Human Rights Glance
Last week, a new border crossing was opened in East Jerusalem's Shoafat neighborhood, to little fanfare. Two days later, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat asserted that Israel should relinquish Palestinian neighborhoods of the capital that are beyond the separation barrier, despite the fact that their residents carry Israeli identity cards.
Some people view these events as two pieces of the same puzzle. A third piece is the resumption of work on separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.
Israel gearing for effective separation of East Jerusalem Palestinians
Jewish terrorism threat grows in West Bank
The Israeli military, already bracing for what could be the most devastating war in the Middle East, is also girding for a looming confrontation with Jewish extremists, mainly hard-liners from the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Extremists from ultra-Orthodox settler groups, who say God gave the region to the children of Abraham for all time, have been increasingly active in recent months.
I won’t sit at the back of the bus
Tanya Rosenblit recounts clash of civilizations she experienced on Israeli bus; ‘until yesterday, I was sure that I live in a free country,’ she says
Until yesterday, I was sure that I live in a free country. I was certain that a person’s dignity and freedom are supreme values in our diverse society. Indeed, there are calls against one group or another, but people, whoever they are, regardless of religion, creed or gender, will be respected, because this is the kind of society I grew up in. These are the values I learned.
Americans face Guantánamo detention after Obama climbdown
Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.
Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end".
Vandals torch second Palestinian mosque
Vandals set fire to a mosque in the West Bank on Thursday and defaced it with Hebrew graffiti a day after a similar arson attack on a Jerusalem mosque. Suspicion fell on Jewish extremists widely assumed to be behind stepped-up violence against Palestinians and the Israeli military.
The governor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Laila Ghanam, said arsonists doused the mosque in the village of Burqa with gasoline, then set it on fire.
Beyond Guantánamo, a Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates
It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.
An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.
Israeli travel ban cuts studies short for Palestinians
For more than a decade, Emal Abu Aisha has run a women's center in the Gaza Strip that provides women with training and classes to improve their education. But Abu Aisha, 42, said she'd been denied that opportunity herself.
In 2000, a new Israeli policy that banned Palestinians from the Gaza Strip from studying in the West Bank cut short her own education, in gender studies in the West Bank's Birzeit University.
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