BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY ELECTRIC CAR

Better Place founder Shai Agassi, about to launch the world’s first fleet of all-electric cars in Israel, tells MATTHEW KALMAN he is surprised to find himself alone on the grid

SHAI AGASSI IS OUT FRONT and loving it. Four years after announcing he would launch the world’s first national network for all-electric cars in Israel, his Better Place company is in pole position on the starting-grid in what appears to be a one-car race.
In January, the first consignment of 100 Renault Fluence ZE (“Zero Emissions”) family sedans arrived in Israel. By the end of 2012, hundreds of Israelis will be driving around the country in cars powered only by electric batteries supplied by Better Place. They will be able to trickle-charge their vehicles over several hours at thousands of charge spots at their office, in the streets of major cities, at public parking lots or overnight at their homes. Each full-charged battery will fuel about 100 miles of driving.
For longer distances, drivers will be able to use a national network of swap stations where spent batteries will be replaced by fully-charged batteries in an automated process that takes less time than filling a gasoline tank.
Agassi, a whiz-kid programmer who sold his first company for $400 million in his early thirties, says he is amazed that four years on, with the Israeli network about to go live and more networks under construction in Denmark and Australia – as well as pilot programs in Canada, California and Hawaii – Better Place has no serious competitors.

No competition

“There has never been a technology disruption of this magnitude where one company was left to run with an idea, where no competition showed up in the span of four years,” Agassi tells The Jerusalem Report.
“That to me is astonishing. It’s as if somebody would have left Apple for four years to build an MP3 empire and expected to catch up. In technology, usually one year is enough to create an advantage that is really hard to catch up afterwards.
“We all thought that the car industry would be more pro-active in catching up and what we’re seeing is that the car industry is extremely conservative,” he says.
Agassi, who drove an electric car to commute to his office in Palo Alto before relocating back to Israel, where he was born in 1968, to launch Better Place, is passionate that electric cars are not just a passing trend but a mass-market phenomenon that will sweep the automobile industry. He believes the all-electric Renault Fluence ZE will become a top-selling car in both Israel and in Denmark, where the second Better Place network is planned.
Agassi says the plan he originally announced in 2008 is on track. “By and large we were scarily accurate on most of the predictions that we made,” he says.
“We needed a few less stations than we originally thought, less public charge spots than we thought. Most of the charge spots are actually at people’s homes, not in the public area,” he says.
One surprise is that early applicants are not limited to people driving shorter distances, but include heavy users driving up to 30,000 miles a year. In the past few months, Better Place has signed deals with 400 corporate fleets and three of Israel’s top five leasing companies. They include major corporations like cellphone companies whose fleets are on the road all the time, clocking up high mileage.

Mileage package

The Fluence ZE is being sold to private customers for NIS 122,900 ($33,000), a comparable price to the regular model. Customers then purchase a mileage package from Better Place that includes the battery, recharging and swapping, up to a certain mileage per year – similar to a cellphone package. A basic 20,000 km (12,427 miles) per year costs NIS 1,090 ($295) per month, while 30,000 km (18,641 miles) costs NIS 1,599 ($432) per month. Better Place says customers will save about 15 percent in fuel costs and more in lower maintenance and insurance compared to a gas-fueled vehicle.
A special package costing NIS 157,500 ($42,600) includes the Fluence ZE and all-inclusive service for three years for those driving up to 25,000 km (15,534 miles), giving an estimated saving of 35% over a similar gas-powered car.
“They are actually showing up for financial reasons, less than for altruistic reasons,” says Agassi.
“When you get a car that is actually cheaper than the gasoline equivalent, you open up a much broader market than just the niche early adopters,” he says.
When he launched the project in 2008, Agassi said he was also inspired to rid the world of its dependency on oil and the pollution it creates. He predicted that oil prices would continue to rise, increasing the advantage of electrically powered vehicles.
“Within a decade, the cost of energy for a single year of fuel supply for a combustion car should cost more than the cost of energy for an electric car’s entire life, even when taking the cost of battery into consideration,” Agassi said.

Convinced

Today he is even more convinced of that calculation.
“The odds of the world oil prices actually going down, given everything we’re seeing around us today, I wouldn’t take that bet. If anyone’s betting on a two-digit number in the next three years, they either found a way to create world peace or they found a way to bring oil from places we don’t know yet,” he says.
“Nothing in the macro conditions, short, medium and long-term, indicate oil’s going to go below $100 a barrel.”
He also points to China, where Better Place buys its batteries. The Chinese are looking at the Better Place model very closely and may well launch their own competing network, if the company does well in Israel and Denmark.
“Just in the next five years with growth of seven to eight percent in China, you’re adding almost all the cars in Western Europe in China in the next five years,” Agassi says.
His confidence is shared by some of the savviest investors in the game. Nissan-Renault has poured more than half a billion dollars into developing the new sedans and expects to supply more than 70,000 electric cars for Better Place drivers in Israel over the next three years.
Leading funds have lined up to provide Better Place with more cash than Agassi expected. Last year, the company raised $200 million from investors, bringing the total to around $750 million. Investors include America’s General Electric conglomerate and the Swiss UBS banking group. The company is now valued at approximately $2.25 billion.

