West Bank

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Israel’s foreign minister thanked Hillary Rodham Clinton for removing items critical of Israel from UNESCO’s agenda.

The United States’ “strong and consistent position,” Avigdor Lieberman wrote in an April 25 letter to the U.S. secretary of state, “prevented the introduction of five anti-Israel resolutions initiated by the Arab group.”

BIL’IN, West Bank (JTA) – Rami Burnat sits in his wheelchair toward the back of a sprawling courtyard where Palestinian speakers take turns championing the cause of nonviolent resistance.

Burnat, 29, has been disabled ever since a bullet pierced his neck in clashes in late 2000, shortly after the second intifada began. Still an activist, Burnat is among a small but growing number of Palestinians trying to mount a new kind of intifada against Israel: a nonviolent one.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the Palestinian Authority to join negotiations with Israel.

"We strongly urge President Abbas and his government to join negotiations with Israel now," the U.S. Secretary of State said Thursday evening, addressing a Center for Middle East Peace dinner.

If it’s time for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be creative, as was asserted in Francine Klagsbrun’s opinion piece last week, it’s time for the author and Israel to learn from history, or be doomed to repeat the disasters of appeasement. Moral relativism is now in ascendancy, so that there is the equivalence of the Israel narrative and the Palestinian narrative, no true or false, no right or wrong, but never let the facts get in the way.