Israelis

Students and teachers at an innovative Tel Aviv school profiled in this year's Oscar-winning short documentary, "Strangers No More," celebrated Monday with balloons and gold-foil-wrapped chocolates, far away from the glitz of Hollywood. But the post-Oscar party at Bialik-Rogozin School, where many of the students have escaped poverty, war and even genocide, was dampened by a government threat to deport as many as 120, or nearly 15%, of the pupils under a controversial new policy aimed at reducing Israel's illegal migrant workforce.

Nearly all the considerable attention generated by Peter Beinart's "The Crisis of Zionism" has focused on its final 81/2 pages. There, warning that the "hour is late," he calls for liberal supporters of Israeli democracy to engage in "direct action" against Israeli occupation of the territories occupied after the June 1967 war. To save Israel from what he sees as the corrosive effects of settlement in the West Bank, he says, American Jews should boycott...

Imagine that you're a parent who sends her children off to school in the morning worrying whether their bus will become a target of suicide bombers. Imagine that, instead of going off to college, your children become soldiers at age 18, serve for three years and remain in the active reserves into their 40s. Imagine that you have fought in several wars, as have your parents and even your grandparents, that you've seen rockets raining down on your neighborhood and have lost close family and friends to terrorist attacks.

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when a comprehensive rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians seemed not just possible but inevitable. In the mid-1990s, the two-state solution was gaining support on both sides. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were losing influence. Israel was handing over West Bank cities to Palestinian control. The 50-year-old conflict seemed to be nearing a resolution. Of course, that never came to pass. Peace fizzled in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the terrorist bombs of the Palestinian militants, among other things.

With a sense of relief and a touch of anxiety, Israelis braced themselves Monday for another high-profile probe of their military's conduct. Relief stemmed from the hope that an Israeli-led commission, approved by the government Monday, will head off U.N. calls for an international inquiry into Israel's May 31 raid on an aid flotilla seeking to break its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Nine Turkish activists were killed in the operation. Anxiety persists, however, because recent inquiries into the military have led to political shake-ups and painful soul-searching.

"The peace process is back," my friend said with bitter sarcasm, after four Israelis were killed in a terror attack just before Palestinian-Israeli negotiations got underway this week. The irony may have been lost on outsiders but not on Israelis. The Oslo peace process of the 1990s was accompanied by waves of attacks by Hamas jihadists, which Israelis believe were tacitly orchestrated by their negotiating partner at the time, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Then, in September 2000, just as Israel accepted a Palestinian state and the re-division of Jerusalem, Arafat responded by launching a four-year terror war. But there is one crucial difference between this week's deadly terrorism and the terror assaults of those years.

Eban's thoughtful and rational thoughts concerning yet-to-begin Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations are a welcome contrast to the stubbornness, intransigence and distasteful cockiness which led to Yitzhak Shamir's downfall. If Israel had hired a public relations firm in the first place, Shamir would long ago be back at his old job as a terrorist while Eban would be prime minister. Eban's moderate and level-headed pronouncements on this sensitive issue have elicited a "sit down and keep quiet" order from his contemporaries in recent years.

Re "Rabin Seeks OK for More Force in Grilling Suspects" and "Palestinian Security Unit Accused of Torture," Aug. 25: According to two Israeli civil rights organizations--B'tselem and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel--both Israeli and the Palestinian authorities use the same techniques, which include beating suspects, depriving them of sleep, isolating them in cramped quarters, shaking them violently and "prolonged binding of [their]...

Two Israelis were detained at Cairo Airport as they were leaving the country with ancient Hebrew-language biblical manuscripts in their possession, the newspaper Al Akhbar said Friday. The newspaper said the Israelis had five large manuscripts and three small ones, as well as three plates with Hebrew inscriptions. The Israelis, identified as David Sasson and Gabriel Jonah, said that the manuscripts dated back before Christ and that they had brought them into Egypt from abroad.

