This underground entrepot is now another front in the multifaceted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  After years of virtual – and sometimes actual -- civil war, the Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have gotten more serious about reconciling and forming a united front, ostensibly to better achieve Palestinian national goals, more immediately to stem growing popular discontent at the abject failure of either party to do so. Yet the unity talks have also exposed a division between Hamas’ external leadership, represented by Khaled Meshaal, and the Gaza-based leadership, represented by current Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.  When Meshal and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah announced the outlines of a deal (one that would make Abbas both president and prime minister of a unity government) in Qatar  earlier this month, the Hamas leadership in Gaza strongly criticized it, saying they hadn’t been sufficiently consulted.

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Israeli, Palestinian and international rights groups have long said that Israel’s administrative detention practices are unlawful, but Adnan – whose hunger strike was the longest of any Palestinian prisoner –gained particular attention. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and members of Palestinian political factions had gone on solidarity hunger strikes, and demonstrators in the West Bank, Gaza and in Tel Aviv called for Israel to end arbitrary administrative detentions. Security forces dispersed protests outside the Ofer military jail in the West Bank with rubber bullets and tear gas.

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Lana, my wife, is from Jenin in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  She has a diploma in economics from Al-Najah University in Nablus. We met and fell in love in Jenin in late 2002 after Israel’s destruction of the Jenin refugee camp during the second intifada. She moved to Israel in 2005 to live with me. We now have two children, Adnan, who is 4 and a half years old and Yosra, who is 3 and a half years old.  My family means the world to me and yet our standing in Israel is extremely tenuous because of my ongoing failed effort to secure citizenship for my wife.

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Ted Koppel asked Gingrich the key question: what do the Adelsons get if you win?

Gingrich, in response, suggested it all comes down to U.S. policy toward Israel.

Here’s the video, via Mondoweiss:

Koppel: But there has to be a so-what at the end of it. So if you win, what does Adelson get out of it?

Gingrich. Well, he knows I'm very pro-Israel. And that's the central value of his life. I mean, he's very worried that Israel is going to not survive.

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This week, Glenn Ivey, the former Prince George's County state's attorney, announced he was abandoning plans to challenge Edwards, citing his inability to raise money.

“[I]t would take a very substantial amount of money to get my message out to voters in two very expensive media markets," Ivey said in a statement. "A tough economy and a compressed election time-frame have made it tough for my campaign to raise enough funds to move forward."

Ivey had raised about $150,000 while Edwards had taken in about $230,000, according to the latest available numbers reported by the Baltimore Sun. Part of the fundraising fight centered on the contentious issue of American policy toward Israel.

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But, as it turns out, Santorum has made contradictory statements on this point, and his campaign has declined multiple opportunities to elaborate on and clarify his position on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Israel has been a key issue in the GOP primary, with Newt Gingrich’s super PAC recently snagging a $5 million donation from billionaire Sheldon Adelson in large part because of Gingrich’s hard-line position on the Palestinians.

To review, here’s what Santorum said to an Iowa voter late last year:

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One of Santorum’s gems in the rough was initially uncovered back in November by the ThinkProgress blogger Eli Clifton and Philip Weiss, and returned to this week by a blogger at The Jewish Week . Santorum  said, among other things, "all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians."

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Smith reports:

The decision to expel Block appears, first hinted at by Greg Sargent, aimed at sending a message of solidarity with the other progressive groups, which have been infuriated by the attacks, and at defending allies from being criticized as anti-Israel at a moment of intense and often partisan debate on the issue.

"This has nothing to do with your policy views, and is a decision solely made on the basis of the need for this community to privilege the ability to debate difficult topics freely, without fear of mischaracterization or character attacks," [Truman founder Rachel Kleinfeld] said in the email [to Block].

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Less than a century ago, Christians comprised nearly 10 percent of the population of Palestine (now Israel and the Palestinian territories). In 1946, the figure was around 8 percent. Today, Christians make up about 4 percent of the West Bank’s population, although there are still a few Christian-majority villages, such as Taybeh, whose skyline is dominated by church spires and whose businessmen produce the only Palestinian beer. In Israel, though Christians make up 10 percent of its Palestinian population, they only constitute 2.5 percent of the total population. In Gaza, the Christian minority is even smaller, representing just 1 percent of the population.

One major factor in the decline of Christianity here: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee or be driven out of their homes, most never to return – and each subsequent war has led to more Palestinians leaving. Today, though Palestinians are often materially better off than other Arabs, restrictions on movement, lack of economic opportunity, unemployment and the constant indignity of living under occupation prompt many to seek out new homes. Palestinian Christians, relatively better educated that Palestinian Muslims and sharing a common religion with the West, have generally been better placed to leave the region.

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The episode, which I covered here (and Glenn Greenwald covered here), has now turned into a public war of words between Block and his business partner, Democratic lobbyist Lanny Davis. Davis has accused Block of "loose language and mischaracterizations," while Block has countered that Davis' accusations are baseless and added that "seeing him ... say those things saddens me."

Davis and Block founded a public affairs and strategic consulting company called Davis-Block last year after Block left his job at AIPAC, which calls itself "America's pro-Israel lobby."

Warning: This gets into the weeds, but it's notable because at heart this episode is about serious charges of anti-Semitism and people who wield a lot of influence in Washington, particularly in the area of U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine.

