Israel

For two decades Miriam and Yona Baumel have suffered while they held onto the belief that their son was alive. Zachary Baumel, a member of an Israeli tank crew, disappeared during a 1982 battle against the Syrian army in Lebanon.
Last week that belief was reinforced when the Baumels received information from a "top-notch" source that Zachary indeed was alive and transferred from Damascus to Lebanon.
"He said it was recent information," Yona Baumel said of the source, adding that the transfer was believed to have been made within the last three weeks.

New Israel Aid May Be Hard Sell

A parade of Israel officials has started lobbying Washington for new U.S. aid as compensation for the military redeployments mandated by last month’s Wye River agreement. But the high-dollar package could be a hard sell in Congress, where the new Republican leadership has vowed to make big tax cuts, not foreign policy, their top priority.

For Now, U.S. Nudging Israel

Urgent but quiet pleas, not strong-arming, were on the diplomatic menu at the State Department this week as the target date to begin implementation of the Wye River Memorandum came and went without much action on the ground.
But observers warned that U.S. pressure is likely to resume if what is seen by administration officials as Israeli foot-dragging continues.

Aid Hinges On Congress
As a sweetener to last week’s Wye River agreement, the Clinton administration is offering new aid to the Palestinians and Israelis. But on Capitol Hill, already sour on foreign aid and not a hotbed of support for Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, the aid package could be a hard sell.

Sderot, Israel — There’s far more to Sderot than the almost daily Kassam rocket attacks and the victimized, stressed-out residents we read about in the headlines.
There is all of that, for sure, but there are also stories to be told of people here who are as in love with this mostly poor town of about 20,000, about a mile from the Gaza border, as they are frustrated with and deeply pained by a government that has allowed them to be targeted by Palestinian militants’ rockets for more than seven years.

Looking through my notes from dozens of interviews and from several conferences I attended in Israel last month, I came across a quote from Jerusalem-based venture capitalist Erel Margalit that seemed to jump out at me, crystallizing my findings.

“There’s a synergy when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” he told me. “But we have the opposite in Israel. We have amazing people doing amazing things, but leadership here — the ability to give it all meaning — is lacking.”

Rabbi Benjamin (Benny) Lau does not look the part of a revolutionary.

At 47, his youthful appearance, warm smile and engaging personality have helped him become a popular Orthodox rabbinic figure in Jerusalem, where he has revitalized the Ramban community synagogue in Katamon and heads the beit midrash program at Beit Morasha, a communal and educational leadership institute for observant men and women.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his cabinet Sunday that he has made fighting anti-Semitism a major concern of his government in the wake of a two-day forum in Jerusalem designed to develop a global initiative to deal with the problem.
"The prime minister said that until now it had a low profile [in Israel]," said Natan Sharansky, who as minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs organized the forum. "In Israel, anti-Semitism was seen as a diaspora problem. Now it is understood that that has to be changed."

An indoor street fair of Israeli merchandise - much of it flown over expressly for the occasion - is scheduled for Mother's Day at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan. It marks just one of a series of events planned for the New York area to help financially troubled Israeli merchants.

Summit Scrambling

The announcement that Israeli and Palestinian leaders will gather in the Washington area this week for a hastily arranged summit sent administration officials scrambling to prepare for the descending diplomatic hordes.