MASKIOT, West Bank — Israel has begun laying the foundations for a new Jewish settlement deep in the West Bank – breaking a promise to Washington while strengthening its hold on a stretch of desert it wants to keep as it draws its final borders.
nwsource.com

It occurs to me there wouldn’t need to be an Israel lobby if Israeli interests just naturally meshed with those of the U.S., even the kooks.

The rabbi who pricks Israel’s conscience
Rabbi Arik Ascherman has spent years planting himself atop doomed Palestinian homes, reading extracts of international law to Israeli forces as they demolish the buildings beneath his feet.
More recently, the American-born rabbi, with a knitted blue skull cap pinned to his woolly black hair, has been at the forefront of resistance to the construction of what Israel calls its “security barrier” penning in and carving up West Bank villages.

Along the way he has been a persistent embarrassment to the Israeli government as a fervent Zionist who claims to reflect the true soul of the Jewish state by resisting its oppression of Palestinians. He has been arrested many times but this week, for the first time, the 45-year-old director of Rabbis for Human Rights was convicted for his form of resistance.

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