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A year and half later, Israeli police using stun grenades carried out a government order to evacuate a group of some 100 settlers hunkered down in the four-story hilltop. The house had become the center of a crisis when the Israeli government ruled that the building had been illegally seized from the Rajabi family, and ordered the settlers out.

Once evicted, the settlers commenced a rampage that lasted several hours, setting fire to Palestinian houses, olive trees and cars. Twenty-five people were wounded, including a man in critical condition after a settler shot him at close range. A Palestinian Red Crescent official told U.S. Consulate officials that during the riots, settlers stopped an ambulance and defaced the ambulance, painting "let the Arabs die" and covering the red crescent symbol with the Star of David.

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Two think tanks he's associated with -- the Progressive Policy Institute and the Truman National Security Project -- were apparently rattled by the incident:

PPI head Will Marshall privately told Block that the think tank would sever ties with Block if he didn’t retract the charges detailed in Salon, according to a source familiar with the discussions. Block subsequently offered Politico a statement on the charges, claiming he had never accused people at CAP in particular of anti-Semitism, but not walking back or apologizing for the gist of what was reported in the Salon piece. It’s still unclear how PPI — which declined to comment — will proceed at this point.

Meanwhile, at Truman, top officials privately debated via email whether to cut ties with Block after the Salon story broke, a source says. They had already been unhappy with Block’s attacks on critics of Israel, and the Salon piece exacerbated tensions, I’m told.

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The ads are pegged to the pledge made last month by Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich to start foreign aid for all countries at zero and then have an annual discussion about how much to give. The ad on Facebook features text that reads, "No Aid to Israel?" The link goes to this page, which in turn leads to a form to give money to the campaign:

It’s worth noting that the Obama ads are incredibly dishonest. First of all, the Republican candidates were talking about setting foreign aid at zero each year as a starting point in discussions about how much to give, not setting it at zero as a matter of policy. (Current U.S. aid to Israel stands at $3 billion per year, a long way from zero.)

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I’ve obtained an email sent by Josh Block to a private listserv called the Freedom Community, in which he throws around accusations of anti-Semitism against liberal bloggers and calls on other list members to “echo” and “amplify” his assault and “use the below [research] to attack the bad guys.”

The Freedom Community list includes many neoconservative journalists, according to a person familiar with the matter. As of last night, the icon for the listserv was Margaret Thatcher:

***

I sent an inquiry to Block late Wednesday night. By Thursday morning, the listserv had been scrubbed:

(The phrase “the freedom community” has also appeared in a post by Weekly Standard editor Daniel Halper hailing a neoconservative speech by the president of Mongolia. And Ben Smith reported last year on a similar sounding endeavor called "Freedom Mail.")

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The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, is facing an intense campaign by hard-line pro-Israel voices in the U.S. who want him fired over remarks he made about anti-Semitism late last month.

Gutman, an Obama fundraiser turned ambassador, as well as a Jew and child of a Holocaust survivor, was addressing a Brussels conference devoted to combating anti-Semitism in Europe last month when he launched into a discussion of the relationship between the Israel-Palestine conflict and tensions between Muslims and Jews.

The first thing to note about the Gutman affair – which has now prompted Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, as well as pundits at Commentary and elsewhere to call for his firing – is that the initial reaction was based on a woefully inaccurate account of his remarks.

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Drawing inspiration from the African-American struggle to desegregate public transportation, Palestinian activists set their own "freedom ride" on Tuesday, the anniversary of the Palestinians’ symbolic declaration of independence in 1988. Symbolic because, despite their current quest for U.N. membership, Palestinians still live under Israeli military occupation, with all the restrictions on their liberty that that involves, including the freedom to travel, work their land, to build and to manage their own affairs.

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The grandiloquent post in question requests either (it's not entirely clear) that Israelis feed Shalit's captors to sharks or that they feed his captors along with women and "their offspring" to sharks. (I imagine Abrams considers nearly every Palestinian in Gaza to be complicit in Shalit's imprisonment, so this distinction may not amount to much.) Either way, the post makes liberal usage of unambiguous anti-Arab slurs ("devils' spawn," "savages," "animals") and, well, it's a call for mass slaughter.

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My mother founded the Civil Rights Movement in Israel, was a member of the Knesset and a Minister of Education in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet. She fought for equal rights for women, gays and lesbians, and, of course, Palestinian Arabs too. My father helped create the Israel Land Administration and managed all government lands.

As a youngster embedded in a humanistic Zionist ideology I was unaware that my father’s daily business for the state consisted of, among other things, appropriating land from Palestinians who had been living on it for generations and granting it to Jewish newcomers. Only a strong ideology can explain the degree of blindness necessary to avoid recognizing that my father was implementing agrarian apartheid policies – and long before the occupation of 1967.

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But there's another  99/1 percent divide: over U.S. policy toward Israel and the whole world.  Here the 1 percent are really on a roll.  Right over the rest of us.

This struggle concerns the American people's support for  the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization known as UNESCO. The organization does a lot of important work, including identifying and protecting World Heritage Sites, working to broaden educational opportunities around the world and helping poor countries get access to scientific information.

One could certainly argue that for a self-interested American, UNESCO isn’t crucial to U.S. national interests. One might say it does nothing more than make sure that tourist sites like the Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat or Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are still there when you want to see them. In fact, during the Cold War, Ronald Reagan pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO altogether; no one except maybe the historians, anthropologists, educators, cultural workers and a few insignificant others seemed to mind. It was almost a decade later that George Bush rejoined the organization.

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