Bet says it has arrested at least 12 students since the start of 2009 who are actively engaged in terrorist activity.

But the students, activists, and faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle say that Israeli security forces regularly detain students and professors on the thinnest of evidence, and that administrative detention offers few rights for the accused.

Asked specific questions by The Chronicle about individual prisoners and cases, the Shin Bet refused to comment on most cases, and so it is impossible to corroborate the students' stories in detail. But the patterns of arrest and detention were reflected across more than a dozen interviews with students, faculty members, human-rights experts, and lawyers familiar with the issues.

Mr. Abuiram, the sociology student, says things started to go wrong about a year into college when fellow students who had been called in for questioning by Israeli intelligence told him they were being asked about his activities.

Feeling hunted, he transferred to a university in Jordan, but Israeli security personnel began to pull him aside for questioning as he traveled across the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the West Bank. In April 2005, he says, he was summoned for a three-hour interrogation by someone identified to him only as Captain Dudu of the Shin Bet secret service at the Ofer military base near Ramallah.

After a few months, he decided to end his studies in Jordan and return to the West Bank. But in December 2005, hours after he had applied to reregister at Birzeit, Mr. Abuiram says Captain Dudu appeared at his family home at 3 in the morning on a freezing-cold night, accompanied by 20 army jeeps and more than 100 soldiers. The captain called his family out into the street, he says, arrested him, and sent him to a prison camp in southern Israel. He remained in administrative detention for one year.

Lingering Effects

From the moment of his arrest, Mr. Abuiram says, he was never questioned and never charged. He was taken to an Israeli military court several times to extend the detention order but was never allowed to see any evidence against him or to speak to his lawyer except in the court.

He was taken to the Ketziot prison camp in the far south of Israel, where he lived in a tent with 19 other prisoners. Their tent was one of six within a walled compound with six showers and exercise space. He was released exactly one year later, in December 2006, and warned that he was being closely monitored and should not resume his previous activities.

He still has no idea why he was arrested.

"I'm just a normal student at the university like everyone else," says Mr. Abuiram. His penetrating stare and prematurely graying close-cropped hair are the only possible clues to his harsh experiences as he talks in measured tones about interrogation, arrest, and detention. "I'm involved in a bit of political activity, not anything that's linked to anything outside the university, but student-union activity to try and achieve student demands from the university."

He flatly denies any involvement in terrorism or violence or membership in any group outside the university. During the single interrogation with Captain Dudu, he says, it became clear that the Israelis suspected he was involved with underground terrorist cells of the PFLP, the PLO group that assassinated the Israeli tourism minister Rechavam Zeevi in 2001.

Another Birzeit student, who asked that his name not be published, says he was snatched off the street by Israeli soldiers in January 2001 and held for 12 days at the Beit El military base north of Ramallah before being released in the pouring rain miles from his home.

The former engineering student says he had never been remotely involved in any militant activity, but in September 2003 he was arrested again and spent three months in the Ketziot prison camp. On his first night home, he was arrested again and taken to the Russian Compound—a security facility that houses Jerusalem's police headquarters and the Shin Bet interrogation center—for questioning.

There he was held in a tiny cell and interrogated for 18 hours at a time. After 70 days, he was allowed to see a lawyer for five minutes, and after 125 days he was moved to another prison in southern Israel where he was held for 20 months, until June 2006, when he was put on trial and sentenced to 28 months in jail for being "an active participant in the intifada."

He was returned to the Ketziot prison camp for three months and then to a jail near Nazareth for one month. He was finally released in January 2007.

The student said the only evidence provided at his trial was his one-time participation in a small demonstration near the university.

"They never found anything to accuse me of. There were no specific accusations that I even knew anyone involved in militant activity," he says.

"I have been at university for eight years now, while four classes have graduated including all my friends and contemporaries," he told The Chronicle. "Some teachers in the labs are now younger than me. All my dreams are about jail. I've never had a nice dream where I wake up happy."

Apart from the delay, the continued arrests persuaded him to drop his engineering courses.

"Electrical engineering was my dream and my hobby. I was top of my school in physics," he says. "But the Israeli interrogators in the Russian Compound said: 'Electrical engineering is dangerous for us. You will use the knowledge against us.' So I changed to media studies because I don't want to be arrested every year. I want them to change their view of me."

He was willing to speak about his experience, but only on the condition of anonymity. "I don't want the Israelis to notice me. I don't want to go back to prison."

Helpless and Defeated

Faculty members on West Bank campuses say they have seen dramatic changes take place among students who have been targets of questioning or arrests. Some, like the former engineering student, switch majors. Others avoid any group activities that could remotely be perceived as student activism.

Anan Quzmar, director of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University, tries to keep updated on the cycle of arrests and releases. He says the effects are obvious on the campus.

"Ex-prisoners face difficulties. It decreases their academic performance, and after being in prison they find it hard to get back into a university atmosphere. All their friends have graduated. They are weakened on the inside. I can see them defeated."

"One of the main effects is this helplessness," agrees Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law faculty at Birzeit. He himself has been arrested three times, most recently in 1986 when he led a sit-down protest of staff members and students at an Israeli checkpoint near the university. He was upset because the checkpoint was delaying students for so long that he would often end up with only half his class.

"I was not affiliated at all to any political movement. But the last detention led me to take a decision that even if there is something, I do not have to be involved," he says.

Mr. Abdel-Jawad describes himself as "a nonviolent intellectual" and says he avoids doing anything that might get him arrested again. He avoids going to trouble spots even as an observer "because I am afraid that one way or another I will be caught by accident."

At An-Najah National University, in Nablus, Akram Daoud, dean of the law faculty, is still trying to understand the case of his star commercial-law lecturer, Ghassan Khaled, who was arrested in January 2008, held and interrogated for 20 days before being released, and then re-arrested in March 2008. Mr. Daoud says Mr. Khaled remains in administrative detention, although the Israeli army says they have no record of his being currently in detention.

