yesterday

Between the tomatoes and eggplants in my local supermarket yesterday, just as I finished loudly blowing my nose and cursing my recent allergy attacks, an elderly woman approached me and tapped my shoulder. "Good for you," she said. "You showed those Arabs."
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In her spend-whatever-it-takes bid to jump from being a billionaire ex-CEO to the governorship of California, Republican Meg Whitman presents herself and her ideas in very simple, straightforward terms. The reality behind the facade, as we see from her attempts to avoid a primary contest and duck debates and the press, as well as her false claim about herself in her introductory TV ad, is different.

Germany's only Jewish Film Festival is in danger of closing down due to lack of funding, the event's founder and director Nicola Galliner said yesterday.
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Yesterday, the Israeli Knesset debated the "Infiltration Prevention Law" which Israeli human rights groups are calling "one of the most dangerous bills ever presented in the Knesset."

The indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas over a deal for the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit have been halted, due to the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai two weeks ago, Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip said yesterday.
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The list of UN resolutions, legal bodies, mainstream human rights organizations, and prominent human rights advocates who have recently condemned, with overwhelming evidence, Israel's atrocities against Palestinians has become too large to ignore. Indeed, it is so extensive that one can no longer defend Israel's human rights record without having to attack the international human rights community itself, along with authoritative institutions of international law, and accuse them of exacerbating the conflict.

President Obama's "State of the Union" left out the traditional call for the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations which, for years, has been boilerplate in Presidential addresses to Congress.

I imagine Obama left it out because his previous calls fell on deaf ears in Israel, with Prime Minister Netanyahu continuing to expand settlements.

The New York Review Of Books
Anne Applebaum

"Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic"
by Michael Scammell, Random House, 689 pp., $35.00

After spending over a week in a small, windowless room in Ben Gurion International Airport, Jared Malsin, the Jewish American editor of a Palestinian news agency, was deported to New York yesterday. The move brought Malsin's legal battle to gain reentry into Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories to a sudden halt.

There are "forces" in Israel that unfairly portray Norway as anti-Semitic, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store charged yesterday. He was responding to various reports critical of Norway in the local press.
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