“President Obama should not interfere with the rights of the Jewish people to live in Jerusalem,” said Danon. “This … is a racist demand, saying that Jews cannot live in Jerusalem, only Arabs.”

He’s right. I wonder how Obama would react to demands from another country that African Americans not be allowed to live in parts of the US.

Meanwhile, just to give you an idea of Israeli feelings about this, Opposition leader Tzipi Livni – who today blasted the Prime Minister – had this to say.

Britain and France have also condemned the construction in Gilo, but in Israel – as Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni stressed to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner – there is consensus on the Jerusalem neighborhood.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:50PM: Israel’s plans to build 900 new residential units in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood are “unforgivable and dangerous”..according to the country who has constructed nuclear facilities for nefarious purposes.

6:05PM: China has criticized the Israeli government’s move to expand a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, saying it poses new obstacles to the Middle East peace process.

Funny, because I was sure China’s idea of an “obstacle” was this:

5:52PM: In Newsweek, Dan Senor and Saul Singer, authors of Start up Nation- the Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, answer the questions:

How does Israel—with fewer people than the state of New Jersey, no natural resources, and hostile nations all around—produce more tech companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, and China combined? How does Israel attract, per person, 30 times as much venture capital as Europe and more than twice the flow to American companies? How does it produce, for its size, the most cutting-edge technology startups in the world?

5:30PM: PA President Mahmoud Abbas has said a Middle East peace deal will not happen with him.

He’s right, but I posit it’s because he and his Fatah party are a bunch of terrorists.

And still on the subject..

Palestinian supporters of the Fatah movement loyal to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, seen, during a march in the west bank city of Nablus. Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009.

5:38AM: With many such as the Obama administration and EU up in arms about Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Israel National News notes the Jerusalem Municipality’s plans for construction on Arab housing.

The Jerusalem Municipality is plowing ahead with plans for construction of more than 5,000 housing units in Arab neighborhoods. These include the following:

• A master plan for the Tel Adasa neighborhood in northern Jerusalem, where 2,000 new housing units are planned.
• A master plan for the Arab a-Sawahara area for a new housing compound with 2,500 units that is currently being prepared for discussion at the local council and district council levels.
• A master plan for the Dir el-Amud and Al-Muntar areas in Beit Safafa in southeastern Jerusalem, currently in advanced planning stages.
• A construction plan for 172 housing units and public buildings at the Jabal Mukabar neighborhood, which has completed the mandatory waiting period and will soon come up for additional discussion and approval in the district council.

Meanwhile, with the mainstream media assaulting us with photos such as this, it is important to note that such homes are illegal, and were demolished pursuant to the Israeli legal system.

The municipality noted that it is also destroying illegal structures in the Arab sector. Three buildings were demolished Wednesday: a structure, 90 square meters in size, that was built  on public land in Isawiya; a structure in Wadi Hilwah, also built on public land, sized 32 square meters; and three temporary structures in Silwan that served as pens for sheep and horses. All of the structures were razed after courts ordered them to be torn down.

12:30AM: A closer look at Jerusalem’s 9-11 memorial.

The answer seems to be hell yeah.

Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon (Likud) confirmed on Saturday that Israel was operating intelligence-gathering networks within Lebanon.

Speaking at an event in Be’er Sheva, Ya’alon said that “the moment Hezbollah renewed their attacks, we began to collect intelligence. We will stop when Hezbollah disarms itself and the [Israel-Lebanon] border is a border of peace.”

“When we are in conflict with an enemy,” he continued, “we gather information about them.”

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

6:45PM: Now it’s Ha’aretz’s turn to use the word “terrorist.”

Which the guy is, if he did what he’s accused of.

4:58PM: Fascinating CNBC story on Israel as a leader of business innovation.

4:46PM: Sakher Habash, a co-founder of Fatah and former member of its Central Committee, has died in Ramallah. So far, no accusations of Israeli involvement in his death. But give it time.

Habash once said:

“To us, the refugee issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state.”

12:42PM: Netanyahu to palestinians: “Get a grip.”

No, really.

9:42AM: PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has actually used the “T” word (”Terrorist”).

But no need to bring out the flying pig.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Saturday condemned an attack during which Israeli settlers shot a Palestinian and injured four others in occupied East Jerusalem.

