Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 50
(JNS)-While the AIPAC policy conferences features panels and breakout sessions on almost every issue central to the geostrategic challenges facing the State of Israel, one key issue is repeatedly left off the schedule. That is the issue of Jewish settlements and growing neighborhoods outside the Green Line. To that end, more than 700 conference participants gathered off-campus on Sunday night to participate in an event supporting approximately 700,000 living in Judea, Samaria and periphery neigh...
(JNS)—For the second time in two months, the leadership of the Jewish Federation of North America has made it clear that it is fed up with the policies of Israel’s government. According to multiple news reports, JFNA leaders told Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Relations this past week that “relations between Israel and U.S. Jewry are at their lowest point since the state of Israel was established.” Eric Goldstein, chief executive of the UJA-Federation of New York—the only leader willing to come on record—is reported as stating that “people...
(JNS)-The controversial Canary Mission-an anonymous campus watchdog group that exposes organizations, academics and activists that demonize Israel on college campuses-recently came under fire when the San Francisco Jewish Federation indicated that it would no longer facilitate private-donor funding of the group. Articles in The Forward blasted the organization as "shadowy" for refusing to identify its leadership and sources of funding. Yet for pro-Israel student activists who are actively...
(JNS)-The passage of an Israeli law to withhold funds that the Palestinian Authority uses to pay murderers for killing Jews is the correction of an unconscionable injustice. That a democratic country with a High Court of Justice has allowed itself to transfer funds month after month to a murder-sponsoring entity within its midst is not just bad policy, it is completely illegal and utterly immoral. Israeli parliamentarians finally awoke to the reality that the P.A. pays more than $360 million a...
(JNS)—Amid all the challenges Israel is facing—the Iran nuclear threat; the presence of Iranian-backed forces and Hezbollah troops along Israel’s northern border; rioters and arsonists along the Gaza border; and Palestinians in the West Bank constantly inciting against Israel and paying terrorists millions of dollars each to kill Jews in a sophisticated “pay-to-slay” stipend scheme—the last thing Israel needs is to pour fuel on the fire of an international community that questions Jews’ rights to live in the only region of the world named J...
(JNS)-In an interview, former U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted that he tried to help former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres defeat Benjamin Netanyahu during Israel's elections in 1996, just a year after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Clinton stated in an interview on Israel's Channel 10 news that it "would be fair to say" that he assisted in the process to elect Shimon Peres, adding that "I tried to do it in a way that didn't overtly involve me." He explained...
(JNS)-On the margins of the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, D.C., more than 300 conference attendees gathered at the prestigious Sixth & I Historic Synagogue on Monday to express support for the nearly 500,000 residents of Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank. AIPAC leaders did not permit the session on one of Israel's most controversial topics to be included within the conference's vast schedule. Yet the high-profile event was co-sponsored by Israel's Ministry of Strategic...
Recognizing it is easier to influence those who are more prone to be natural supporters of the Jewish state than it is to sway journalists who cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a perceived anti-Israel bias, the Israeli government this week offered Christian media professionals a crash course in Israel advocacy and diplomacy. More than 130 journalists from 30 countries converged in Jerusalem for Israel’s inaugural Christian Media Summit, which was sponsored by the Government Press Office and spearheaded by Minister of Jerusalem A...
The Israeli government reopened the Temple Mount complex to Muslims and members of other faiths Sunday with strict new security measures, in the wake of last Friday's attack near the flashpoint holy site, in which Arab terrorists killed two Israeli Druze police officers. Israeli defense experts who specialize in understanding radical Islamic culture stress that such attacks are likely to occur again. "For many years, there has been the motivation to create an apocalypse between Islam and...
An upcoming vote by the United Nations cultural body UNESCO on whether to declare Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs as an endangered Palestinian heritage site is the latest example of "narrative warfare" against Israel and Jews, legal experts say. As part of an ongoing Palestinian-engineered diplomatic campaign, an "emergency resolution" UNESCO presented to its World Heritage Committee claims Israel is causing "irreversible negative effect on the integrity, authenticity and/or the distinctive...
A Palestinian driver rammed a truck into a crowd of Israeli soldiers Sunday at the scenic Haas Promenade overlooking Jerusalem's Old City, killing four and injuring 16 others in a terror attack that immediately drew comparisons to recent vehicular attacks in Europe. "This attack is part of the jihad against us, and the [car-ramming] methods that are being employed are part of the same methods that we saw recently in Nice and Berlin," Dr. Mordechai Kedar, senior lecturer in the Department of...
JERUSALEM—A newly approved plan to build 98 homes in the Shiloh Valley in northern Samaria has renewed longstanding tensions between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of “West Bank” settlement construction. Both the U.S. State Department and the White House have issued statements strongly condemning the plan—continuing a pattern of condemnations whenever Israel announces plans to build homes in territories captured from Jordan during the 1967 Six Day War. These territories lie at the center...
