Everything you need to know about the weekend media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.
Journalists draw their daggers on Robert Fisk. Gaza fuel crisis claims its first fatality. And the UN Human Rights Council wants to investigate settlements.
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Israel and the Palestinians
• Israel’s UN delegation dug up more dirt on false photo tweeter Khulood Badawi. Turns out Badawi was disciplined for participating in a 2008 demonstration against Israel:
“The OCHA employee’s rap sheet of incitement extends well beyond the incident this month,” he wrote. “From the time that she was hired, OCHA has whitewashed Ms. Badawi’s record of hate speech. How can Israel possibly regard OCHA as impartial, when it hires extremists like Ms. Badawi – and allows them free reign to engage in political activism?”
• Mamas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be West Bank activists. Haaretz says there’s a “wide phenomenon” of female activists from Israel and the West facing sexually harassment. How frequent?
In the past two years, at least six incidents were recorded in the West Bank and East Jerusalem: two in Sheikh Jarrah, four more in the Mount Hebron area, in Masra, in Kfar a-Dik, and an alleged case of attempted rape in Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem, that was revealed in Haaretz.
Recently, a special forum was started by a group of women from leftist groups for the purpose of dealing and monitoring such incidents.
• UN Human Rights Council launches “investigation” into Israeli settlement activity. Reuters says the US voted against the Palestinian initiative to no avail; the JPost says Israel won’t cooperate with it and Haaretz notes Jerusalem is mulling sanctions against the PA, such as freezing the transfer of tax revenues.
• Worth reading: To The Leftist Who Has No Problem With Rocket Fire on Israel.
• Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Alan Wolfe weighs which critique to support: the “liberal” one for a two-state solution, or the “leftist” one for a one-state solution. The word count’s 3,232, so spoiler alert:
Anyone concerned with making the world a better place should want to see Israel made a better society. That is the key truth upon which liberal critics insist, and which leftist ones deny.
• A Jeffrey Goldberg reader shares four thought-provoking reasons why Peter Beinart’s settlement boycott idea would fail.
• One year after the senseless murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, The Observer visits the Jenin theater he founded. The murder remains unsolved, and the accumulation of rumors is hurting the Freedom Theater:
The speculation has done more harm than good, Stanczak said: it has only fuelled paranoia around the theatre, causing students to drop out and scaring away potential new admissions.
• Benny Avni: Iran’s exploiting the Global March on Jerusalem. Some of the participants have already arrived in Tehran:
At the very least, the organizers can hope that the inevitable condemnations of Israel will distract attention away from Iran’s nuclear advances and/or Syria’s murderous suppression of dissent.
The march is on Friday; the IDF’s already gearing up.
• The Daily Telegraph‘s Nile Gardiner says Catherine Ashton should resign for equating Toulouse and Gaza.