Highly attractive

“Of all the clean tech we looked at in the area of transportation, nothing compares to Better Place. The business model is highly attractive,” says Anthony Bernbaum, the global head of direct principal investments at HSBC, Britain’s international banking corporation, which has sunk $150 million into Better Place so far.
Agassi says the new investment will allow Better Place to start expanding into other areas.
“The real next big networks will most likely happen in Western Europe,” he says, but Better Place is already looking further afield with future plans dependent on the success of its first three networks.
“Think of Israel’s network as a single cell organism, integrated and covering the entire country. Denmark is roughly the same. Think of Australia as a three and-a-half cell organism with one network connecting it. Melbourne is a cell roughly the size of Israel, same thing for Sydney, same thing for Brisbane and a half cell for Canberra, connected with a freeway that is roughly the same length as the freeway between San Diego and Seattle,” says Agassi.
“When we prove that we can do a cell, it’s not that hard to expand it to do multi-cell. Once you do multicell, you prove that you can actually do places like the US,” he says.

OSCAR: The friend in your car

Inside every car is a computer called Oscar. It is an advanced entertainment center, GPS navigation system and fuel controller all rolled into one. It also provides a constant wireless interface between the car and the national network, with a direct link to the National Operations Center.
“If I want to drive from here to Jerusalem, all I have to do is put the address inside the car,” says Better Place CTO Barak Hershkovitz. “Once you put the destination inside Oscar, it will not just build a route plan like any GPS system. It will do a very accurate range calculation of what will be the exact state of charge of the battery when we get to our destination.”
Oscar absorbs each driver’s habits and adjusts its calculation of fuel consumption accordingly. It will also take into account various factors including the weather, how many people are in the car, whether there are bicycles on the roof creating extra drag, and whether the journey is uphill or downhill.
“We will know how you drive, how your specific battery behaves, how your specific car behaves and we will have a very accurate statistical model that will predict the range when you arrive. The longer you drive the car, the smarter the system becomes,” says Hershkovitz.
“The car communicates with the Network Operations Center (NOC). The user doesn’t do anything. Oscar does that for you. It has a charge application inside. It knows everything about the car, it knows everything about the battery, it knows what the user wants and sends it automatically to the NOC.
“When you go for a battery switch, Oscar already communicates with the switch station. He senses that you are coming. There is a wireless connection. He knows what car you are, what kind of user. He will tell you at each step where you are in the process.”

The Switch

The driver programs their destination into Oscar, the in-car computer, which maps out a route. If the route is beyond the current fuel charge left in the battery, Oscar will program a route via a battery-switching station so there will be enough electric “fuel” to complete the journey.
A national network of switch stations means that a battery change is never more than 15 miles away. Oscar continuously monitors the car’s battery charge and estimates the remaining charge on reaching the planned destination. If a swap is necessary, Oscar maps out a route to the most convenient switch station and alerts the station as the car approaches.
Screens inside the car and on the wall of the switch station guide the driver through the process. At the entrance to a short tunnel similar to a car wash, the driver switches off his engine while the car is manoeuvered into position by hydraulic clamps. The battery weighs more than 500 pounds, but the removal of the gasoline engine and tank means that overall the vehicle is only about 100 pounds heavier than a regular car.
Inside the station, 16 batteries are cooled and recharged at optimum current to maintain battery longevity. By the time the last battery is swapped, the first is recharged and ready for use. Each battery carries a full charge of 22 kilowatt hours, giving a driving range of approximately 100 miles in normal conditions.
The underside of the car is washed and dried to avoid dirt contaminating the switching station. The car is then lifted on hydraulic jacks and a well opens beneath the car. Through wireless communication with Oscar, the switch station knows the exact car model and chooses the appropriate battery.
A robot releases and removes the spent battery from its enclosure between the rear passenger seat and the trunk, and lowers it into the underground rack where its diagnostics will be checked and it will be recharged. The robot then lifts a replacement battery into the car and fixes it in place. The well closes, the jacks are lowered, the clamps are released and the driver is instructed to restart the engine and drive away on the fully charged battery and complete the journey.
The entire process has taken three minutes and 40 seconds – the same time it would take to refuel at a gas station.

