1) At the INSS, Yohanan Tzoreff analyses an event late last month which has not been covered by the BBC: ‘The Palestinian Summit in el-Alamein’.
“The summit of the Palestinian factions in el-Alamein, Egypt, convened by Abu Mazen, was attended by the head of the Hamas Political Bureau and the leaders of most other factions. It was coordinated in advance with Hamas, which upon its conclusion, praised the amicable spirit and inclination toward agreement that prevailed throughout the event. In his concluding remarks, Abu Mazen announced the establishment of a follow-up committee in order to reach agreements for a reconciliation formula that would be acceptable to all, although no such formula has been reached within the individual organizations, and it is unclear whether any such intention toward a consensus exists.”
2) At the ITIC, Dr Arnon Groiss reports on ‘Revealing Maps: The Palestinian Vision as Taught in PA Schools’.
“…there is not even one map in the entire corpus of maps in use in PA schools today that shows the State of Israel. Even in clearly political maps the whole country appears under the name “Palestine” only. Thus, Israel, a recognized sovereign state which has been a member of the UN organization since 1949, is erased from the maps used by the PA.”
3) WINEP presents a discussion on ‘Israel-Lebanon Border Tensions: Hezbollah Provocation, IDF Response, and the Potential for Conflict’.
“Simmering tensions along Israel’s Blue Line frontier with Lebanon rose another degree in recent days, with IDF officials preparing to visit the UN for talks on the matter and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warning that Israel “will send Lebanon back to the Stone Age” if Hezbollah escalates. What has changed in Hezbollah’s longstanding provocations on this front, and what are the prospects for near-term conflict there? Will recent developments at home play a role in shaping the group’s calculus?”
4) The Times of Israel brings an article by Oren Kessler titled ‘Herbert Samuel’s secret 1937 testimony on the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem revealed’.
“…Herbert Samuel — or rather, the Viscount Samuel of Mount Carmel and Toxteth — was a seminal figure in the history of Zionism: the first Jew in Britain’s Cabinet, the official who first proposed the idea of a Jewish state to the British government, and the first high commissioner for British-ruled Palestine. And it was he who, just over a century ago, selected a 25-year-old Jerusalem effendi to be the most powerful Arab in Palestine, with consequences more profound than anyone at the time could conceive. That man was Amin al-Husseini.”
