Deadly role

On Monday, actor Juliano Mer Khamis, the son of an Israeli Jewish mother and a Palestinian Arab father, was murdered by a terrorist in the West Bank town of Jenin. Richard Klagsbrun remembers him as an actor who believed that hope and reason could overcome hate.

Goldstone Report finding reversed

Richard Goldstone has come to the conclusion that in the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict it was not Israeli policy to intentionally target civilians, reversing a key finding of his United Nations report. "If I had known then what I know now," he has written in an article in The Washington Post, "the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

Israel has called for the report, which accused Israel of war crimes, to be withdrawn. "Everything we said has been proven true," said Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. "Israel did not intentionally harm civilians .... The fact that Goldstone backtracked must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all."

Education in Gaza

The United Nations wants to teach children in UN schools in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust, starting this September. Hamas has pledged to stop the plan, "regardless of the price."

Palestinian hi-tech

After considering India and China, an Israeli hi-tech company chose Ramallah in the West Bank for a new software design center. In the past five years, the Palestinian technology sector has grown to 250 companies employing 5,800 people. About 32 percent of Palestinian technology companies are working with Israeli partners.

Hope tempered by worry

Some Israelis are worried by the popular rebellions rocking the Middle East.  Natan Sharansky is hopeful.

Seeking justice in Libya

For Gina Bublil Waldman, a Libyan Jew who left Libya more than 42 years ago  the upheaval sweeping Libya has opened old wounds. "In 1967, during the Six-Day War between Israel and its five Arab neighbors," she writes, "mobs took to the streets, burning Jewish homes."

Israel Apartheid Week and its precursors

Catherine Chatterley, founding director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, discusses the origins of IAW and what is needed in response.

Another refugee issue

Before the state of Israel was re-established in 1948, there were almost 1 million Jews in Arab lands; today there are around 5,000. Jewish refugees, writes Danny Ayalon, were pushed out of the lands that they had lived in for thousands of years, predating even Islam.

Canada will boycott UN conference

Canada is the first country to announce it will not attend  a UN conference on racism, known as "Durban III", scheduled to occur in 2011.

“The original Durban conference and its declaration, as well as the non-governmental activities associated with it, proved to be a dangerous platform for racism, including anti-Semitism,”said Canada's Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. “The General Assembly has now chosen to repeat and even augment the mistakes of the past.”

Ottawa conference on combatting anti-Semitism

"Harnessing disparate anti-Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western ideologies, [anti-Semitism] targets the Jewish people by targeting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world, and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so."

Excerpt from a speech by Prime Minister Stephen Harper ... more.

Canada in the Middle East

Canadian member of parliament and cabinet minister Peter Kent visited Israel and the West Bank. Canadian and Israeli columnists comment.

Canada and the Dead Sea Scrolls

In 1954 several thousand fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were purchased by McGill University. They never arrived. Now the story of this purchase is told in Canada's Big Biblical Bargain: How McGill University Bought the Dead Sea Scrolls ... more.

Canadian-Iranian blogger may be executed

Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian who moved to Canada and became a blogger. His on-line publication, sometimes critical, sometimes supportive of Tehran, taught Iranians, domestic and ex-patriate, how to blog in Persian. In 2006 as a Canadian citizen he visited Israel. In 2008 he returned to Iran and was arrested. Now he faces a possible death penalty ... more.

Update:  For “conspiring with hostile governments, spreading propaganda against the Islamic system, spreading propaganda in favor of counterrevolutionary groups, blasphemy, and creating and managing obscene Web sites,” an Iranian court has sentenced Mr. Derakhshan to 19.5 years in jail ... more.

View from Havana

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should stop slandering Jews and denying the Holocaust and Tehran should acknowledge the "unique" history of antisemitism and understand why Israelis fear for their existence. So says Cuba's retired President Fidel Castro.

Rebuilding trust

Peace between Israelis and Palestinians is "within our grasp" writes Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak.  The biggest obstacle is psychological.