"There are no charges. This was the first time he was arrested. He is religious. He is someone who prays and sometimes talks in the mosques, but he's not connected to any kind of political party," says Mr. Daoud. "They couldn't prove that he has any link with any political party—this is why they are going to put him in administrative detention, because they don't have any charges against him. This guy has very close connections to Israelis from the peace movement—they are coming daily to his house. He has many friends in Israel and among the Israeli people."

'Activism Is Illegal'

Sahar Francis, director of Addameer Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association, in Ramallah, says the widespread use of administrative detention orders makes it almost impossible for detainees to enjoy legal protection. Addameer is campaigning on behalf of another Birzeit student, Arafat Daoud, a third-year sociology major who has been in administrative detention since 2006.

Contacted by The Chronicle, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said in a written statement that Mr. Daoud is in administration detention "due to his involvement in military activity which endangers the security in the area." The spokesman noted that Mr. Daoud's case was due for review last week.

Administrative detention was an emergency measure introduced in 1945 under the British Mandate, the League of Nations government established in Palestine after World War I. The Israeli army, which continues to apply British Mandate law to the West Bank, updated the regulations through military orders issued in 1970 and 1988, allowing the local military commander to detain prisoners without trial, based on confidential intelligence from the Shin Bet, if the commander believes the prisoner poses a danger to the security of the state.

"For Israel, activism is illegal," says Ms. Francis. "They use administrative detention when the evidence comes from collaborators or agents. They have effectively criminalized all student activities."

Lt. Col. Maurice Hirsch, a senior Israeli military prosecutor, told The Chronicle that the lengthy detention of innocent Palestinians as described by these interviewees was "almost impossible in reality" because of a system of legal checks and balances and an appeals process that allowed access to judicial review all the way to Israel's high court.

"The legal basis for administrative detention in Judea and Samaria is Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which specifically states that a conquering army has the right to hold persons who pose a threat to the security of the region in administrative detention," says Mr. Hirsch.

He says the measure is used only "as a last resort" where exposing the evidence in open court would endanger sources, or where no crime has yet been committed but there is firm intelligence that a terrorist act is being planned.

He rejects accusations that the army is abusing its powers in order to intimidate Palestinians or punish them for nonviolent political activity.

"The very basic requirement before every administrative-detention order is handed down is that it can be proven by the evidence supplied by the security forces that this person poses an immediate and severe danger to the security of the region. It has no connection to that person's vocation and no connection to that person's political views in any way, shape, or form," he says.

Mr. Hirsch says Israeli procedures go far beyond the demands of international law, requiring each administrative-detention order to be reviewed every few months, when statistics show that military judges, military appeals judges, or the Israeli high court change or overturn the orders in nearly half the cases.

As for Mr. Abuiram, he is in his final year of study.

He dropped out several times after his release, and assiduously avoids anything that could be remotely construed as a political activity. But his empathy for Palestinian militants has only increased.

"I used to respect them before getting into prison because they are defending themselves," he says. "Even before getting to prison I could understand everything about them, even if they kill civilians. And you can write that. I can understand anything that the Palestinians did against the occupation."

Israel Deports a Bethlehem U. Student Because She Is From Gaza

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
October 29, 2009

By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

A student in her final year of work at Bethlehem University was deported last night to her home in Gaza by Israeli authorities, despite appeals by the university and human-rights groups after she was arrested on Wednesday at a military checkpoint near Bethlehem, in the West Bank.

Berlanty Azzam, who is 21 and has been studying business administration and translation at Bethlehem since 2005, was stopped at a roadside checkpoint in the West Bank and detained because she is a resident of Gaza.

The Israeli military has banned Palestinian residents of Gaza from studying at Palestinian universities in the West Bank. Two years ago, it began arresting Palestinians with Gaza identity cards and sending them back to the embattled coastal strip.

Ms. Azzam told The Chronicle that she was handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to an unknown destination by Israeli security forces. It wasn't until they removed her blindfold that she discovered she was being dumped across the border into Gaza at midnight, with no warning and no means of finding her way home in the dark. She said she was "terrified."

Israeli officials said she had "cynically used permission given to her in 2005 to stay for four years illegally in Bethlehem."

But human-rights lawyers said the Israeli army had broken an understanding not to deport her before her case could be brought before a judge. Noting that another Gaza resident arrested at the same time at the same checkpoint was not deported, they accused the Israeli army of "a naked attempt to evade judicial review."

Bethlehem University administrators urged supporters on Wednesday to contact the Israeli military authorities to protest the arrest. "Let them know that you demand that they release Berlanty Azzam immediately so that she can resume and complete her last year of studies," the university said in its message.

Ms. Azzam, who is due to complete her bachelor's degree in December, began her studies in Bethlehem in 2005 after the Israeli authorities granted her a permit to travel across Israel from Gaza to the West Bank. The travel permit has not been renewed, so she has stayed in Bethlehem since then to finish her degree and has been unable to see her family for four years.

In August 2007, Israel's Supreme Court upheld Israeli military policy denying Gaza residents the right to stay in the West Bank but asked the army to consider exceptions. Trying to take advantage of that ruling, Bethlehem University created a scholarship program for 16 students from the Gaza Strip, but in the current academic year, all 16 candidates were refused entry by Israel.

Enforcement of the deportation policy had seemed to halt after protests from human-rights groups, but it has intensified again in the past few weeks, according to Gisha, an Israeli human-rights organization that campaigns for freedom of movement for Palestinians.

"I spoke to her today for about 10 minutes until the army took away her cellphone," Sari Bashi, executive director of Gisha, told The Chronicle. "She's terrified. She's 21. She has never been in detention and doesn't know what's happening to her."

