Everything you need to know about today’s coverage of Israel and the Mideast. Join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Today’s Top Stories
1. Mahmoud Abbas received a visiting delegation of Knesset members. Most media coverage emphasized A) the Palestinian chief’s condemnation of Saturday’s Psagot terror (he really did or he really didn’t), and B) the meeting’s hopeful boost for peace. But David Horovitz’s Ramallah dispatch keenly noted the absence of Israeli flags and Palestinian journalists:
During the encounter, Abbas took pains to assert that, although there were “opponents of peace” on the Palestinian side too, he was sure that most of his people support a two-state solution. Evidently, however, he didn’t want to take the risk of inviting a sizable contingent of his own media to document, for his two-state-supporting people, this meeting with the dovish representatives of that other state. And if his people saw the photographs, he didn’t want that other state’s national flag causing him any trouble.
Another likely reason for their absence: Palestinian journalists oppose normalization with Israel.
2. AP: Iranian internet censors won’t unblock Facebook or Twitter, even though high level officials like President Hassan Rohani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and others are active on social media.
3. Bashar Assad’s stationing jets in Iran to protect them from a possible Western attack. When Saddam Hussein did the same thing, heh, Iran confiscated the aircraft.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators agreed to start meeting twice a week to “up the tempo.”
• Jerusalem Post: The IDF arrested two suspects in the Saturday night Psagot shooting that injured a nine year-old girl.
• Canadian activists are finally learning that Israel isn’t the Mideast’s true villain.
• Quite a few news services picked up on a World Bank report which claims the West Bank’s annual gross domestic product would increase by 35 percent if Israel would stop restricting Palestinian movement and access in Area C. The Times of Israel picked up on this.
• When was the last time you saw a Western newspaper — in the reporter’s voice — use a Hebrew term to refer to the holy land? The Daily Telegraph‘s parenthetical reference to Palestine isn’t inaccurate because the rabbi’s family arrived in 1920s during the British Mandate:
When Ovadia was four, the family emigrated to Eretz Yisrael (Palestine) and settled in Jerusalem . . .
Rest O’ the Roundup
• For commentary on Iranian atomic diplomacy, see Elliott Abrams, Zalman Shoval, Bret Stephens (Wall St. Journal via Google News), Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Toronto Star.
• Activists are organizing a protest against Facebook “refusal to remove anti-Semitic hate pages aimed primarily at Jews, Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel.” According to Examiner, the October 14 rally will be outside Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters.
“They keep popping up like cockroaches or weeds. Fortunately for the African American or Gay American, when enough people complain to Facebook, the pages are red-flagged and removed. All we’re asking for is the same respectful treatment towards the Jewish People, and implore Facebook to remove anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate pages.”
(Image of Rabbi Yosef via Wikimedia Commons)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
