| The PalArab prisoner cause jumps the shark Posted: 08 May 2012 06:27 PM PDT Guess who is now pushing the issue of Palestinian Arab prisoners in Israel? That bastion of human rights, Syria! From the official Syrian SANA news agency: Al-Fadel Association for Development, Culture and Support of Resistant Creativity, in cooperation with the Palestinian Youth Movement, staged a sit-in in front of the UN Commission headquarters in Damascus in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in the jails of the Zionist occupation.
The participants chanted slogans in support of prisoners, Palestine and Jerusalem, raising the Palestinian flag and banners which call for releasing the prisoners and liberating al-Aqsa.
They condemned the stances of the Arab League and some Arab countries which conspired against the Palestinian Cause. Arab dictatorships have used the Palestinian Arabs as pawns to distract the world from their very real human right violations, so why mess with that formula? And if they can say that their Arab enemies are also enemies of the "Palestinian Cause," so much the better! 
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| Arab media noticing Israel's Jewish refugees Posted: 08 May 2012 12:45 PM PDT Al Quds quotes an Israeli Foreign Ministry report from last month about Jewish immigrants from Arab countries: Up until the present day, an injustice was done to the Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries. Their property rights and their historic justice were abandoned.
During various efforts and talks in pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, negotiators have overlooked an important element pertaining to the Arab-Israeli conflict - the uprooting of around 850,000 Jews living in Arab nations, the loss of their assets and property, and the difficulties they underwent upon migrating to Israel and their absorption. But the part they highlighted was this part: Close to half of Israel's Jewish citizen's today, including their descendents, came from Arab countries. This is a remarkable statistic. The MFA's point: There should be a joint solution between the Arab countries and the international community in order to provide compensation for both Palestinian and Jewish refugees. In order to achieve this goal an international fund will be created that will be based on President Clinton's suggestion from 2000 and the Congress resolution 185 from 2008 in which Israel will also take part, even only in a symbolic way.
This fund will also compensate the countries that had already been working on absorbing and rehabilitating refugees; amongst others Jordan and Israel (retroactively) and perhaps Lebanon if it is willing to rehabilitate the descendants of Palestinian refugees in its territory. Here we should emphasize that the basis for compensation will be the value of assets of the refugees at the time, which according to research was much greater on the Jewish side than on the Palestinian side.
The fund will also deal with the issue of Jewish property that is still in the hands of Arab and Muslim countries, however the so-called Right of Return will not be relevant as the Jews are not interested in returning to the places from which they were deported from.
The State of Israel will not accept the principle of a Palestinian "right of return" but will prefer to provide compensation by an authorized third party. This demand has historic precedents as in the case of Cyprus.
... The Palestinian refugees will be rehabilitated in their place of residence just as the Jewish refugees were rehabilitated in theirs - Israel. There should be an immediate discontinuation of the perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee issue. However, there is a reason that the almost throwaway sentence highlighted by Al Quds is critically important. It completely destroys the Arab narrative that Israel is a colonialist entity. If half of Israel's citizens are from the Middle East, then Israel is not an artificial European colonialist state as the Arab world likes to define it. Israelis are as likely as not to be descended from Jews who lived in the Middle East for centuries. Of course, even if 100% of Israel's citizens were European Jews, it would not be colonialist either. But this statistic is a much more visceral argument against every stereotype Arabs try to ascribe to Israel, and it is important to highlight the fact that - even after the massive aliyah of Russian Jews in the 1990s - nearly half of Israeli Jews are native to the region by any definition. 
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| Google innovations created in Israel Posted: 08 May 2012 10:45 AM PDT Forbes lists ten Google innovations created in Israel. I knew about some of them, but others were new to me. Live Results is being developed in Israel. It allows people to find data they are looking for directly in the Google webpage, without the need to click on a link that will direct visitors to a website. For instance, you search "Weather in Rio de Janeiro" and it directly shows the forecast instead of only links to websites.
Person finder application. An app that was very useful during the Turkey Earthquake. Whenever a natural disaster takes place, the person finder application goes live, aiming to provide reliable and actual information about missing people. People basically have two buttons, "I am looking for someone" and "I have info about someone."
Google Suggest – The Autocomplete Search Tool that let us "search faster than the speed of typing" was fully developed in Israel.
Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Project. Google has digitized one of the oldest manuscript ever discovered and allows everyone to examine it online with high resolution. For instance, if you search for "And the world shall dwell with the lamb," you can instantly find the exact location in the digital version of the original scroll. This project was such a success that in the first day it was live more people saw the dead sea scrolls than in the entire year before.