Five relatives, three of them over 60 years old, were hospitalized after right-wing Israelis attacked the Salah family, shooting one, in a bid to take over their home in the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa on Friday.

“This terrorist settler attack on the lives and property of Palestinian citizens demonstrates the necessity of providing immediate international protection for our people in Jerusalem,” Fayyad said, speaking alongside US Consul General Daniel Rubenstein and other American officials at an unrelated event near Ramallah.

Interestingly enough, this alleged attack has not been reported anywhere besides some palestinian news sites. Which is curious, considering the mainstream media are normally more than willing to publish such reports, even when based on unsubstantiated claims.

9:30AM: Photo of the day:

“The hills are alive with the sound of settlements.”

Israeli Nobel Prize for chemistry laureate Professor Ada Yonath on Saturday said all Hamas prisoners held in Israel should be released in order to bring Gilad Shalit home.

“I don’t understand why we incarcerate them in Israel in the first place,” the professor told Army Radio Saturday.

She added that “all prisoners should be returned to Palestine regardless of a deal for Gilad Shalit’s release.”

Yonath was interviewed on the weekly Saturday radio show about her thoughts in general regarding the Middle East conflict and called for a “change in the status quo.” She said that holding Palestinians captive encourages and perpetuates their motivation to harm Israel and its citizens.

“If we hold Palestinian prisoners captive for years on end, their familys’ resentment for Israel will grow and we are actively creating terrorists,” the Nobel Laureate suggested.

She also said that if we cease from incarcerating Palestinians it will end soldier abductions. “Once we don’t have any prisoners to release they will have no reason to kidnap soldiers.”

Yonath described many Palestinian lives as having “no hope for the future,” and said that “in a state of such despair they have every reason to jump at the opportunity to better their prospects for a better afterlife.”

Either this woman has spent way too much in the laboratory, isolated from real life, or she is gunning for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:42PM: PA President Mahmoud Abbas has said he instructed the palestinian envoy at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council to request an urgent meeting to discuss the Goldstone report “in order to prosecute those who perpetrated crimes against our children and our women.”

He has also tried to explain why he agreed to have the Goldstone Report passed on to the next UN Security Council session in six months.

The president, who has been under serious scrutiny from Hamas and many other bodies in the Arab world, tried to explain Palestinian “folding” that some called a “betrayal of martyrs’ blood”.

According to Abbas, the Palestinians originally agreed to have the Goldstone Report passed on to the next UN Security Council session in six months, “following attempts by various bodies to change the original version of the resolution. These changes would have emptied the report of its content and would have harmed efforts to condemn and accuse those responsible of war crimes.”

He said, “Following estimates that the report would not be passed in the current session, we decided to agree to have it deferred to the next session, and this cannot be turned into part of the political provacations.”

I call BS on Abbas since:

• It is not hard to call BS on someone who constantly lies
• If this was the real reason, he would have immediately justified his decision on these grounds. It is therefore likely his decision was in fact based on grounds he could not disclose to his people, and this justification has been invented to placate his people in the wake of their harsh reaction

I’m guessing that he agreed to have the Goldstone Report passed on to the next UN Security Council session in six months since he and his Fatah party pushed for Israel to go ahead with Operation Cast Lead and deal a huge blow to Hamas, which is something Israel had threatened to expose unless he withdraw his support for an adoption of the report.

If I’m right, the PA may just have bitten of its nose to spite its face. Unless the US has asked Israel to refrain from weakening the PA by revealing the facts.

8:28PM: This next story is likely to put you off bananas for good.

7:52PM: This next bit of Israeli ingenuity may not win a Nobel Prize, but I’m lovin’ it.

British film director Ken Loach may oppose promoting Israeli movies at international festivals, but his films are actually going to do just that: Nurit Shani, CEO of Lev Cinemas and Films, announced on Wednesday that the profits from the local distribution of Loach’s new film “Looking for Eric” will be dedicated to the  distribution of Israeli films both in Israel  and abroad.

“In recent years, Ken Loach has voiced a number of criticisms against Israel and its policies,” Shani said before the premiere screening of the film at the Haifa International Film Festival.