In the past, when human-rights groups have interceded before detainees have been deported, Israel's Supreme Court has ruled against the army and allowed Gaza residents to remain in the West Bank. In most cases, however, Palestinians are deported before anyone hears about their arrest, and it has proved almost impossible to get them out of Gaza once they have been returned there.

According to Ms. Bashi, Ms. Azzam's case is the sixth in less than two weeks involving Gazans arrested at the same checkpoint, the only passage permitted to Palestinians between the southern and northern sections of the West Bank.

This policy of deporting people to Gaza because of their identity cards is pending before the Supreme Court, said Ms. Bashi. "We have asked the military to stop doing this at least until the court rules. Instead we end up playing cat and mouse with the military."

Israel Detains a Bethlehem U. Student Because She Is From Gaza

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
October 28, 2009
By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

Bethlehem University and human-rights groups are appealing to Israeli authorities not to deport a final-year student back to her home in Gaza after she was arrested on Wednesday at a military checkpoint near Bethlehem, in the West Bank.

Berlanty Azzam, who is 21 and has been studying business administration and translation at Bethlehem since 2005, was stopped at a roadside checkpoint in the West Bank and detained because she is a resident of Gaza.

The Israeli military has banned Palestinian residents of Gaza from studying at Palestinian universities in the West Bank. Two years ago, it began arresting Palestinians with Gaza identity cards and sending them back to the embattled coastal strip.

Ms. Azzam is being held at a detention center inside Israel pending her deportation.

"We need your help," Bethlehem University administrators wrote in a message to supporters on Wednesday, urging them to contact the Israeli military authorities to protest the arrest. "Let them know that you demand that they release Berlanty Azzam immediately so that she can resume and complete her last year of studies," the university said.

Ms. Azzam, who is due to complete her bachelor's degree in December, began her studies in Bethlehem in 2005 after the Israeli authorities granted her a permit to travel across Israel from Gaza to the West Bank. The travel permit has not been renewed, so she has stayed in Bethlehem since then to finish her degree and has been unable to see her family for four years.

In August 2007, Israel's Supreme Court upheld Israeli military policy denying Gaza residents the right to stay in the West Bank but asked the army to consider exceptions. Trying to take advantage of that ruling, Bethlehem University created a scholarship program for 16 students from the Gaza Strip, but in the current academic year, all 16 candidates were refused entry by Israel.

Enforcement of the deportation policy had seemed to halt after protests from human-rights groups, but it has intensified again in the past few weeks, according to Gisha, an Israeli human-rights organization that campaigns for freedom of movement for Palestinians.

"I spoke to her today for about 10 minutes until the army took away her cellphone," Sari Bashi, executive director of Gisha, told The Chronicle. "She's terrified. She's 21. She has never been in detention and doesn't know what's happening to her."

Ms. Azzam is being detained illegally, Ms. Bashi said. "We asked the army to let her go," she added, but "they said no. They did agree to wait until after our lawyer visits in the morning. They won't deport her pending an opportunity for our lawyer to file a court petition."

In the past, when human-rights groups have interceded before detainees have been deported, Israel's Supreme Court has ruled against the army and allowed Gaza residents to remain in the West Bank. In most cases, however, Palestinians are deported before anyone hears about their arrest, and it has proved almost impossible to get them out of Gaza once they have been returned there.

According to Ms. Bashi, Ms. Azzam's case is the sixth in less than two weeks involving Gazans arrested at the same checkpoint, the only passage permitted to Palestinians between the southern and northern sections of the West Bank.

This policy of deporting people to Gaza because of their identity cards is pending before the Supreme Court, said Ms. Bashi. "We have asked the military to stop doing this at least until the court rules. Instead we end up playing cat and mouse with the military."

Lawyers plan to petition the Supreme Court on behalf of Ms. Azzam on Thursday.

Israeli officials were unavailable for comment on Wednesday.

Hundreds of Palestinian Students Are Blocked From Travel to Foreign Universities

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
DAILY NEWS TICKER
22 October 2009
With the 2009-10 academic year under way, 838 Palestinian students are still waiting for the authorization that will enable them to leave the Gaza Strip for overseas universities. The Israeli human-rights group Gisha-Legal Center for Freedom of Movement says that 1,983 such students have been accepted into educational institutions abroad and registered for permits to exit via the Rafah border crossing since the start of the year, but only 1,145 have managed to pass through the crossing because of Egyptian restrictions. Approximately 50 other students have left via Israel through the Erez crossing.

Israel's Illegal Immigrants — and Their Children

By Matthew Kalman / Tel Aviv Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009

Two Filipino women in the flat they rent in Tel Aviv. Like many other Filipino migrant workers in Israel, they work as caregivers to the elderly Judah Passow / Getty

Mila Valdez, 40, lives near the central bus station in Tel Aviv. It is thousands of miles from where she was born, in the Philippines. She and her 7-year-old son live a cramped existence in three small rooms plus kitchen and bathroom — plus eight other people. But she is fighting for the right to stay in Israel.

Valdez is among 200,000 foreign workers from East Asia, Africa and Latin America who have found their way to Israel. About half of them are illegal, as Valdez is now. She went to Israel legally but her visa lapsed at about the time she gave birth to her son Jerry. Her apartment is among the Eritrean cafés, Sudanese restaurants and Filipino bars in the streets around the old central bus station — underneath a police advertisement inviting residents to inform on their neighbors' visa status. "I am working as a house cleaner because I'm now illegal," Valdez tells TIME. "My husband was caught in 2007 and he was deported. My son Jerry loves Israel. We're hoping to stay."

