2012 News

Palestine comes today to the United Nations General Assembly at a time when it is still tending to its wounds and still burying its beloved martyrs of children, women and men who have fallen victim to the latest Israeli aggression.

A senior Christian clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem. When he returned to his car, a man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the Jew spat in his face

Today, on a commanding hilltop north of Ramallah, some 2,500 workers and 88 pieces of heavy machinery are busy crafting a different story. They are part of a vast, costly and complex effort to transform this picturesque site into Rawabi, the first ever planned Palestinian city.

The triumph of lunacy over sanity will result in tears for Israelis, Palestinians and the wider region

By refusing to support the Palestinian bid at the UN, President Obama has essentially endorsed a No State Solution between Israel and Palestine. Changing course is possible. A good place to start would be threatening to remove US aid to Israel, given its plans for more settlement building.

We have created an infogram to illustrate and explain how demographic changes within the West Bank obstruct the possibility of the two-state solution. The numbers suggest that Abbas' bid to the United Nations was too little, too late

However heavy the blow to Palestinian aspirations, an equally heavy political price for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's E1 plan will be paid by Israelis. For by terminating the prospect of a two-state solution, Netanyahu will also be sealing the fate of an exclusively Jewish state.

But occasional talk of punishing Israel - for example by suspending its valued 1995 association agreement with the EU or other co-operation programmes - has remained that, just talk

Israel has canceled the transfer of US$120 million collected in taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority in response to Palestine's UN-bid, which saw it granted non-member observer status, thus implicitly recognizing the state.

So when most of the nations of the world voted in the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday to recognize Palestine as a symbolic member state, many saw the move as a pre-emption of that peace process and a provocation that would only drive the two parties further into conflict

More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, a triumph for Palestinian diplomacy and a sharp rebuke to the United States and Israel.

The United Nations voted overwhelmingly Thursday to recognize a Palestinian state, a long-sought victory for the Palestinians but an embarrassing diplomatic defeat for the United States.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas won 138 of the assembly's 193 votes, including those of some key European states, for his proposal to have the territories' standing upgraded to "nonmember observer state" from "nonmember observer entity."

Palestinian President has been leading the campaign to win support for the resolution, and some European governments have offered him their support after an eight-day conflict this month between Israel and HAMAS

A resolution that would change the Palestinian Authority's U.N. observer status from "entity" to "non-member state," like the Vatican, is expected to pass easily in the 193-nation General Assembly

Hours before the UN General Assembly vote, Germany decides to abstain, instead of voting against; Netanyahu says the decision will not advance the establishment of a Palestinian state.

An Islamic cleric in Gaza has issued a religious edict declaring it a sin to violate the truce arranged last week between Israel and Hamas. The fatwa - a religious edict - was ruled by Imam Suleiman al-Daya late Saturday

After 24 hours, crossings into Gaza are to be opened and the movement of people and goods is to be allowed

When we were negotiating with Hamas to release Mr. Shalit, members of the Israeli team believed that Mr. Jabari wouldn't make a deal because holding Mr. Shalit was a kind of "life insurance policy."

The current framework for so-called peace process is driven by the Israelis' insistence on tangible security guarantees, which erode the principle of sovereignty

For years, Israelis have embraced a theory of "deterrence" with respect to the Gaza Strip. The idea is that if Gazans feel enough pain, they will refrain from attacking Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces an even more awkward time with Washington and re-energized critics at home who accused him on Wednesday of backing the loser in the U.S. presidential election.

Ahmad Issa Farhan, 65, passed away Tuesday evening, Oct. 30, 2012. Ahmad was born Feb. 8, 1947 in Jerusalem, Palestine, to Aisha Ibrahim Lutfi and Issa Ahmad Farhan. He spent his boyhood in Bethlehem, Palestine

With many Palestinians and Israelis coming round to the idea of a bi-national state, it's possible to glimpse a peaceful future

We were writing a script on Golda Meir's love affair with a Palestinian. The grandson of the Palestinian lover told the story. This was a secret of course, a shameful secret to have slept with the enemy for Palestinians.

Two weeks ago, fifteen religious leaders representing major Protestant denominations dared to urge Congress to investigate whether unconditional U.S. military assistance to Israel is contributing to violations of Palestinian human rights

In a noteworthy development that has been largely unreported by foreign media, Egypt's Ministry of Education announced that a new human rights class for 11th grade students will use portions of the Bible in its curriculum and will discuss non-Muslim rights in Islam.

The UN agency blamed Israel for harm caused to the Palestinian people.

"It's hard for me to speak about it," he said in an interview with the Forward, "but I fear that Israel cannot continue to exist even 50 years if it continues in the current path."

Two young Palestinian Israelis who came second in an international Physics Competition in Warsaw are omitted conspicuously in a racist report on the winners in Israel Hayom

"Death to Christianity," profanity about Jesus scrawled on Baptist church in apparent "price tag" attack.

The gruelling economic crisis that grips Palestine today has exposed the magnitude of the fiction of the possibility of Palestinian economic development under an occupation

An Israeli filmmaker based in California went into hiding after his movie attacking Islam's prophet sparked angry assaults by ultra-conservative Muslims on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya, where one American was killed.

