The outline of such an initiative was presented to President Obama in several letters by former senior officials, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, William Fallon, Chuck Hagel, Lee Hamilton, Carla Hills, Nancy Kassebaum-Baker, Thomas Pickering, Brent Scowcroft, James Wolfensohn and Paul Volcker. They proposed that negotiations take place within the following parameters:

Jerry Haber, in a mostly sensible comment on Peter Beinart, writes that

Tony Kushner was, in my view, imprecise when he referred to the “ethnic cleansing”  conducted by the Zionists at Israel’s founding. The phrase conjures up mass murder and genocide along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. What we have had in Israel for over sixty years is not so much ethnic “cleansing,” with its implication of blood and destruction, but rather ethnic “dry-cleaning”, ridding the homeland of most of its Palestinian population through legal stratagems that ensure that the natives of Palestine will be effectively barred from full participation in their homeland.

 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to Washington at what may be the last chance to turn the establishment of a Palestinian state from a global anti-Israel campaign into a joint Israeli, American and European project. The establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state is today a necessity, just as Zionism was a necessity. And about half of Israeli society apparently agrees with Western public opinion and Western governments on the principle that Palestinian Arabs have the same right to independence and sovereignty as do Israeli Jews.

The crippling fear of September's UNGA coupled with Israel's continued delegitimization sadly means that, with help from the PM, Barak's self-fulfilling "diplomatic tsunami" prophecy may actually come true.

The Palestinian Authority is calling on Israel to reinstate the rights of up to 140,000 people who lived in the occupied West Bank and lost their residency after travelling abroad.

According to official documents obtained by an Israeli human rights group, the practice affected Palestinians travelling abroad after the 1967 Six Day War.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, like other Israeli officials, routinely point out that about twenty percent of the population of Israel is Arab. Most often they go on to say that Arabs have significant roles in the Israeli community such as judges and physicians and hold elected seats in the Knesset. Some go on to say that if one were to visit Israel, he or she would find a significant Arab population living in the Jewish state as if to convey a message that Israel is a democracy not unlike Western democracies in Europe and North America.

Editor's note: This Thursday night in New York we're going to be holding an event with a smashing array of speakers, from Laura Flanders to Trudie Styler to Naomi Klein to Noura Erakat to Desmond Travers. And also: our co-editor on the Goldstone Report book, Lizzy Ratner, whose genuineness and presence has moved many audiences throughout our book launch. Last Friday Ratner spoke about the Goldstone Report.at the United Nations, to a gathering hosted by the Egyptian Mission and also by the Palestinian observer mission. Here are some of her remarks:

From coast to coast, the movement to end military aid to Israel has an emerging public face. In Chicago, CJPIP (www.cjpip.org) has launched Phase 2 of our successful public transportation advertising campaign on the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) system.

And in this “End Military Aid to Israel Spring”, we have been joined by activist groups from coast to coast – with new ad campaigns going live in Boston and Washington DC (to coincide with Move Over AIPAC ) over the past couple of weeks.

Zochrot ("Remembering") seeks to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel, who bear a special responsibility to remember and amend the legacy of 1948. The principal victims of the Nakba were the Palestinians, especially the refugees, who lost their entire world. But Jews in Israel also pay a price for their conquest of the land in 1948, living in constant fear and without hope.

In the north-eastern zone of the city, Palestinian youths tell us stories about those infamous days in December 2008, when the Israeli army began its Operation ‘Cast Lead’. The landscape in front of us bears witness to the devastation the Operation left in its wake: buildings turned rubble, destroyed houses, fields which the locals try cultivating, now become arid and contaminated with white phosphorus bombs.

To reply to the Gaza youth Manifesto, and with no additional words to the ones spoken with true heart on this video, we give you, The Manifesto. A simple, true, self-explanatory, expression of what we're sick of.

NABLUS, (PIC)-- Jewish settlers stormed a Palestinian secondary school for girls in Sawiya village, south of Nablus, and placed racist, anti-Arab posters on its entrance in Hebrew.

Do Israel’s practices in occupied Palestinian territory, namely the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, amount to the crimes of colonialism and apartheid under international law? A summary of a legal study by HSRC of South Africa.

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, in its efforts to eliminate and prevent the kind of suffering the South African and Namibian people suffered under apartheid, commissioned a legal study of the Israel-Palestine situation. “The aim of this project was to scrutinize the situation from the nonpartisan perspective of international law, rather than engage in political discourse and rhetoric.”

Egypt says it will open its Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip on a permanent basis.

In a city full of venerable institutions, Munther Fahmi’s bookshop is as revered as any.

He counts among his customers Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter and Uma Thurman. In a city riven by political and social tensions, Mr Fahmi’s bookshop has been a place for dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, with well-known writers and scholars from both sides of the divide regularly invited to give readings and talk about their work.

Despite his high-profile connections, Mr Fahmi’s days in the city of his birth may be numbered.

Israeli officials have told him that, after 16 years running his bookshop in the grounds of East Jerusalem’s 19th-century hotel the American Colony, he is no longer welcome in Israel.

There is broad international consensus that that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank – which includes East Jerusalem - violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and are, therefore, illegal according to international law. This position has been affirmed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 465, the International Court of Justice, the world's highest legal body, and by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the respected Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem. Not only did the US government repeatedly affirm this position throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli Supreme Court has acknowledged de facto its validity by ruling that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are under "belligerent occupation."

Children develop a keen sense of injustice at an early age. This is experienced by exasperated carers all over the world as protestations, ad nauseam, of unfairness: "but she has a bigger piece; why can't I go too?" Strategies employed, with limited success, include distracting the little people with alternate entertainment or treats, and fooling them into believing that they have actually got the better deal. Children grow wary of their carers' motives not without reason. In the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), children have the right to feel profoundly aggrieved for the betrayal is of a far more serious nature. A September 2010 report has found that Palestinian children's rights to life and liberty are being sacrificed, as major donor agencies fail to challenge the Israeli state's violations of international laws for fear of offending influential political lobbies.

The Education Ministry's plan for the coming school year does not include civics, democratic values or Jewish-Arab coexistence, according to copies circulated among principals.

It states schools' two main objectives are to reinforce Jewish and Zionist values, and to improve scholastic achievements, and instructs principals how to fulfill these goals.

Since his June 2009 Bar-Ilan speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have done practically nothing to push forward diplomatic solutions with the Palestinians and with the Syrians.

Activists of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement hold weekly demonstrations in the neighborhood of the same name, protesting Jews that continue to move into the mostly Arab area, claiming that they are displacing the current residents.

The proposal would see Israel agree to a Palestinian state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem with border adjustments so it could keep key settlements.

It would give possible financial compensation to Palestinian refugees. A small number might be allowed to return to their former family homes in Israel.

The historical background of the Israeli apartheid state-in-the-making that is emerging before our eyes should be sought in 1967. It is part of a process that has been going on for about 44 years: What started as rule over another people has gradually ripened - especially since the latter part of the 1970s - into a colonialism that is nurturing a regime of oppression and discrimination with regard to the Palestinian population. It is robbing that population of its land and of its basic civil rights, and is encouraging a minority group (the settlers ) to develop a crude, violent attitude toward the Arabs in the territories. This was exactly the reality that, after many years, led to the establishment of the apartheid state in South Africa.