The New York Times reports Nov. 5 on an initiative to win justice for Jews who fled Arab countries after 1948, and their descendants. But the first paragraph makes nearly explicitly clear that they are being exploited as bargaining chips against the claims of Palestinian refugees:

Setting a new standard for accuracy in the blogosphere, the New York Times editorial board makes a major error in their Oct. 31 blog post, "A Visit From: Eli Khoury, Lebanese Activist." On "The Board," the editorial staff of the newspaper of record declares: "Israel, which is pounded daily by Hezbollah rockets coming across its northern border with Lebanon..."

The northern Israeli village of Pekiin turned into a battleground Oct. 30 as clashes between police and Druze protesters left some 16 police officers and a similar number of medics and residents injured. One resident was in serious condition after being shot in the stomach, and a police officer was reportedly hospitalized with serious head wounds. The clashes broke out after a force of more than 100 police entered the village before dawn to arrest five men suspected of having vandalized a cellphone antenna installed in the neighboring community of New Pekiin. When the force tried to carry out the arrests, they were attacked with rocks and metal bars by masked Druze youth, and police responded by opening fire. The villagers believe that radiation from the antenna causes cancer. (NYT, Oct. 31)

Amos Schocken, the publisher of Israel's liberal daily Ha'aretz newspaper, has defended his paper's applying the word "apartheid" to the Israeli- occupied West Bank, as well as the phrase "Jews-only roads." According to journalist and blogger Phillip Weiss, who attended an Oct. 23 conference called "Israel and its Jewish Defamers," by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Schocken's statements came in a result to inquiries from CAMERA, which is led by Andrea Levin:

Our October issue featured the story "Israeli High Court Returns Palestinian Lands? Don't Believe the Hype!" by WW4 REPORT co-editor David Bloom, finding: "A review of the decisions shows that even in the few cases where the High Court decided in favor of Palestinians, the benefits to the villages have been minimal... In a widely publicized ruling, on Sept. 4, the town of Bil'in won a case at the High Court to have the barrier moved, saving 500 acres of its farmland which had been isolated from the rest of the village by the wall. But the very next day, in a separate ruling that received little media attention, the court ruled that Matityahu East, a large, new settlement outpost being built within the wall on part of Bil'in's land, could stay. So while the publicized decision returned lands to Bil'in, the quiet one upheld an illegal grab of other village lands." Our October Exit Poll was: "Separation barriers appear to be the icon of the new security state from the West Bank to Baghdad to the US-Mexican border. Are there still potentialities for a just co-existence (Israeli-Palestinian, Sunni-Shi'ite, gringo-Latino), or do 'good fences make good neighbors' and it is just a question of where to draw the line?" We received the following responses:

The recent controversy over the cancellation of two concerts sponsored by the group OneVoice, to have been held simultaneously on Oct. 18 in Israeli-occupied Jericho and Tel Aviv, has drawn wide recriminations from its New York-based leadership. OneVoice was founded by Daniel Lubetsky, a young Israeli-Mexican-American polyglot businessman. He has called the mostly Palestinian critics of OneVoice "extremists" who are against peace. Ironically, one of the Israeli musicians Lubestky hired for OneVoice's ill-fated Tel Aviv show was the popular Israeli singer Ehud Banai. Banai recently got into some hot water of his own with the Israeli left. We were first tipped off to this controversy by a comment left on OneVoice's blog:

From the Alternative Information Center, Oct 16.

The general secretary of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, did his reserve military duty at a checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, deep in the occupied Palestinian territories, acting just like any other good Israeli soldier.

From the NYC civil service paper The Chief-Leader, Oct 19:

Thompson and Israel

To the Editor:

The undersigned trade-union activists disagree with New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson and the Jewish Labor Committee, who have joined the witch-hunt against British unions for boycotting Israel (The Chief, Sept. 7).