“I believe it is any artist’s right to express his opinion, and I have therefore always given his films a screen. Unfortunately, in the past year I discovered that Ken Loach himself does not share my views. The original artist, who I considered a great humanist, has turned out to be a man who does not believe in freedom of expression for people whose opinions oppose his own.

“An artist that that has not read or did not understand Voltaire. An artist that does everything in his power to silence his colleagues, Israeli directors, from speaking their mind and from having Israeli films screened around the world.”

In the past year, Loach led that protest against the Edinburgh International Film Festival, whose organizers chose to screen the Israeli film “Surrogate” with financial support from the Israeli embassy.

Loach later took part in a protest against the “City to City” program at the Toronto International Film Festival focusing on films about Tel Aviv.

Shani said she has been bringing Loach’s films to Israel for almost 20 years, but could not hide her disgust with his latest actions. “I view his deeds as an act of hypocrisy, a burning slap in the face of democracy and the humanistic spirit of his films. His movies are of a great director, but his actions are of a small person,” she said.

As a result, Shani decided to donate the profit from “Looking for Eric”, and from his next film, to the distribution of Israeli films abroad. “I believe the way to fight the silencing – and there is no other way to define Loach’s actions other then attempts to silence – is to ensure that the Israeli voice, the Israeli creativity that is so diverse and fascinating, be heard load and clear, in Israel and in the world,” she said.

I think this calls for unleashing the Nelson.

4:24PM: Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s briefing to the Foreign Press on the Goldstone Report.

3:42PM: Quote of the day:

“What is the difference between blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv and taking over Palestinian land?”

- Mohammed Dahlan of our “peace partners” Fatah

Leaving aside the issue of whether or not we actually took over land belonging to palestinians, how can anyone with an ounce of morality ask that question?

3:38PM: Turkey has announced the cancellation of an international air force drill, which was to include Israeli, as well as US, Italian and NATO forces, because the planes that Israel was going to send likely bombed Hamas targets during Operation Cast Lead.

But not to worry! Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks we are great at making money.

And some of his best friends are Jewish..

9:55AM: Interesting video on the plight of Muslim Sudanese refugees who have fled to Israel from the genocide of Darfur.

6:22AM: Holy technical error, Batman!

The Guardian was forced to amend an article on past Nobel Peace Prize winners on its Web site on Friday after it omitted the names of Israel’s prize winners.

Following the announcement of US President Barack Obama’s winning the 2009 prize, an article written by the newspaper’s news editor Simon Rogers listed the names of all Nobel Peace prize winners since the awards inception in 1909. However, all of Israel’s prize winners – Menachem Begin, Yizhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – were omitted.

In the 1978 entry, Menachem Begin’s name was missing, with only Egyptian president Anwar Sadat listed. The same error occurred in the 1994 entry with Yasser Arafat the only entry and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres missing.

The omission led to a number of frenzied entries in the article’s comment section.

In a statement on Friday, the newspaper blamed the mistake on a “technical issue,” saying the names was accidentally omitted.

“For the Nobel Peace Prize winners list, we used data from nobelprize.org. However, there was a technical issue during the data transfer from the site, which meant that many of the names of the joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were accidentally omitted, although the country of origin of the winners was not. This has now been corrected,” a Guardian spokesperson said.

The article’s author, Simon Rogers, also posted an entry online: “It’s my fault, I’m afraid. I decided where there was more than one winner to put the joint one in the second column. Unfortunately, this caused a few problems, which we’ve now rectified. Please let me know if you spot any other missing names.”

Although the Israeli winners are never mentioned first on the Nobel Peace Prize list, I find it hard to believe that this is a mere technical error, especially given the Guardian’s reputation for being anti-Israel. Besides, these “technical errors” always seem to be to the detriment of Israel.

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Created here (found thanks to The ShadowLands)

Background here.

Journalists lamented the balkanization of Palestinian media at a symposium in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Sunday.

A panel titled “The Role of Journalism in Enhancing Civil Society” was held on Sunday at the Shepherd Hotel in Bethlehem. The panel was organized by the Peace Alliance Foundation.

The Director of the Peace Alliance Foundation, Nidal Fuqaha, opened the panel by asserting the important, but dangerous role journalism currently serves in Palestine. He argued that impartiality and professionalism are the way to approach the current crisis.