And it is Jerry who may be key to her chances. He and another 1,200 children are at the heart of a political battle that cuts across traditional political loyalties, raising fundamental questions about the mission of the Jewish state. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, leader of the ultra-orthodox Shas Party, wants to expel the foreign workers, many of whom are devout Christians, like Valdez, a Roman Catholic. Yishai says their presence "is liable to damage the state's Jewish identity, constitute a demographic threat and increase the danger of assimilation." The government says the illegals and their children must leave Israel once the school year ends in June.

A new police unit, Oz (from the Hebrew for "strength"), has been rounding up illegals and shipping them home. Since July, 800 have been deported while more than 2,000 have left voluntarily. But the government decision to expel children born in Israel has split the ruling Likud party. "Those 1,200 children that were born in Israel and didn't ever know another country are not to be blamed. They should stay here and we should resolve their status," Likud minister Limor Livnat tells TIME. The government is still debating the order and it may yet be countermanded or changed. It has happened before. In 2006, Israel naturalized 567 families with school-age children.

The municipality of Tel Aviv, where most of the immigrant workers live, together with about 17,000 refugees mainly from Darfur and Eritrea, provides free health care and day care for children, including vaccinations and education. Adult health services are provided by Physicians for Human Rights. The Hotline for Migrant Workers has people on call 24/7 to provide welfare and legal advice. "Whoever is in our territory deserves our services," deputy mayor Yael Dayan tells TIME. "It's not a question of grace, it's really a question of right. It's not doing them a favor and it's not how moved we are by these little children. They have added a lot to Tel Aviv society in many ways."

The uncertainty of residency and the constant threat of arrest takes its toll on the children. Parents report nightmares, bed-wetting and clinginess. "I've been there in that situation they are going through right now. I was illegal and I was afraid whenever I saw men in uniforms," says Jenalyn Zuno, 22, a Filipina granted permanent residency in 2006.

The problem may be becoming cyclical. Israel started recruiting workers from East Asia 20 years ago, after the first intifadeh ended the flood of day laborers from the West Bank and Gaza. The migrants support entire families back in their home countries. Noa Kaufman of the Israeli Children pressure group, says Israel encourages deporting workers after five years or when they have children. But then those departing workers are simply replaced by new arrivals who go through the same turmoil. "The recruitment companies only get money for new workers. If a worker moves jobs once he's here, the recruitment company doesn't get any money," she says. "It doesn't make sense that there is no naturalization process for someone who was born here or someone who lived here as a refugee for 10 years. They are people, not machines. You can't expect them not to fall in love, not to give birth."

'You're a terrorist': Tony Blair taunted by young Palestinian in West Bank mosque

DAILY MAIL
21st October 2009

By Matthew Kalman

Tony Blair had to be rescued by bodyguards as he visited a West Bank mosque yesterday when a Palestinian man approached him shouting: 'You are a terrorist!'

The security breach occurred as the former prime minister was visiting an ancient mosque during an official trip to the city of Hebron.

The protester, a local man carrying a bag who was praying when Mr Blair and his entourage entered, was backed into a corner by guards who tried to shut him up.

Taking no chances: A bodyguard (left) scuffles with the Palestinian man after he shouts 'You are a terrorist' at Tony Blair

'He is not welcome in the land of Palestine,' the man shouted before he was dragged away by Palestinian security forces.

The man, a supporter of the Islamic Liberation Party Hizbut-Tahrir, was released after Blair left.

Mr Blair - the Special Representative in the Middle East for the 'Quartet' of the UN, EU, U.S. and Russia - gave a tight-lipped smile and tried to wave the incident off, but his Palestinian hosts were visibly upset by the lapse.

'You know, he made his protest and that's fair enough,' Mr Blair, 56, told reporters after the man was arrested.

'I think it's important for you guys as well to not always mistake the protest for the general view of the whole population.'

Verbal attack: The man, who is clutching a bag in his left hand, raises his right arm as he shouts towards Tony Blair in the Hebron mosque

Still shouting, the man raises his bag as he struggles with guards, who quickly surround him

The guards push the shouting man backwards before eventually pinning him up against the wall behind him

Mr Blair, right, continued the tour through the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron

Mr Blair (centre) is joined by Middle East dignitaries as he tours the mosque

The incident took place at the Ibrahimi Mosque, the sanctuary marking the location of the tombs of Muslim worshippers were gunned down by an Israeli extremist in the mid-1990s.

Mr Blair's spokesman Matthew Doyle said that at no time was the former prime minister in any danger, adding: 'He was on the opposite side of the mosque and he was just shouting. Mr Blair is used to being heckled.'

The fracas comes just days after Mr Blair was accused of being a war criminal by the father of a British soldier killed in Iraq, while attending a service at St Paul's Cathedral to remember the war dead.

'You've got blood on your hands': Peter Brierley, left, also verbally attacked Mr Blair over the death of his son Shaun, right, who was killed while fighting in Iraq

Security has been a constant concern-since Mr Blair's appointment two years ago.

The Daily Mail last Saturday

Last month, the head of a Palestinian group in Gaza that supports Al Qaeda revealed they had tried to assassinate 'the infidel' Mr Blair and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter but the plots were foiled by Gaza's ruling group Hamas.

Mr Blair is accompanied by a permanent four-man security detail from the Metropolitan Police Diplomatic Protection Unit.

He travels in a bullet-and bomb-proof jeep provided by the United Nations.

Palestinians say Mr Blair has little to show for more than two years as the Quartet envoy.

He is also hated by many Arabs for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq as then U.S. president George W. Bush's 'puppet', for declining to speak out against Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and for what they perceive as his pro-Israel bias when prime minister.

