International Glance
Israel has no plan to review its nuclear policies, a government official said on Friday, playing down efforts by world powers at a U.N. non-proliferation conference to promote a Middle East free of atomic arms.
Hoping to win Arab backing for sanctions against Iran, the United States and other permanent U.N. Security Council members on Wednesday called for ways to be found to implement a 1995 initiative that would guarantee nuclear disarmament in a region where Israel is widely assumed to have the only such weapons.
Diaspora Jews around the world are beginning to realize that the time has come to reject the right’s dictate that being pro-Israel means that you need to support the policies of Israeli governments, no matter what they do; that the Jewish right represents a small minority of the Jewish people.
Strangely, in all this no one has wondered how it is possible that the IDF, the body charged with imposing the law on the West Bank, never lifted a finger against its officers who settled in an illegal outpost in the first place.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday signed a law banning Palestinians from working in Israeli settlements and selling settlement goods, with violators facing up to five years in prison and stiff fines.
The Israeli government has effectively frozen new Jewish construction in Jerusalem's disputed eastern sector, municipal officials said Monday. The decision was made despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's public insistence that building would not be stopped in the face of U.S. pressure.
For eight years, Israeli commuters have whizzed between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on Route 443, a highway whose West Bank portion is lined with barriers and is off-limits to Palestinians who live along the way.
Spain's most prominent judge, already charged with abuse of power in a potentially career-ending indictment, denied any wrongdoing as he testified Thursday as a suspect in a separate bribery investigation that has compounded his legal woes.