Ma’an’s Chief Editor, Nasser Lahham also addressed the panel, recommending that Palestinian media employ journalists with diverse affiliations.

“As long as Hamas media employs only Hamas-affiliated journalists, Fatah media employs only Fatah-affiliated journalists, and communist factions’ media employ only communist journalists, the inevitable outcome will be partial journalism far from the professionalism and impartiality that should be strived for,” Lahham explained.

He added that most Palestinian media outlets failed during the inter-Palestinian fighting because each reported according to its affiliation and factional attitudes. Thus, he advised that from now on, we should focus on professionalism rather than political affiliation in our reporting.

Lahham gave an example of Ma’an News Agency which employs journalists with different political affiliations in order to create balance and diversity. In its four years of existence, Ma’an has achieved the highest degree of impartiality, he added.

Which isn’t saying much.

An Executive Committee secretary within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) accused Hamas of working toward the establishment of a Saudi-styled “Islamic emirate” in Gaza and, eventually, all of Palestine.

Secretary Yasser Abed Rabbo made the comments at a seminar organized by the Cultural Liberation Organization on Saturday in Ramallah, where he gave a lecture on the signing of the now 20-year-old Palestinian Independence document in Algiers.

The Hamas leadership “wants to return to the era of the PLO before Arafat’s rule,” according to the PLO leader, who went on to say that Hamas is willing to replace the national draft agreement with one that would “establish an Islamic emirate.”

“Yet they still won’t promote national issues,” he said.

Another member at the PLO Executive Committee, Abdul-Rahim Malluh, said that there is “a need to restore respect for the Independence document,” something both men said Hamas was unwilling to do.

Malluh noted that the first and last references in the declaration are in regard to the Palestinian people, themselves, which he claimed contained the legitimacy to go through with Fatah’s attempts to hold new elections in 2010, “as a way to resolve the division and solve the problems of Palestine.”

Of course, Fatah’s main issue with an Islamic emirate in all of “palestine” is the fact they promote a secular nationalist agenda.

Fatah at a crossroads, conference will decide new track: peace or resistance

The sixth Fatah conference is a pivotal moment which could either be a farewell or the start of a new and stronger unity, said secretary of Fatah’s Central Committee Farouq Qaddoumi.

The Fatah leader spoke with Ma’an in Amman as he worked with the Central Committee to prepare the Sixth Fatah conference, the first since 1989. Qaddoumi will be part of several key decisions on Saturday and Sunday that will determine the character of the Fatah party for the next decade.

While Fatah has decided to hold a conference, it has not decided where it will take place, since location determines to a great extend who will be able to participate. The party has also not decided who will be invited to the conference, since the Fatah membership list has hundreds of thousands of names listed on it. Once these decisions are made, a date will be set and concrete preparations will begin.

Asked his thoughts on the importance of the coming conference, Qaddoumi noted that between the 1989 conference and today, Fatah has experimented with the “peaceful solution and political compromise.” He noted that Israel had thwarted Palestinian peace attempts in several ways, “from assassinating [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin to poisoning [former Palestinian President] Yasser Arafat.”

The conference will thus weigh the option of continuing with the peace-track and re-discussing the option of resistance. Qaddoumi said the second option “must be seriously considered since our other choices have failed,” and added that there were other options besides peace and resistance.

The main issue, said Qaddoumi, is to “include Palestinian, Arab and international efforts to reach a just solution which secures Palestinian rights, on top of which is the right of return.”

The return to resistance would be complicated for Fatah, given the changes in the international and political climate since the 1994 Oslo Accords. But Qaddoumi insisted that the international climate should take the Palestinian situation rather than the Palestinians taking into account what he called “political equations.”

“We should benefit from changes rather than being victims of them,” he said. He referred to Hizbullah victories, collapse of the US economy, socialist success in Latin America, Russia’s emerge and Iran’s might as factors which Fatah should take political advantage of.

Just in case you thought they had already abandoned terrorism..

I have a sneaking suspicion the terrorist on the left would oblige him.

Hazem Abu Shanab, a spokesman of the Fatah movement in Gaza, hugs his sons after he was released from Hamas security forces jail in Gaza September 28, 2008. Hamas security forces released 35 people on Sunday, including five senior leaders of President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. Hamas said the releases were in order to help the Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks succeed, and to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid el-Fitr.