Egyptian mediators began separate talks on Monday with Hamas and with Israel to flesh out details of a ceasefire agreed last week that ended eight days of fighting in the Gaza Strip.
Even Israel’s critics say that the recent conflict was conducted more humanely than the last military campaign in Gaza. Were the controversial Goldstone Report’s criticisms heeded?
The U.N. is pushing ahead with a ‘fact-finding’ mission into Israeli settlements. Some fear a repeat of the Goldstone report that accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says the greatest aspiration for Jews is to make Israel ‘a divine society.’ Leonard Fein trembles when he hears about God playing favorites.
With his New York Times op-ed today, Judge Richard Goldstone continues his long march towards insuring that his name no longer be synonymous with self-hating, Israel-bashing Jew. He has written to argue — from his vantage point of having been a judge in apartheid-era South Africa — that the attempt to label the situation in Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians as a form of “apartheid” is pernicious and destructive and just plain inaccurate.
Well, here it is, Saturday night. Some time around 8:30 I observe that Shabbes is over, so I crank up the old laptop to see what’s new and catch up with my Forward fan mail. My latest column on Palestinian statehood had some pretty lively back-and-forth going on as of Friday evening, and I’m eager to see what new pearls of Torah have been shared while I was off-line.
According to a an article posted Wednesday on the Web site of the South African Centre for Law and Social Justice, Judge Richard Goldstone has been effectively barred from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah in the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, because of objections from the South African Zionist Federation.