Construction will resume on Israel’s West Bank security fence, five years after it was halted due to budget shortfalls. The construction of a segment of the barrier around the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem was approved Wednesday by Israel’s Supreme Court, according to reports. The construction will begin in the next few weeks. A…
Author Naomi Ragen has appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court against a judgment finding her guilty of plagiarism. In December, the Jerusalem District Court found that Ragen had knowingly copied sections of her book “Sotah” from a book by Sarah Shapiro. In her appeal, Ragen’s attorney wrote that this verdict destroyed her life. “The ruling…
Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard must be released, former CIA chief R. James Woolsey wrote in a letter to the editor sent to the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, arguing that one reason Pollard has remained in prison for as long as he has was that he was an American Jew. Woolsey, who has voiced…
Online anti-Semitism in Spain doubled in volume last year, according to a Spanish Jewish community monitor. In a report on anti-Semitism in Spain in 2011, the Observatory on Anti-Semitism in Spain counted more than 1,000 anti-Semitic sites and web pages that the observatory says were created in Spain. In 2010 the observatory counted only 400…
The State Prosecutor’s Office reached a plea bargain with an Haaretz journalist Uri Blau, suspected of possessing classified Israel Defense Forces documents on Thursday, a little over a month after the state announced its intention to indict him. As part of the deal Blau will admit to holding secret intelligence, without intent to harm national…
A Ghanaian man who has lived in Israel for 14 years reported on Wednesday that he was forced to wait for a doctor for his sick baby while locked in a room at Dana Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv. Isaac Asiedeu’s story of being locked in at the children’s hospital, in Ichilov Hospital, with his…
As Kadima MK Yohanan Plesner announced on Wednesday the recommendations of the committee he headed which examined alternatives for mandatory military or civilian service for ultra-Orthodox men and Israeli Arabs, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scrambled to find a formula that would keep his coalition together. Netanyahu does not want Kadima to leave the coalition. Party…
Left-leaning pro-Israel groups have called on the country’s largest Presbyterian Church to abandon plans to divest from three companies that it is says have resisted the request to stop providing services that aid Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Americans for Peace Now and J Street have called on the Church’s plenary to vote against…
A delegation of U.S. university presidents is in Israel to explore opportunities for academic and research collaboration. The seminar, which ends July 9, is sponsored by Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee. A president of a historically Black college and university, Spelman College President Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, is participating in…
Former Palestinian Authority head Yasser Arafat may have died of radioactive poisoning, Al Jazeera is reporting. Reuters said Palestinian leaders had agreed to allow his body to be exhumed to perform tests that could confirm or refute the account. Al Jazeera’s report released Tuesday, following a nine-month investigation, cites findings by The Institut de Radiophysique…
Yigal Amir, who is serving a life sentence for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, will serve out his prison sentence amongst the general prison population. Amir has been in solitary confinement since his arrest for Rabin’s murder 17 years ago. Until 2006 he was under camera surveillance 24 hours a day. Amir’s case,…
