Israel and the Palestinians
• John Kerry means business: He reportedly threatened to cut off all US aid to the PA if current peace talks fail to reach an agreement. Details at the Times of Israel.
• Former Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon left Denmark on short notice after learning pro-Palestinian activists had filed a complaint with police. In the end, the Danish prosecutors rejected the complaint due to lack of evidence. According to Haaretz, the complaint apparently accused Gillon of complicity in torture.
• Palestinian opponents of normalizing ties with Israel disrupted a meeting of Israeli and Palestinian activists discussing peace. It’s all part of a growing anti-normalization campaign. The Jerusalem Post described the sorry scene from Ramallah.
• Worth reading: Israel kills fewest innocents but takes most heat.
• Stand With Us busted some Palestinian activists who brazenly doctored a video of Nelson Mandela speaking at a town hall meeting in New York. Don’t be fooled by the BDS movement’s blatant historical revisionism. Here are the two sentences they didn’t want you to hear:
The support for Yassir Arafat in his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secured borders.”
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Ernst & Young: The Tamar gas field is worth $52 billion to the Israeli economy. Meanwhile, Forbes looks at Israel’s challenges of securing the offshore infrastructure.
The rigs required to lift the gas from the sea floor are a target that some commentators have referred to as a “sitting duck” for terrorists. The gas platforms are to be situated outside of Israeli territorial waters, but inside Israel’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), an area roughly twice the size of Israel itself. Inside this zone any foreign vessel is legally allowed to approach within half a kilometre of Israeli infrastructure before defensive action can officially be taken.
• Uh-oh. Syrian Islamists are trying to recruit Western jihadis to carry out attacks in the US and Europe. According to the NY Times, around 70 US citizens and 1,200 European Muslims have travelled to Syria to fight against the Assad regime during the three-year civil war.
• Hezbollah’s setting up shop in the Syrian Golan Heights.
• Robert Gates’s book sheds new light on US arms sales to Israel and the Mideast, notes Eli Lake.
• Turkey’s mulling a law that would give the government the right to monitor and restrict internet use, reports Hurriyet:
All individuals’ Internet records, including details about what sites they have visited, which words they have searched for on the web and what activity they have engaged in on social networking websites, will be kept for one or two years, according to the draft law.
Web providers will also be forced to become members of a new Internet union to be formed under the control of government, Do?an wrote.
(Image of Sharon via Flickr/public.resource.org, Choudhury via Wikimedia Commons/Choudhury)
For more, see Thursday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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