Charge it

Better Place’s blue and gray, sleek, thigh-high charging posts are intended to look and function more like high-tech appliances than passive electric sockets. They have sprouted in parking lots and along pavement-side parking spots around the counrtry, prompting some surprised residents to wonder if they are a new-fangled parking meter.
Access to the actual sockets in the post is possible only by swiping a Better Place smart card over a card-reader on the top, to identify the customer as a subscriber. This prevents unauthorized access and vandalism, and also enables the company to charge automatically for the service. The charge point allows subscribers to refuel their vehicles for regular journeys at home, their place of business or one of thousands of public locations while they are asleep or at work.
Each Better Place charge point is connected to the National Operations Center that continuously monitors the level of charge and other diagnostics. Wireless control allows smart management to avoid overloading the electricity grid while ensuring that each battery is fully charged for the next journey. A modem inside each charge point reports technical problems or power failures that are either solved remotely or passed on to customer service and engineers.
“Eighty-five percent of drivers drive about 35 miles a day,” says Better Place CTO Barak Hershkovitz. “The car is parked for 22 hours. The feeling you get as a consumer, if you have a charge spot at home and a charge spot at work, is that by magic your car is full all the time.
“We have two energy networks: one for charging and one for range extension. I can immediately get an extra battery that will immediately take me the extra range,” he says.
Users sign a service contract similar to a cellphone subscription under which Better Place retains ownership of the battery, lowering the cost of the car and allowing future technological improvements without users having to buy replacement batteries.
“My supreme goal is to get off oil, not just to make Better Place profitable,” says Hershkovitz. “I see a technology that’s really creating a dramatic change in the world. It’s not a small enhancement, it’s a revolution.”

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR FOOTNOTE

Joseph Cedar, writer/director of the Oscar-nominated “Footnote,” tells MATTHEW KALMAN that Israeli films do not have to focus on the conflict to attract international interest

The Jerusalem Report, issue dated February 27, 2012

Film director Joseph Cedar returns to the Academy Awards this month for the second time in four years. His latest movie “Footnote” – a compelling tragi-comedy of father-son relations set in the obscure world of Talmudic philology – has already won Israel’s top cinema prize and was named best script at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Now it has been nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, just like his last movie “Beaufort,” which in 2008 became Israel’s first Academy Award nomination in nearly three decades.

A flood of awards and nominations has accompanied what the “Los Angeles Times” called “Israel’s film renaissance” in recent years. Since Cedar broke the drought, two more Israeli films – “Waltz with Bashir” and “Ajami” have also been nominated for Oscars, while these and other Israeli films have taken home gold and silver Globes, Bears, Cameras and Lions from film festivals in Berlin, Venice, Los Angeles and Cannes.

Unlike the three previous Israeli Oscar nominations, including Cedar’s own “Beaufort” which dealt with the gut-wrenching tensions surrounding Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, the director’s latest movie marks an abrupt departure from the theme of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

But Cedar, who at 43 is widely considered the leading light of this sparkling new generation of Israeli filmmakers, tells The Jerusalem Report that Israeli cinema has much more to offer than a variation on the political themes thrashed out each day in the newspapers.

JOSEPH CEDAR ON SET (Photo: Ran Mendelson)

“I really think that some of the best films that came out of Israel recently are not necessarily about the conflict or about political angles of things in our region,” says the soft-spoken Cedar, whose distinctive New York tones recall the city where he was born and raised. He emigrated to Israel at age six before returning to New York for film school. He now lives in Tel Aviv with his wife Vered, a journalist, and their three children.

“When you look at those films, the reason they were nominated or received attention outside of Israel didn’t really have to do with their political message or their subject matter. It had to do with the filmmaking,” he says.

“‘Ajami,’ at least for me, was such a miracle in how it was made and how it was able to give an audience this authentic experience that seemed effortless but was actually constructed of really challenging elements of non-actors doing extremely dramatic scenes.

“It’s more of a coincidence that they were films that dealt with kind of political aspects. They are films that were interesting for other reasons,” he says.

Father versus son

Cedar happily admits that the subject of “Footnote” could not be more opaque. The film is all about interpretation, set in a world where scholars labor in dusty basements over fragments of ancient texts. A father and son, both Talmudic scholars but with radically different approaches, are caught in a scholarly rivalry that stretches the bond between them to breaking-point and challenges their own integrity.

“New York Times” film critic A.O.Scott said the film “blends academic satire, classic Jewish humor and an almost Shakespearean sense of the tragic potential of the paternal bond.”