Inna was very excited to present the work Google has done with the Yad Vashem memorial, dedicated to victims of the Holocaust. This collaborationhas created an online collaborative archive of photographs of the museum. Basically, Google uploaded thons of physical documents, such as photos. Anyone, anywhere can not only find information about each person and/or location in the pictures but also easily add information. In-Page Analytics was fully developed in Israel. Basically, it lets you quantify precise information about your website. For instance, you can measure the percentage of visitors who clicked on any clickable item in your website. Receive emails through SMS in Ghana. Google Israel developed an app that allows people to receive emails in SMS format. In Ghana, just like in Guinea Conakry where I worked, broadband internet is not widespread. However, most people have cell phones. When you send an email to someone registered in this service, the person receives the email as a SMS. I hope Google has found a better way of filtering spams than in regular Gmail. Google hires some of the smartest software engineers and programmers on the planet, and even so Google Israel seems to be punching above its weight in creating interesting Google applications. (h/t Mike) 
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| Major archaeological finds in Israel confirm Biblical accounts from King David's time Posted: 08 May 2012 09:10 AM PDT From Israel's MFA:  Prof. Yosef Garfinkel, the Yigal Yadin Professor of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced the discovery of objects that for the first time shed light on how a cult was organized in Judah at the time of King David. During recent archaeological excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified city in Judah adjacent to the Valley of Elah, Garfinkel and colleagues uncovered rich assemblages of pottery, stone and metal tools, and many art and cult objects. These include three large rooms that served as cultic shrines, which in their architecture and finds correspond to the biblical description of a cult at the time of King David.
 This discovery is extraordinary as it is the first time that shrines from the time of early biblical kings were uncovered. Because these shrines pre-date the construction of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem by 30 to 40 years, they provide the first physical evidence of a cult in the time of King David, with significant implications for the fields of archaeology, history, biblical and religion studies.
Located approximately 30 km. southwest of Jerusalem in the valley of Elah, Khirbet Qeiyafa was a border city of the Kingdom of Judah opposite the Philistine city of Gath. The city, which was dated by 10 radiometric measurements (14C) done at Oxford University on burned olive pits, existed for a short period of time between ca. 1020 to 980 BCE, and was violently destroyed.
The absence of cultic images of humans or animals in the three shrines provides evidence that the inhabitants of the place practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines, observing a ban on graven images.
The findings at Khirbet Qeiyafa also indicate that an elaborate architectural style had developed as early as the time of King David. Such construction is typical of royal activities, thus indicating that state formation, the establishment of an elite, social level and urbanism in the region existed in the days of the early kings of Israel. These finds strengthen the historicity of the biblical tradition and its architectural description of the Palace and Temple of Solomon.
 According to Prof. Garfinkel, "This is the first time that archaeologists uncovered a fortified city in Judah from the time of King David. Even in Jerusalem we do not have a clear fortified city from his period. Thus, various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong." Garfinkel continued, "Over the years, thousands of animal bones were found, including sheep, goats and cattle, but no pigs. Now we uncovered three cultic rooms, with various cultic paraphernalia, but not even one human or animal figurine was found. This suggests that the population of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two biblical bans - on pork and on graven images - and thus practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines."
...The stone model helps us to understand obscure technical terms in the description of Solomon's palace as described in 1 Kings 7, 1-6. The text uses the term "Slaot," which were mistakenly understood as pillars and can now be understood as triglyphs. The text also uses the term "Sequfim", which was usually understood as nine windows in the palace, and can now be understood as "triple recessed doorway."
Similar triglyphs and recessed doors can be found in the description of Solomon's temple (1 Kings 6, Verses 5, 31-33, and in the description of a temple by the prophet Ezekiel (41:6). These biblical texts are replete with obscure technical terms that have lost their original meaning over the millennia. Now, with the help of the stone model uncovered at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the biblical text is clarified. For the first time in history we have actual objects from the time of David, which can be related to monuments described in the Bible. (h/t D) 
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| A Gaza journalist who really does deserve an award Posted: 08 May 2012 07:30 AM PDT Over the years we have seen many awards given to Palestinian Arab journalists purely based on their anti-Israel reporting. We've even seen Helen Thomas receive a " Courage in Journalism" award purely because she publicly espoused anti-semitic opinions. But there are some Palestinian Arab journalists who exhibit real courage. Reporting the truth about their political leadership is a hell of a lot more dangerous than writing yet another anti-Israel screed. Here is one of the truly courageous Arab journalists: Gaza journalist Asma al-Ghoul has won an international award for courage in journalism, the International Women's Media Foundation said.
Al-Ghoul, 30, was awarded the 2012 IWMF prize alongside female journalists Reeyot Alemu from Ethiopia, Khadija Ismayilova from Azerbaijan and Zubeida Mustafa from Pakistan.
She has worked for Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam and her popular blog, AsmaGaza, was discontinued in February for unstated reasons.
Her reporting on the Palestinian internal division and social and political issues has earned international acclaim, receiving awards from Human Rights Watch and the Anna Lindh Mediterranean Foundation.
Al-Ghoul has been beaten by security forces at popular protests in Gaza, received death threats against her and her son, and once slept at her office out of fear for her life, the IWMF said.
