The Holy Land doesn’t always seem to be very Holy.
It can seem like a bubbling cauldron of fraticidal trouble.
Today there’s plenty a-bubbling.
We at USDemocrazy have assembled some important and troubling news items that you may have missed ( and won’t want to miss) from the Middle East in recent days.
Palestine
1) Hamas, the extremist ruling party of Gaza, has implemented some pretty unhelpful changes to their public school curriculum.
The textbooks claim that the Jewish Torah is “fabricated” and define many cities within modern Israel as Palestinian.
The new texts, speculated to be used by 55,000 students in the 8th, 9th, and 10th grades, do not recognize Israel or the Oslo Peace Accords that created the Palestinian Authority (competitor to Hamas) as the interim government of Palestine.
2) The deceased Palesinian political hero, Yasser Arafat, may have been poisoned. The body of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was exhumed in November 2012. A team of Swiss forensic scientists released a report on Nov. 5 2013 that showed Arafat’s corpse had abnormally high levels of radioactive polonium-210.
210Po levels appeared 18 times higher than usual in parts of Arafat’s body, implying that it is likely Arafat could have been poisoned. In 2004, it was thought that Arafat died from a “flu’ that brought about a deepening coma.
(210Pohas been used to poison many people in the past – most notably Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.)
Israel
1) Israeli security forces bulldozed property of the Catholic Church in East Jerusalem. Israeli officials claim that property was built without a permit, which justified razing the property.
Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Faud Tawwal claims the property had been there before Israel annexed the area after the Six-Day War (1967).
2) The Israeli government has announced plans to demolish the homes of over 15,000 Palestinians, spanning approximately 200 blocks in East Jerusalem.
Just as with the property of the Catholic Church, Israel claims the homes are illegal because they were built without permits.The proposed demolition would be the largest since Israel annexed the area in 1967.
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Regardless of your views on the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it doesn’t look like either side wants to cool the bubbling cauldron.