Ken Loach film money to promote Israeli cinema

Matthew Kalman Blog,
October 11, 2009
Ken Loach, the British film director who has become a leading light of the campaign to boycott Israel, will see the profits from his new film used – to promote Israeli cinema.
Nurit Shani, the cinema distributor who handles Loach’s films in Israel, announced before the Israeli premiere of his new movie “Looking for Eric” that she would dedicate the profits to distributing Israeli films worldwide.
Recently, Loach has led cultural boycott campaigns against Israeli films in Canada, Australia and the Edinburgh Film Festival. Loach’s ultimatum that he would withdraw from Edinburgh unless festival organizers return an Israeli travel grant for a young Israeli film director drew criticisms of blackmail.
Even Vanessa Redgrave, the outspoken pro-Palestinian campaigner who was filmed brandishing a Kalashnikov in a Palestinian refugee campaign, this week denounced Loach’s boycott tactics in a letter to the New York Review of Books.
"If attitudes are hardened on both sides, if those who are fighting within their own communities for peace are insulted, where then is the hope? The point finally is not to grandstand but to inch toward a two-state solution and a world in which both nations can exist, perhaps not lovingly, but at least in peace," said Redgrave's letter.
"I believe it is any artist's right to express his opinion, and I have therefore always given his films a screen,” his Israeli distributor told the “Looking for Eric” premiere audience at the Haifa Film Festival on Sunday. “Unfortunately, in the past year I discovered that Ken Loach himself does not share my views. The original artist, who I considered a great humanist, has turned out to be a man who does not believe in freedom of expression for people whose opinions oppose his own."

Israelis divided over Dachau as sister city: Tel Aviv suburb Rosh Ha-Ayin's mayor is son of survivor

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, October 11th 2009

By Matthew Kalman
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

JERUSALEM - Of all the towns in the world, an Israeli mayor wants to take as a sister city a Bavarian burg whose name sends chills up the spines of Holocaust survivors: Dachau.

Even more astounding, Mayor Moshe Sinai of Rosh Ha-Ayin, a Tel Aviv suburb of 40,000, is the son of a Dachau concentration camp survivor.

Sinai says the German town shouldn't be shunned for its infamous past. "The majority of people in Dachau weren't yet born when the Holocaust happened," he said.

Besides, said Sinai, the Nazis "beat Jews and murdered Jews everywhere."

Still, Sinai's move has outraged many Israelis - especially the remaining survivors.

"I don't understand how they could do something like this, because of the symbolism," said Moshe Zanbar, a prominent Israeli politician who was a teenage Dachau inmate. "A special agreement between Dachau and an Israeli town is too much for me."

Noah Kliger, a historian and Holocaust survivor, said reaching out to receptive Germans is fine, but embracing Dachau is an "act of disturbing stupidity."

"Can a few apparent friends of Israel erase the name and the past of Dachau?" he asked.

In New York, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League took the opposite view, adding "I applaud the mayor."

"I think it's a positive sign of moving forward," Foxman said. "I want the new generation of kids in Dachau to know there is a special relationship with Israel. That doesn't mean you forget the past."

Located near Munich, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp and a prototype for death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. About a third of the estimated 30,000 prisoners murdered there were Jews.

When U.S. forces liberated Dachau in 1945, they made local residents come see the emaciated prisoners and the gas chambers operating downwind of them.

"I have nothing against the new generation of Germans, and we must not hate all of them, but their parents who lived through that era saw us and knew what was happening," Zanbar said. "We were worked to death there."

Sinai said Dachau Mayor Peter Brgel suggested twinning their cities in an effort to bring young people from around the world to Dachau to study the Holocaust.

"When I visited Dachau and the mayor accompanied me to the concentration camp, I saw his face," Sinai said. "I saw how much he regrets the past and I saw his willingness to build a new future for the youth in his city."

Sinai said their aim is "to build new bridges for the future, to build a connection between the children of both towns, learn about the past and guarantee that maybe in the future we will have another world, and draw the lessons from the past."

A Palestinian Brewery Grows in the West Bank

By MATTHEW KALMAN / TAYBEH
Thursday, Oct. 08, 2009

Madees Khoury draws pints of Taybeh Golden draught beer during the Palestinian brewery's annual Oktoberfest in Taybeh in the West Bank

Madees Khoury's favorite days are the ones where she wakes at 5 A.M., slips out of the house, enters the huge shed in the yard and, still in her pajamas, climbs the ladder to the top of the stainless steel tanks to begin brewing beer. A graduate of Hellenic College, Boston, Khoury, 24, is the only woman brewer — or brewster — in the Middle East. She is being groomed by her family to take over the Taybeh brewery, home of the only Palestinian beer.

With just 2,000 residents, Taybeh is the last remaining all-Christian village in the Holy Land. It rests on barren biblical hilltops between Ramallah and Jericho that have barely changed since Jesus stayed here. Madees's father and uncle were born here, and moved to Boston. When they returned to start the brewery in 1995, they met open hostility from the 16 Muslim villages surrounding them. Alcohol is banned by Islam. (Watch TIME's video "West Bank Brew: The Beer That Made Taybeh Famous.")

Today, Taybeh Beer is a potent symbol of the emerging Palestinian state and its tiny Christian minority — which is less than 2% of the population. The brewery turns a tidy profit, produces 600,000 litres a year and is brewed under license in Germany. Half the sales are within the West Bank, 40% go to Israel, and the rest are exports to Japan. Taybeh even had a nearby rabbi certify its product as kosher. Last year the brewery introduced a zero-alcohol brew for Muslims. Taybeh billboards with the slogan "Drink Palestinian — Taste the Revolution" tower over the main street of Ramallah. "Taybeh beer is our way of struggling," Madees Khoury tells TIME. "This is our resistance to the occupation — just to make beer and make people happy." (Read a story about the constraints on doing business in Palestine.)

Christians have fled the Holy Land in recent decades. There are more Taybeh natives living in Michigan than in the village. Madees hopes to inspire others to return. "I hope people look at me as a role model," says Khoury, adding that she supports "any Palestinian that lives here, goes to study abroad, then decides to move back to Palestine and invest their knowledge and their experience into anything in the country."

