• Secretary of State Clinton chewed out Prime Minister Netanyahu over the East Jerusalem announcement (and Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg approves). [Ynet]
• But one experienced observer predicts that such rebukes will be the beginning and end of U.S. response: “for this very busy president, the Arab-Israeli issue now has little to do with his stock at home. Frankly, it isn’t even the most important priority in the region.” [Politico]
• Birthright co-founder Michael Steinhardt has an idea—involving significant reparations as well as resettlement—for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [WSJ]
• A survey found that nearly half of Israeli high-schoolers would refuse to evacuate West Bank settlements as soldiers, and believe Israeli Arabs do not merit the same rights as Israeli Jews. [Haaretz]
• A good long look at the Hurva, the grand 300-year-old synagogue in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, which is about to be rededicated after extensive restoration. [WSJ]
In a pretty epic case of burying the lede (though it is in the headline), Haaretz published a profile of Sarah Corrie Simpson, the sister of Rachel Corrie, while waiting until the penultimate paragraph to reveal the real scoop: that (according to Simpson), an unnamed U.S. government official encouraged the Corrie family to sue the Israeli government over her sister’s death (which it did, last month)—was, in fact, the first person or entity to do so.
Rachel Corrie, then 23, was killed in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting in Gaza. The facts in dispute concern whether Corrie’s death took place in an active combat zone, and how visible Corrie made herself to the bulldozer’s driver. An Israeli probe cleared the driver and the authorities; the Corries, as well as U.S. authorities, don’t fully buy it. The civil trial is currently going on in Haifa District Court.
Faithful Vox Tablet listeners know that musician Alicia Jo Rabins heads the band Girls in Trouble, which performs her indie-rock song cycle about Biblical women. The band is about to set off on a month-long tour, which will take them to Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, and many points in between, before landing them back at Cake Shop, on the Lower East Side, in late April. (For full dates, see here.) I mention this because this won’t be the last you hear of Rabins and Girls in Trouble on The Scroll before the tour is through.
Meanwhile, do enjoy Rabins’s take on this week’s Parsha. Gives you a good sense of what her music’s like. And I would challenge you to find a more pleasant way to spend four pre-Shabbat minutes.
Game-changer: for the next season of The Millionaire Matchmaker, host Patti Stanger is taking her show, currently Los Angeles-based, to the Big Apple. (Allison Hoffman recaps each episode every Wednesday on The Scroll.) “Yeah, New York is harder,” she tellsNew York’s Vulture blog. “Yes, you walk and you get sweaty, and you’re in the freezing cold with your parkas—how is he going to see the sea of assets?” Stanger intends to get around this obstacle by thinking outside the box—or, in this case, the borough. “You go to the fucking suburbs! You go to Westchester, you go to Long Island, you go to Jersey, you look around! Guys in Jersey buy fucking $4 million houses! My sister met her husband at Cold Spring Harbor. What happened to the outskirts of New York?”
A Palestinian academic in Lebanon—he teaches at the American University in Beirut—has come under fire for collaborating with two Israeli scholars on a book, in violation of a formal academic boycott of Israel’s academy and cultural institutions.
Here’s what’s odd. The two Israeli scholars are anti-Zionist. The book in question is called The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule. And the book contains, according to the academic, “a detailed analysis of the ways in which Israel deploys technologies of power and systems of control to maintain its stranglehold over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is a book that concentrates on the illegality of the occupation regime.”
Fellas! The whole “strange bedfellows” thing works best if you let them stay the night!
In the journo-business, we call this Man Bites Dog: The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman is blaming Israel for the “disaster”—his word—that was the announcement of new East Jerusalem construction during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit. According to Foxman, whether or not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew the announcement was coming is beside the point: “it is the government of Israel that justifiably is held accountable for converting an optimal moment in U.S.-Israel relations into a moment of crisis.”
In his article, Foxman establishes that the announcement “it couldn’t have been worse.” And he says—in apparent revision of what he toldHaaretz earlier this week—that he fully understands the administration’s anger.
By the end, we are back in Dog Bites Man territory. Foxman concludes: “Ultimately, Palestinian unwillingness to compromise for peace and to stop the hate are the real obstacles to peace.”
Today in Tablet Magazine, Staff Writer Marissa Brostoff discerns in a new novel and a new film the latest evolutionary stage of the schlemiel. For his weekly haftorah column, Liel Leibovitz graciously lent his space to a bull, and it pretty much goes from there. Maybe The Scroll needs more of a farm-animal presence?
The big news from Forbes’s annual list of the world’s billionaires is that Planet Earth has a new richest man: Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications magnate who now owns a substantial minority share of The New York Times. He weighs in at $53.5 billion. Muchas felicitationes!
But you want to know where the Jews—say, those in the top 50—are. The short answer is: They’re down.
• The richest Jew, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, fell from fourth to sixth, and from $22.5 billion to … well, to $28 billion, but obviously you’d rather have the higher ranking than the extra $5.5 billion.
• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped further, from 17th to 23rd, and from $16 billion to $18 billion (no way you could trade me six slots for $2 billion). [MORE]
• Despite everything, Israel expects the proximity talks will in fact launch, and soon. [JPost]
• The IDF indicted two soldiers in military court for allegedly getting a Palestinian boy to open a suspected booby-trapped package during last year’s Gaza conflict. [LAT]
• To head off buzzed-about rioting, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered a 48-hour full closure of the West Bank. [Ynet]
• In Saudia Arabia, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Gulf countries will pressure China to support anti-Iran sanctions. [Reuters/Haaretz]
• Egypt continues to clamp down on Hamas after sealing its Gaza border. [Haaretz]
• West Bank Palestinians commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history. [NYT]
• Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon argued that, whether or not the East Jerusalem announcement’s timing was unfortunate, Israeli development there is legitimate: “Jerusalem has always been out of the question.” Ladies and gentlemen, your second-ranking Israeli diplomat! [Haaretz]
• One day after endorsing the Goldstone Report, the E.U. parliament demanded that Hamas immediately release Gilad Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier who also holds French citizenship. [JTA]
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will speak at the annual AIPAC Conference later this month. Should be interesting, given recent events. [Ben Smith]
• An Israeli book called The Confessions of Noa Weber won the award for Best Translated Novel of 2010. [Jewcy]
• Scholar Martin Kramer, who has come under fire for proposing the end of Gaza pro-natal subsidies, argues his case in a “Q&A” with various Hamas interlocutors. [Sandbox]
• Lehavi, an Israeli group that works to get Jews to break up with non-Jewish significant others, has called on Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli to ditch Leonardo DiCaprio. [Gawker]