The Israeli government's failure to respond adequately to Jewish extremist attacks against churches and monasteries is fostering a climate of intolerance towards Christianity in the country, a senior Vatican official in Jerusalem has warned.

With all its power, why isn't America more admired and respected? Exactly what's going on here?

Those who assert that Israel is being "singled out" aren't interested in assessing where to rank Israel on the scoreboard of global human rights violators.

The government has made it official that its policy is to discourage South Africans from visiting Israel.

I am a proud American. I am a hardworking businessman and job creator. I am a faithful Christian.

And I am Palestinian

Jonathan Ben-Artzi reveals a perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is completely missing from the discourse in the U.S.

There was little anger when Mr. Romney made thinly veiled racist allusions to the supposed inferiority of Palestinian culture

Liel remembers from his days as an envoy to apartheid-era South Africa what a full-blown academic boycott resembles: South African academics isolated from their colleagues in most countries,

Great-niece of the legendary animator Walt Disney - has publicly renounced her share of the family profits from an Israeli firm she claims is exploiting "occupied natural resources".

The party's economic blueprint describes an ambitious drive to attract more than $200 billion in foreign investments,

Representatives of Hebron's Jewish community, European parliamentarians accept invitation from sheikh with vision one democratic state for all.

How many ultra-Orthodox men and Arab citizens should be drafted into the military or national service, over how many years and how should those who resist be penalized?

Egypt's military rulers on Sunday officially recognized Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood as the winner of Egypt's first competitive presidential election.

Palestinian security forces have little reason to believe their efforts are advancing national goals, and Israel can't assume that the Palestinian Authority will provide security indefinitely.

Kamal Nawash, founder of the Free Muslims Coalition, told The Christian Post that he felt Yousef's project would not be "significant."

The last 10 years have not been easy for Arab Christians. Numerous events, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq has inspired the belief that the "Christian West" has declared war on Muslims of the Middle East.

Even if Prince Naif's death does not change the status quo in the kingdom, it will remove an octopus-like nightmare most Saudis, including members of his own family.

Israeli rabbis are to clamp down on the growing number of devout Jewish women wearing the burka by declaring the garment an item of sexual deviancy.

With the end to the solution based on two separate states, all immediate efforts, energies and funding must be directed towards determining the best way to have two states in one geographical space.

Interior minister Yishai says African migrants should be jailed or expelled; Aharonovich to request emergency meeting

Although Israel has long been the target of Arab columnists, Saudi Arabia never faced large, sustained public criticism in Egypt during the Mubarak era

Egypt's most conservative Islamists endorsed a liberal Islamist for president late Saturday night

We, a group of Christian Palestinians, cry out from within the suffering in our country, under the Israeli occupation.

Netanyahu was fully updated by Israeli ambassador to U.S. Michael Oren on his attempts to halt an investigative report on Israel's treatment of its Christian community stians

A brutal new video reveals how out-of-touch the country's leaders are with the security reality

There is no denying that settlement construction, Palestinian disunity, and other factors are fast rendering the two-state concept impracticable.

"It's time to raise the white flag, to admit publicly that the two-state solution has been foiled." It was doomed, he says, by "the plundering settlers, the establishment that embraces them and the majority of Israelis, who do not lift a finger to stop them."

Indeed, Palestinian Christians are continuing to be steadfast in the face of 45 years of Israeli military occupation that has caused their presence to dwindle in the land that has been their home since the beginning of Christianity.

At the nation's top spy agency, the ghosts of Iraq are never far away.

Hamas is partly an intentional creation of Israel that dates back to the 1970s.

"The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation," Obama has said. Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise; too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable.

One of the well known figures in the settler movement, Knesset Member Uri Ariel from the radical rightwing National Union Party, is publicly calling for a one-state solution as an alternative to the construction of a Palestinian state, the independent news site Srugim reported.

No people on earth have been less "anti-Semitic" than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West.

To give teeth to the deterrent threat against Iran, Israel want Mr. Obama to stop urging restraint on Israel

Former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg endorsed the one-state solution in an article in Haaretz in December 2011, and called the entire left to do the same.

The one state that is directly implicated by the events in Syria is Israel. This is because the Israeli Prime Minister would prefer the Assad regime to continue; it is a known quantity and any new regime could severely destabilise the effective balance-of-power between two uneasy neighbours.

The Free Muslims Coalition has just learned that one of Israel's top film makers has agreed to do a documentary on the efforts of Kamal Nawash and his Israeli Partners to create a union between Israel and Palestine.

The 91-year-old younger brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which took 45 per cent of seats in elections, believes Egypt needs a 'more open society'.

Only one state will exist on the lands that currently make up Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; but that state will be divided into two provinces, one province will be called Israel, and the other Palestine

One of the Arab speakers was Attorney Kamal Nawash, President of the Free Muslims Coalition, whose proposal is one country for Jews and Arabs which provides security, independence, and self-determination that each side needs.