Last weekend, more than 10,000 visitors thronged Taybeh village for the fifth annual Oktoberfest, a celebration of music, dance, food and beer. Villagers sold more olive oil, honey, embroidery and other items in those two days than in the whole of 2009. But it wasn't easy for Taybeh to learn to thrive — and still isn't. After a promising start, business collapsed during the Palestinian intifada uprising. The Khoury brothers weathered the storm but new restrictions at the Israeli security barrier have now turned what used to be an hour-long delivery to Tel Aviv into an expensive two-day journey. Even the fresh water piped from a spring two miles away is under Israeli control and only flows for half the week. (See a brief history of oktoberfest.)

There are more serious hazards. Days before the festival, a car belonging to Madees's uncle David, who is also mayor, was torched, for still unknown reasons, outside the municipality building during a council meeting. A couple of years ago, he was shot at and someone tried to burn down a new commercial center he was constructing. In 2005, 14 homes were torched and the brewery nearly destroyed when a mob descended on Taybeh after a love affair between a Taybeh man and a Muslim woman from the neighboring village.

But the mayor, who still has a business interest in the brewery, told TIME he was not discouraged. "We are trying to show all foreigners and locals that we are a people that love life and liberty and are willing to live in peace with our neighbors, whether Jews or Muslims, and to show the other face of Palestine, that we are not terrorists," he says. "Some people want to interrupt my giving to my village," says the mayor. "I came after 30 years being in the U.S. in Boston. I left all the wealth. I left all the relaxing on the beaches and everything else and I came because I want to do something for Palestine, to invest in Palestine first. I want to do something for Taybeh. I want to help raise the living standards. I want to help create jobs in this village. I want to clean up the city. I want to put Taybeh on the map."

Video - West Bank Brew: The Beer That Made Taybeh Famous

Palestinian University Is Shut Down Amid Fight Over Control

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
DAILY NEWS TICKER
October 08, 2009

The Palestinian minister of education, Lamis Al-Alami, today announced the closure of Gaza City's Al-Aqsa University after the Hamas government, which controls the coastal strip, fired its president on Wednesday, according to the Ma-an News Agency. The university is one of the last major institutions in Gaza associated with Fatah, Hamas's bitter rival for Palestinian leadership. In a written statement, the minister said that she considered what the de facto government had done to be illegal and that she was closing the university according to the powers given her under the Palestinian Law of Higher Education.

Fatah Accuses Hamas of Seizing Control of University in Gaza City

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
DAILY NEWS TICKER
October 7, 2009

Fatah accused the rival Hamas faction of stealing control of Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City on Wednesday after the Hamas-led government in Gaza fired the university's president and replaced him with a three-member council. In a statement, Fatah officials alleged that "Hamas stormed the university in a barbaric way and took over it by force." The university was one of the last Fatah-affiliated strongholds in Gaza. It suffered some $1.5-million worth of damage during Israel's incursion into Gaza in January.

Anger as Israeli mayor plans to twin town with Dachau

DAILY MAIL
7th October 2009

By Matthew Kalman

An Israeli mayor has caused uproar with plans for his town to become the first to twin with a German town which housed a Nazi death camp.

Rosh Ha-Ayin, a middle-class dormitory town about 15 miles from Tel Aviv with a population of 40,000, has twinned with the infamous Bavarian town of Dachau, home of the first Nazi concentration camp about 12 miles from Munich.

More than 200,000 people from 30 countries were imprisoned at Dachau, a third of them Jews. Nearly 60,000 were murdered by the Nazis.

The Israeli town of Rosh Ha-Ayin which is to be twinned with the German town of Dachau

The camp was erected by the Nazis in March 1933 and carried the famous, cynical slogan “Arbeit Marcht Frei” above the entrance to its slave labour camp years before the same sign was placed above Auschwitz in Poland.

SS officers were trained there before being sent to larger death camps in Germany and Poland.

Many Israeli towns are twinned with similar-sized towns in Germany, and since the Jewish state was founded in 1948 the two countries have fostered close diplomatic and cultural ties in an effort to repair the damage done by the Nazi murder of six million Jews under Hitler.

But no Israeli town has ever twinned with those places that hosted the gas chambers and crematoria.

Moshe Zanbar, a prominent Israeli businessman and politician who survived Dachau as a slave labourer after being sent there aged 18, said he was 'appalled.'

'I don’t understand how they could do something like this, because of the symbolism,' he said.

'I have nothing against the new generation of Germans, and we must not hate all of them, but their parents who lived through that era saw us and knew what was happening.

'We were worked to death there. A special agreement between Dachau and an Israeli town is too much for me.'

Noah Kliger, a Holcoaust survivor and historian, described the twinning as an act of 'disturbing stupidity'.

'Can a few apparent friends of Israel erase the name and the past of Dachau?' he asked.

But Moshe Sinai, the mayor of Rosh Ha-Ayin and a former Israeli diplomat, said the twinning agreement honoured the memory of the Holocaust by bringing the next generation of Israeli and German youth together.

'My family are also Holocaust survivors and my family also suffered from the horrors of the Holocaust and many of them perished. But I also think about the future,' said Sinai.

He said it was ridiculous to discriminate between the people of different German cities because a concentration camp happened to be located there a half century ago.

'There was discrimination and the Kristallnacht in every town in Germany. They beat Jews and murdered Jews everywhere,' he said.

'Either we co-operate with Germany and honestly try to open a new page, and try to learn from the Holocaust to try and prevent more Holocausts, or we have to take Germany and divide it into permitted and non-permitted areas.'

'As local leaders we must think of the future of our children. If youth from Rosh Ha-Ayin learn together with youth from Dachau how to prevent future Holocausts, how to prevent future anti-Semitism, it should be welcomed.

