November 10, 2003

Sorry - No Deal In an op-ed piece former US President Jimmy Carter offers his support for the "Geneva Accords", a private sample deal outlined by rejected Israeli left-wing politicians and Palestinian negotiators. President Carter states that this deal successfully proposes a two-state solution. It would settle the conflict's most critical elements, including precise border delineations, Israeli settlements, the end of excessive occupation of Palestinian lands, the future of Jerusalem and its holy places and the troubling question of Palestinian refugees. Which is why the editors at Arab News reject it. But the Geneva agreement also has one huge flaw from the Palestinian perspective: Land in exchange for relinquishing the Palestinian right of return with the recognition this implies of the Jewish character of the Israeli state. This is of grave significance. The right of return is a fundamental Palestinian principle. This of course is exactly what Yossi Klein Halevi was talking about when he said no Arabs accepted Israel as a Jewish state. 11:03:58 PM

IsraeliInsider has an editorial by The New Republic correspondent and The Jerusalem Reporter senior writer Yossi Klein Halevi that is a modified form of a speech he gave last week into Toronto, Canada. In the editorial he discusses why security concerns and the concern over illegal Palestinian immigration to Israel force him to support the construction of the separation fence between Israel and the West Bank. He also notes that the construction of the fence will remind Palestinians that when their use of violence results in the loss of land and that a peaceful solution is the only way to avoid further losses. Not in the article is a second aspect of his speech in which Yossi stated that he did not believe that a permanent solution is currently reachable because no Palestinians are willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state. He stated that even the most moderate and trustworthy Palestinian officers he met only saw Israel as a future bi-national state in which Palestinians would invariably make up a majority. As a result he states that interm agreemets are all that may be reachable. 11:01:32 PM

Microsoft will add a pop-up killer to the next version of Internet Explorer as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2, to be release next year. 11:00:54 PM