After two intense days of religious ceremonies in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials, unscheduled photo opportunities, and debilitating traffic arrangements, Israelis and interfaith relations experts are trying to attach the appropriate symbolism to Pope Francis’s visit to the region. Nearly every stop made by the pontiff was subjected to simultaneous scrutiny and praise. While long-term tensions between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church were made apparent by the trip, some experts are a...
Close to half a million members of Israel's haredi public rallied in Jerusalem on Sunday, shutting down roads in and around the city, to protest a proposed bill that would mandate them to participate in the Israel Defense Forces and would criminalize those that refuse conscription. Some political parties-led notably by Finance Minister Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid-have made the issue of religious enlistment a focal point of their agendas, while religious leaders, who are conspicuously absent from the...
Leaked comments Israeli Defense Minister Moshe [Bogie] Ya'alon made about U.S. Secretary State of State John Kerry's approach to Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations caused a diplomatic stir last week. Yet Ya'alon's reported remarks-which characterized Kerry's approach as an "obsession" and as "messianic"-appear to have less to do with any personal dislike of Kerry and more to do with how Kerry's pursuit of a two-state solution is at odds with the defense minister's understanding of...
Upsurges in Palestinian terrorism have often accompanied progress-and eventual breakdowns-in Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations over the past 20 years. The latest round of talks, brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, is proving to be no different. Palestinian attacks on Jewish military and civilian targets have been on the rise since a Lebanese sniper killed an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier in mid-December. A civilian hired by the IDF was murdered Dec. 24 while repairing...
Several weeks after Bedouin and global anti-Israel elements celebrated the apparent cancelation of a plan to resettle tens of thousands of Bedouin in Israel's southern Negev region, the fate of the plan remains unknown. In a dramatic press conference on Dec.12, former Israeli minister Benny Begin, placed in charge of the implementation of the "Prawer Plan," resigned his post and announced that the plan would be withdrawn. Just days later, however, Knesset members continued to meet to discuss...
An apparent antidote to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is coming from a once unlikely source. Chinese magnate Li Ka-Shing, among Asia’s richest businessmen, recently donated $130 million to Israel’s Technion University, as part of a joint venture with Shantou University that will establish the Technion Guangdong Institute of Technology (TGIT). The gift, one of the largest ever to an Israeli university, is indicative of a pervasive deepening in the con...
On the same day that the U.S. and Russia agreed to a deal stipulating that Syria must remove or destroy its chemical weapons stockpile by mid-2014, Israelis were happy to spend Saturday’s 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War in synagogue, and not on the battlefield or in safe rooms with gas masks. Yet Israelis’ long-term outlook on the situation in Syria isn’t as rosy. “Israelis are relieved in the short-term but concerned in the long-term,” Mitchell Barak, an Israeli political pollster...
Twenty years after the signing of the fateful Oslo Accords between Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, Knesset Members are heavily debating the merits of the peace process and the two-state solution paradigm. Parliamentarians from both Israel’s left and the right agree that the process has not yielded the results anyone would have hoped for, including the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians, and agree that th...
As Israeli children begin their school year, one particular requirement for students is taking on a somewhat sudden and newfound sense of urgency—inoculation against polio. The disease, which many in Israel had believed to be completely eradicated for more than two decades, has recently been identified in sewage systems—first in the south and then in the north of the country—during routine testing. Many across Israel are invoking thoughts of a biblical-style plague outbreak, even though no fo...
With his attention focused on a situation that is stable, relative to its immediate surroundings, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has left many in Israel wondering if the U.S. has its foreign policy priorities straight—particularly in the Middle East. Kerry has visited Israel and the Palestinian territories five times since he started his new post in February (with the sixth, scheduled for July 11, expected to be canceled because of his wife’s health) in an effort to restart peace neg...
While the Israeli economy has managed to steadily weather the global financial crisis of recent years, a growing budget deficit now threatens to disturb the relative economic stability of the past several years. Freshman Knesset Member and newly minted Finance Minister Yair Lapid must now attempt to raise government revenues by increasing taxes and slashing expenditures in order to close sizeable gaps in the 2013 budget. The uncomfortable measures, and remaining budget shortfalls, leave many...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reversed Israeli policy last Friday, offering an apology to the Turkish people for the deaths of nine Turkish citizens aboard the armed Mavi Marmara flotilla headed toward Gaza in 2010. But that apology may have had less to do with Turkey itself than with guarantees relating to Iran or Syria. “Apologizing to Turkey may clear the deck on one issue to get free reign on other issues,” Dr. Harold Rhode—who worked for 28 years in the Pentagon, including from 1989-90 as the head of the Turkish Desk at the U.S...
The surprise of Israel’s 2013 election was the rapid ascendance of the new Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, led by former television celebrity Yair Lapid, at the expense of Israel’s known political entities. The party surpassed all polling estimates to be come the nation’s second-most powerful party in Israel’s 19th Knesset. With 19 out of 120 parliamentary seats, Yesh Atid is in prime position to dictate many of the terms of Israel’s next ruling coalition, to be led by re-elected Prime Min...