The two lead characters, brilliantly played by Shlomo Bar-Aba and Lior Ashkenazi, inhabit a world where an entire life’s work might win international acclaim or be reduced to a single footnote in a forgotten monograph. When outside society comes calling in the form of an ambitious young reporter, the elderly scholar is forced to confront the painful truth that his whole life has been devoted to the study of a subject that no one but a handful of people care about or can even comprehend. The plot turns on whether public acclaim for son or father will be decided by a simple bureaucratic error.

“I’m still in a battle zone, just not between armies, between family members. It’s about a father and son and a competition between them that just crosses all the boundaries that you’d think would exist between a father and son,” says Cedar. “In ‘Footnote’ the characters cross that red line and do things that are really extreme one to another.”

But Cedar declines to be drawn further on interpreting his own award-winning story, preferring others to seek their own meaning in the movie.

“There is something about this film that my instinct has been telling me not to interpret,” he says. “There are a few things that seem to exist in the storyline. Every time I put my finger on one theme or another it somehow reduces what actually is there for the audience.

“Clearly the main dramatic tension is between a father and a son, but the thing or the issue or the sentiment that they are arguing about is really wide in how it seems relevant to many things in my life – not only in my relationship to my son and to my father.”

Cedar says he chose to set the film in the obscure world of philological research after stumbling across the Talmud department at the Hebrew University, where his own father happens to be a world-renowned professor of science.

“Aside from issues that are extremely relevant to me, I found rivalries that were just really extreme, and characters who are unforgiving and who never compromise about anything. It was clear that I had found a gold mine of dramatic treasure,” he says. “The fact that these great epic rivalries had to do with the tiniest, sometimes esoteric nuances of this text that is probably the most important text in our culture, is an added bonus. It allowed me to touch things that I’m happy I had a chance to deal with.”

Asked to explain how such intense passions are ignited by such tiny matters of scholarly analysis, Cedar likes to quote Henry Kissinger, who said the reason that academics are so vicious “is because the stakes are so small.”

While the movie clearly transcends the very small world in which it is set and has proven its appeal to a broad audience, Cedar likes the fact that it is so Jewish.

“There’s something very unique about the world that this film takes place in. Hopefully there are things that an audience outside that world can appreciate or at least be interested in but these characters are extremely specific,” he says.

“The field of manuscript research and Hebrew philology and Talmudic philology is so challenging in Judaic studies because, unlike the Vatican, we don’t really have archives and libraries that connect us to manuscripts continuously over the decades. There are big holes in our heritage. So the job of a Talmudic philologist is really to put together a puzzle with many, many missing pieces. That in itself is unique for Judaic studies.

“Jewish texts were always in danger. It became a survival tool to pass on our data from generation to generation orally, which is also a great philological challenge to decipher because there’s such a big difference between how you convey something orally and how you would convey it in writing,” he says.

Strictly observant

The interaction between text and meaning, and the layers that evolve as different people communicate, lies at the heart of “Footnote.” It is also a film about the limits of integrity, an issue that is familiar territory for Cedar. Rare among Israeli filmmakers, he is an Orthodox Jew who is strictly observant. To collect his awards at both Berlin and Cannes, where the ceremonies started just as night was falling on Saturday, Cedar and his 100-strong entourage walked a mile or so through the crowded festival streets to arrive on foot and avoid desecrating Shabbat.

Despite his fluency in both Hebrew and English, Cedar says he has no particular desire to make films outside Israel, but language continues to fascinate him.

“It’s something I’m dealing with now. It’s actually in a remote way the subject of my next film. Not whether I can make a film in English, but how far a character can move away from his comfort zone or his roots without feeling that he’s all by himself in the world,” he says, declining to describe the new movie in any more detail.

“I’ve decided not to talk about it until it’s there,” he says. “Too many times I’ve said something about a project that hasn’t happened or turned out to be completely different. It’s hard enough to talk about a film after it’s made. Talking about it before it’s made is impossible.”

He says his filmmaking process is largely “unconscious” – something brought home to him after comparisons were drawn between themes in his last two films. “Beaufort” was set in a military base built on the ruins of a Crusader castle. The word “fortress” turns out to be the key to deciphering the central text in “Footnote.”

“Someone pointed out to me after the film was made the relation between the word ‘fortress’ and the fact that I just made a film that deals with the complexities of a fortress.”

“In retrospect, there’s a direct connection between those two films, how they show two sides of what a fortress is,” Cedar says. “It’s something that someone pointed out to me afterwards. I had not thought of that.”

Better Place Launches Electric Fleet in Israel

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."

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israeli Legal Group Asks American Colleges to Curb Anti-Semitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.