Five Israeli air force officers were killed when their light plane crashed in southern Israel while on a supply mission, the military command said Friday.

False equivalency Re "Student loans, abuse against women spur fights in Congress," April 26 The article says, "The looming confrontations on both issues show how hard it is for Republicans - or Democrats, for that matter - to compromise in this highly contentious environment. " Democrats, often to my dismay, are usually too willing to compromise. Republicans, at least since President Obama was elected, never do unless the public outcry is so great and they're forced to. And to imply that there is an equivalency between taking funds from public health versus a tax increase on the rich that is "off-limits" because almost all Republicans have signed a pledge not to raise taxes is laughable.

JERUSALEM — Historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the father of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the man said to have had the most profound influence on the conservative Israeli leader, died early Monday in his Jerusalem home. He was 102. The elder Netanyahu served as the personal secretary of Zionism's prominent Revisionist leader, Zeev Jabotinsky, in the United States during World War II, lobbying for the creation of a Jewish state. He also pursued his academic work, specializing in medieval Spanish Jewry and the roots of the Spanish Inquisition.

UMM AL FAHM, Israel — He's an Israeli-born Islamist whom the government considers so dangerous he's been banned from stepping foot in Jerusalem. Yet his prison stints over the last decade for allegedly funding terrorist groups, inciting violence and spitting on an Israeli security officer — all of which he denies — have only served to make Sheik Raed Saleh, 53, extremely popular and influential among Arab Israelis. After returning this month from London, where he successfully fought deportation by British immigration officials who cited his controversial views, Saleh received a hero's welcome.

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details. The Israeli Parliament's move to ban skinny models from appearing in that nation's media may be less momentous than its efforts to thwart Iran's bid to build nuclear weapons. But to the Israeli politicians who sponsored the measure, which won approval in Tel Aviv on Monday, and to American experts on eating disorders, the measure is a clear step toward a key goal: promoting more realistic body images among girls and women.

Israeli President Shimon Peres praised Facebook Inc. as a vehicle for social change during a visit to the social networking company's Menlo Park, Calif., campus. Peres, 88, came to Facebook on Tuesday to launch his official personal page on the site that he hopes will open a dialogue with Arabs throughout the world and to meet with Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. "The matter of peace is no longer the business of governments but the business of people," Peres told Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview streamed live on Facebook.

Israeli President Shimon Peres praised Facebook as a vehicle for social change during a visit to the social networking company's Menlo Park, Calif., campus. Peres, 88, came to Facebook on Tuesday to launch his official personal page on the site that he hopes will open a dialogue with Arabs throughout the world and to meet with Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. "The matter of peace is no longer the business of governments but the business of people,” Peres told Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview streamed live on Facebook . "Today the people are governing the governments.

As a non-Jew, non-Arab non-Middle Easterner, I have one thing to say in response to Hussein Ibish's May 26 commentary, "Know Now That Arab Lives Are as Worthy as Israelis' "--enough already! The Israelis had security reasons for invading south Lebanon. The Lebanese now have every right to be angry about the conduct of the Israeli occupiers. Zigzagging back through history, chronicling one side's "ghastly massacres" and then the other's, serves no purpose except to keep the flames of passion roiling.

President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday sought to offer a united front against Iran's growing nuclear program but appeared to differ on whether a diplomatic solution remains possible or if military action is needed to prevent Tehran from gaining a nuclear bomb. At a White House meeting, Netanyahu said he reserved the option to launch a unilateral attack on Iran despite Obama's position that more time is needed for stiff economic sanctions and international diplomacy to work.

  At a previous high-profile summit between a U.S. president and an Israeli prime minister, an exasperated Bill Clinton marveled at what he viewed as his counterpart's arrogance in schooling him about the Mideast conflict. According to one aide, Clinton asked after the meeting: Just who is the superpower? The Israeli leader at the time was - and again is - Benjamin Netanyahu. At home, Netanyahu is seen as politically cautious, risk-averse and "squeezable" when it comes to his positions.