The foundation added: "In 2007, she wrote an article as an open letter to her uncle -- a Hamas commander -- questioning methods of certain entities claiming to seek peace for Palestine. The article resulted in al-Ghoul's uncle threatening to kill her." Putting your life on the line to report the truth is brave. No matter what your political opinions are, Asma al-Ghoul is a courageous reporter. 
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| Observations about Israel's new unity government Posted: 08 May 2012 05:30 AM PDT I don't usually blog about internal Israeli politics, mostly because understanding them requires total immersion. One of my Israeli correspondents, who wants to be called Professor X, is a tenured professor in the social sciences who has a background in political sciences, economics and law. I asked him if I could post his thoughts: Three observations:
Kadima as a party has not proved itself either centrist or pragmatic. It came into existence to pursue a leftist and utterly failed policy of unilateral withdrawal, and then moved to embrace the Labor-left policy of "peace in our time" through the imagined acceptance by the PLO of a generous Israeli peace offer.
As long as Israel keeps getting richer, the gap between rich and poor will continue to grow. It is a continuing matter of astonishment to me that people can look at statistics showing that all Israelis are getting wealthier and proclaim them proof of a broken economic system or a failure of social justice because the affluent are growing wealth faster. The Jewish principles of social justice do not embrace a return to Israel's failed socialism, high taxes, wasteful spending, and obstructive regulation. It is unclear to me that the general population is generally "underpaid" — I would suspect quite the opposite. The working public is overpaid on average, thanks to the Histadrut, notwithstanding the fact that the labor agreements generally require underpaying the more skilled to subsidize overpaying the less skilled, while pricing many of the less skilled out of the working market altogether. Israel has several serious economic problems — monopolies established during Israel's socialist heyday, underemployment of the workforce thanks not only to overly generous welfare benefits but also laws that require unemployment in order to enjoy state benefits like exemption from army service, excessive government ownership of land and other sectors of the economy, excessive regulation of land use and ordinary business decisions, and an overly powerful labor union that controls vast sectors of the economy (again a relic of Israel's socialist heyday). Much of the agenda of the "social protests" was to exacerbate these problems, and, at best, the reforms adopted so far have been a mixed bag. There is little reason to celebrate if the unity government means an adoption of the destructive agenda of the "social protests." Certainly, it's not true that Israel has retained failed socialist policies and dirigisme due to the excessive influence of "wealthy donors" who will now be neutralized. And, incidentally, the protests were hardly "student-led."
The idea that there is no peace with the Palestinians due to a violent fringe of Israelis is unfairly exculpatory to the Palestinians and defamatory to Israelis. Notwithstanding noisy fringes on the left and right (and the left fringe has done – so far as I can see – far more damage to Israel), they have not been players in the game in recent years. Both with and without Kadima, the government has the stability and motivation to reach a worthwhile agreement with the Palestinians. It is absolutely clear that whether Kadima is in or out of the government, Abbas has no interest in such a deal. It is true that Kadima endorses your suggested policy: that Israel should aim for a unilateral withdrawal after trying to use another round of failed negotiations to prove that that there is no realistic possibility of negotiated peace. But I hope and believe that Netanyahu has no such plans, and certainly the public will not demand such a self-destructive course after the Gaza fiasco. If this is the secret agenda of the new government, it is a cause for mourning, not celebration. Other notable analyses from The Muqata, who looks at winners and losers, and Gerald Steinberg at the Times of Israel. A number of people were trying to figure out why Netanyahu was calling for early elections, and a consensus of sorts was that it would give him more flexibility in deciding on a military option for Iran since Likud was well ahead in the polls. If that is true, this unity government is even more effective than any election results could have been in giving Israel internal political strength should it make that decision. 
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| Work accident in the "playground of death" Posted: 08 May 2012 03:16 AM PDT From the Hamas al-Qassam website: As Al Aqsa Intifada against the occupation assault on the Gaza Strip continues, Ezzeddeen Al-Qassam Brigades has its best men to be in the playground of death to defend their people from any attack by the enemy ... Today, Al-Qassam Brigades mourn the death of the Mujahed:
 | | Rantisi in happier times, hanging out in his playground | Faris Mahmoud Al Rantisi,19 years old
Jabaliya refugee camp – North of Gaza Strip
The Mujahed martyred from wounds sustained during training last week. He was martyred on Monday evening May 7th, 2012. He was martyred after a long bright path of jihad, hard work, struggle and sacrifice.
Al Qassam Brigades mourn the death of the Mujahed, reaffirms the commitment and determination to continue the resistance against the belligerent occupation forces.
Finally, may Allah (swt) accept him and his blessed efforts for the path of Jihad and may Allah grant his family patience and solace for his lose. I'm not sure if that last word is supposed to be "loss" or "for being such a loser." (Or perhaps he had a pet louse who is inconsolable.) As usual, the Arabic version is much more flowery in language as they beseech Allah to allow him into Paradise even though he didn't manage to actually, you know, kill any Jews. 
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