'The majority of people in Dachau weren’t yet born when the Holocaust happened.

'They’ ve been told about the Holocaust and they want to learn from it. To co-operate with them in learning about the Holocaust is the best thing we can do,' he said.

Palestinian Students in Gaza Ask Egypt to Allow Entrance to Universities

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
NEWS TICKER
October 05, 2009, 09:27 AM ET

Palestinian students in Gaza have appealed to Egypt to open the Rafah border crossing so they can begin studying at Egyptian universities. Dozens of students with valid Egyptian residence permits who are enrolled in college in Egypt told the Ma'an news agency their classes had already begun but they were unable to reach them because of border restrictions that limit the number of Palestinians entering Egypt to a few hundred each day, even when the crossing is open.

Israeli University in West Bank Is Disqualified From Architecture Competition

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
NEWS TICKER
September 22, 2009, 08:39 AM ET

An Israeli college that reached the finals of a Spanish environmental-architecture competition has been disqualified because it is situated in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. The college, the Ariel University Center of Samaria, was among 20 university architecture departments from around the world selected for the finals of the Solar Decathlon, sponsored by Spain's Housing Ministry, after a two-year competition. The college, which has 10,000 students, including many Arabs, had been awarded a 100,000-euro grant by the competition's organizers to build a model house for the finals, slated for Madrid in June 2010. But Ariel's involvement was terminated after a campaign led by Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, a pro-Palestinian group.

An Israeli Professor Tests the Limits of Academic Freedom

Ben-Gurion U. of the Negev

Neve Gordon's call for a worldwide boycott of Israel as "an apartheid state" has raised a fierce debate about academic freedom far beyond the confines of his campus at Ben-Gurion U. of the Negev.

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
September 13, 2009

By Matthew Kalman
JERUSALEM

A bitter and very public debate in Israel has raised difficult questions about how far an academic can go in criticizing his own institution while continuing to work there.

Last month Neve Gordon, chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, branded Israel an "apartheid state" in an op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times. He called for an "international boycott" of his country, including his own university.

The university's president, Rivka Carmi, quickly shot back an angry response. In the same newspaper and in a letter to faculty members, she noted that Mr. Gordon, a tenured professor, could not be "readily dismissed." But, she said, he had "forfeited his ability to work effectively within the academic setting."

Both Mr. Gordon's attack on Israel and Ms. Carmi's attack on one of her faculty members have inspired impassioned debates in Israel and beyond.

The Israeli Social Science Network, an online forum that usually carries notices of conferences and opportunities for financial support, was transformed into a heated intellectual battleground as Israeli academics debated the implications for academic freedom in the country. Nearly 200 tenured faculty members in Israel signed a petition supporting Mr. Gordon's right to freedom of expression.

Chilling Factor?

The professor's future at Ben-Gurion seems assured by the legal protection he enjoys through tenure, but many of his colleagues say they find his position untenable. Many others support and admire him, while still others disagree vehemently with his opinions but defend his right to express them. Nagging questions persist about whether the controversy will dissuade junior faculty members and students from freely expressing their opinions.

"I was not surprised by the fact that the president of the university and people in Israel disagreed with me and even disagreed with me vehemently," Mr. Gordon said in an interview with The Chronicle. "I think it's part of some of the people's job, and I think that's what they were supposed to do."

But he said that suggestions he should leave Israel or be sacked "went just overboard."

Ms. Carmi said she had spent years defending the right of her rebellious political-science professor to express his radical views about Israeli policy, but that this time he had gone too far.

"If I had lived in South Africa when it was an apartheid country, I would have left," she told The Chronicle. "I wouldn't be able to live in a country that I believed was an apartheid state."

"I don't understand how he can carry on doing his job in an institution that he is damaging by his very public comments. I don't understand how he can condemn the university and continue to take the salary that it pays," Ms. Carmi said.

"There is an inherent contradiction between calling for academic boycotts and fulfilling the responsibilities of leading an academic department in research collaboration, publications, and international conferences," she said.

Ms. Carmi said Mr. Gordon's opinion essay had branded Ben-Gurion as a radical, left-wing university and was endangering potential donations, crucial for future development. Several major donors have written to say they will no longer support the university unless action is taken against him, she said.

Mr. Gordon said he accepted that there was "tension" between his support for a boycott and his duties as department chairman, and he said he had considered stepping down. But he called Ms. Carmi's comments "a form of harassment and intimidation."

"My stepping down as department chair would have caused so much damage to academic freedom in Israel that we could not do it," he said. "If someone has to lose his position as department chair because of his opinion, however controversial, it creates a precedent."

'A Disservice' to Peace

Alon Tal, a veteran peace activist and associate professor of desert ecology at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at the university, said Mr. Gordon had done "a disservice" to the peace camp and undermined the work toward Israeli-Palestinian coexistence at which the university excels.

"The country is in a state of war—let's not lose that context," Mr. Tal told The Chronicle. "People forget that. And you go to our enemies and you give them comfort and you strengthen their activities, and most of all you take actions that you know will damage your own university that supports you. That I find unacceptable."

He said Mr. Gordon should resign as department head and apologize. "When you take on a position as a head of department, you represent an institution. You don't represent just yourself," Mr. Tal said.

Uri Ram, head of Ben-Gurion's sociology department, agreed but drew different conclusions.

"There is a tension between a call to boycott Israeli universities and working in them and promoting them," he said. "Yet it should be left to Dr. Gordon to decide whether he can perform properly as department chair with this contradiction or not. He should not be sanctioned with discharge because he expressed an opinion. He is entitled unequivocally to freedom of expression."

Mr. Ram said he would resign as department head if Mr. Gordon was forced to step down, and he urged his colleagues to do the same.

'The Stakes Are Quite High'

The online petition in support of Mr. Gordon's academic freedom was started by Alon Harel, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He said he "vehemently" disagreed with Mr. Gordon's opinions but warned that it would be "death for Ben-Gurion University" if Mr. Gordon were not allowed to express them.

"The stakes are quite high. The stakes are the future of Israeli academia," he said. "It would be a great loss to Israeli universities if people completing their Ph.D.'s and looking for a job believe they cannot teach at Ben-Gurion because their positions are ones that the president of the university does not tolerate."

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said he was disturbed by Ms. Carmi's attitude but encouraged by the debate it had aroused.

"The kind of statements that Rivka Carmi has made have an immense chilling effect on untenured faculty from exercising the same freedom of speech," he said. "If Neve Gordon had been untenured and had written this op-ed and then came up for tenure, a president who says this oversteps the boundaries of academic freedom would seem implicitly willing to fire him."

"One of the greatest challenges for any nation-state is to protect the free-speech rights of its citizens and its faculty members during times of war," Mr. Nelson continued. "My own country has repeatedly failed that challenge. Israel is hardly alone in finding it difficult to meet the challenge of sustaining freedoms in wartime. The rest of the countries in the Middle East wouldn't even consider such a thing. In Syria they already would have shot him. In Iran they'd just beat him to death in a jail."

"I do think it is valid in thinking about the status of these freedoms in Israel," Mr. Nelson said, "to recognize that Israel is practically the only country in the Middle East where you could even have this debate."

Antiquities Authority chief: Top scholars were suspected of ties to forgery group

THE JERUSALEM POST
Sep. 8, 2009

MATTHEW KALMAN

A world-famous French scholar who authenticated one of the Israel Museum's prize exhibits and Israel's leading analyst of ancient semitic inscriptions were once suspected of being part of an "international forgery industry," it was revealed on Tuesday.

Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said that both Prof. Andre Lemaire of the Sorbonne and Ada Yardeni, Israel's leading epigrapher, had been under suspicion as the Authority prepared its case against those accused of faking dozens of priceless archeological items, including a burial box possibly connected to Jesus.

Dorfman divulged this information as part of the testimony he was giving at the Jerusalem District Court in the long-running trial of two men accused of dealing in fake antiquities.

The trial, which began in 2005, followed an indictment that Dorfman described at the time as "the tip of the iceberg" of an international forgery network.

Oded Golan, a Tel Aviv collector, is charged with forging the inscription on a 60 cm.-long limestone burial box, or ossuary, that reads "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus."

The ossuary was exhibited in Toronto in 2002 and hailed by scholars as the first physical link ever discovered to the family of Jesus. But when it was returned to Israel, an Antiquities Authority committee of experts determined it was fake.

Golan is also accused of forging an inscribed stone tablet supposedly from the First Temple, and dozens of other ancient items.

Robert Deutsch, a prominent antiquities dealer based in Jaffa, was also charged with forgery, but the prosecution has been forced to retract many of the original charges after they were challenged in court.

Many of the world's top archeological experts have testified as both prosecution and defense witnesses in proceedings that already run to more than 9,000 pages.

Judge Aharon Farkash has wondered aloud in court how he could determine the authenticity of the items if the professors could not agree among themselves.

Deutsch called Dorfman to give evidence as a defense witness after the prosecution refused to put him or his deputy, Uzi Dahari, on the stand.

Dorfman said the anti-theft unit of the Antiquities Authority believed the items were forged by an international group of experts and dealers that included the two defendants.

He said the suspects at one time included Prof. Lemaire, a paleographer at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Lemaire was the first scholar to study an ivory pomegranate believed to have been used in the First Temple. The thumb-sized pomegranate is inscribed in ancient Hebrew: "Sacred donation for the priests in the House of God."

It was purchased nearly 20 years ago by a private philanthropist for $550,000 and donated to the Israel Museum after its authenticity was verified by experts.

Lemaire said he discovered the item in 1979 when an antiquities dealer in the Old City of Jerusalem showed him the tiny ornament over a cup of tea.

Lemaire photographed it and published his findings two years later in the respected Revue Biblique journal. In 1984, he published his findings in English, triggering worldwide interest.

In 2002, Lemaire published the first study of the James ossuary in the Biblical Archeology Review after seeing the burial box at the home of Oded Golan.

The pomegranate was later inspected and the inscription on it found to be suspect by a separate Antiquities Authority inquiry. Dorfman told the court they decided not to bring criminal charges against eight suspects identified in that case.

Lemaire was questioned by Antiquities Authority inspectors during a two-year investigation, but apparently was never told that he was under suspicion.

Under questioning by Deutsch's attorney, Hagai Sitton, Dorfman was challenged to justify the sweeping statements he made at a press conference in December 2005, the day the defendants were charged.

"We know there are antiquity forgeries - it's not a new thing. But the extent and the drama in attempting to fake history didn't allow us as a government body not to become involved," Dorfman told the press conference.

"I believe we have revealed only the tip of the iceberg. This industry encircles the world, involves millions of dollars," he said.

"I said there was an industry involved in making all these fakes," Dorfman told the court on Tuesday. "In my view, it looked like an entire industry, not a single forger."

Dorfman said he took responsibility for the prosecution, which has run into difficulties as the trial has wound on, but Dorfman himself cast doubt on the reliability of much of the testimony of the prosecution's star witness, billionaire antiquities collector Shlomo Moussaieff. According to the indictment, Moussaieff was duped into paying huge sums for several of the allegedly fake items, but his version of events has been repeatedly questioned.

Asked to comment on one story told by Moussaieff, Dorfman responded, "He is not telling the truth, plain and simple."

In another setback for the prosecution, Judge Farkash agreed to recall an expert on isotopes from the Geological Survey of Israel to explain apparent contradictions between testimony given to the court and research submitted to a scientific journal three weeks earlier.