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→ 21 November 2018
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Israel steps up boycott fight after Airbnb settlement ban | NZ Herald

KFAR ADUMIM, West Bank (AP) — Israel is threatening vacation rental company Airbnb with high taxes and legal repercussions over its decision to remove listings from Jewish West Bank settlements.

The threats step up Israel’s fight against a global movement advocating for boycotts over the country’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin says Tuesday that Israel will seek to impose “very high taxes” on the company in order to restrict its operations in the country. He also says Israel will encourage hosts in settlements to sue the company to make it “pay” for its decision.

Airbnb’s decision on Monday sparked outrage among Israeli officials and settler leaders, but was welcomed by Palestinian officials and human rights groups that had long pressured the company to end its contentious West Bank settlement listings.

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→ 14 November 2018
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24 hours and 400 rockets later | Jerusalem Online

In the past 24 hours, Israel has been attacked by the terrorist organization Hamas. More than 400 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip. This number is the highest recorded on any day since Hamas began firing rockets into Israel more than 10 years ago. The previous record was 192 which fell in one day during Operation Protective Margin.

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→ 13 November 2018
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Botched Israeli Army operation in Gaza triggers sharp escalation in violence | NZ Herald

A new round of hostilities triggered by a botched Israeli covert operation into the Gaza Strip pushed the territory’s fragile security situation to the brink today.

Palestinian militants launched hundreds of rockets towards Israel and Israeli jets carried out bombing raids.

Israel’s military said it had rushed extra infantry troops and air defences to the boundary with Gaza as at least 200 projectiles were launched towards Israeli territory in less than three hours.

At least two projectiles hit houses, while an anti-tank missile hit a bus transporting soldiers near the border, the military said, critically injuring a 19-year-old soldier.

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→ 8 November 2018
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UN overlooks human rights abuses and praises Saudi Arabia | UN Watch

Saudi delegate addresses the UNHRC

For those who think that the UNHRC has any credibility:

GENEVA, November 5, 2018 – Saudi Arabia today won widespread praise for its human rights record as the fundamentalist regime was examined in a routine UN review.

Sadly, 75 out of 96 country delegations who took the floor at the UN Human Rights Council today expressed praise for the brutal and misogynistic Saudi regime.

It was a betrayal of jailed Saudi human rights activists like pro-democracy blogger Raif Badawi, who has been wrongfully imprisoned since June 2012. UN Watch made appeals to Canada, and to Germany, Britain, Sweden, France and others, yet no one spoke up for Raif Badawi.

Despite today’s mandatory review of Saudi Arabia, in a standard exercise that all countries undergo every five years, the 47-nation UNHRC has never produced a single resolution, special session or commission of inquiry to condemn Saudi Arabia’s human rights record — not even for their confessed killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

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→ 6 November 2018
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Recep Erdogan

ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey’s president says he will not permit what he called the seizing of natural resources in the eastern Mediterranean.

Speaking at a naval ceremony Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey would never accept such attempts “excluding our country and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.”

Turkey and the Greek Cypriot government in Cyprus_who do not have diplomatic relations— are both planning hydrocarbon research in the Mediterranean Sea for natural gas reserves.

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https://www.nzfoi.org/2018/11/06/1657696/

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→ 4 November 2018
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Israel PM praises restoration of US sanctions on Iran | NZ Herald

Benjamin Netanyahu

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Israel’s prime minister has praised the restoration of U.S. sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal.

Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch opponent of the agreement concluded by the Obama administration, said Saturday that President Donald Trump had made an “historic” decision by restoring sanctions against “the murderous terror regime in Iran that is endangering the entire world.”

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→ 25 October 2018
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We have been fined for asking Lorde to boycott Israel – but we won’t be silenced | Guardian

Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab

An Israeli court this month ordered us to pay NZ$18,000 (£9,000) in damages for harming the “artistic welfare” of three Israeli teenagers. This ruling came after New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde heeded the call of activists, including a letter from the two of us, and cancelled her show in Tel Aviv. The teenagers claimed they suffered “damage to their good name as Israelis and Jews”; their legal action was possible because of a 2011 Israeli law allowing civil lawsuits against anyone who encourages a boycott of the country.

This is no farce. It may sound laughable, but the political implications are deadly serious. The lawsuit is a vivid example and extension of Israel’s suppression of dissenting voices.

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→ 22 October 2018
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Jordan cancels part of peace agreement with Israel | NZ Herald

King Abdullah II of Jordan

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Sunday said he has decided not to renew parts of his country’s landmark peace treaty with Israel.

Abdullah released a statement that he intends to pull out of two annexes from the 1994 peace agreement that allowed Israel to lease two small areas, Baqura and Ghamr, from the Jordanians for 25 years. The leases expire next year, and the deadline for renewing them is Thursday.

The lands were leased to Jewish farmers early last century, but then became part of Jordan after the kingdom gained independence in 1946.

Baqura, in the northern Jordan Valley, was captured by Israel in 1950. Ghamr, near Aqaba in southern Jordan, was seized in the 1967 Mideast War.

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→ 4 October 2018
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Jeremy Corbyn has lit a fire of Jew-hate that is now beyond his control | The JC

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

‘Corbyn has said and done things that can reasonably be described as antisemitic,’ writes Dave Rich

A little over three years ago, shortly before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, this newspaper set out seven questions for him to answer regarding people and organisations who he had supported, assisted or spoken alongside. It was a gruesome list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers and antisemites, and it was vital and urgent for Mr Corbyn to answer these questions satisfactorily, the JC urged, lest he “be regarded from the day of his election as an enemy of Britain’s Jewish community”.

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→ 4 October 2018
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Iran and Israel Don’t Want to Fight a War – Can They Avoid One? | Jerusalem Online

After Donald Trump announced that the US would unilaterally pull back from the historic 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, Iranian forces in Syria fired rockets into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights for the first time. The Israelis retaliated by targeting Iranian forces and positions in Syria. That attack, which killed 23 people, was the biggest Israeli assault on Iranian positions in Syria since the civil war there started in 2011.

For a moment, it looked like two of the Middle East’s major political and military players to the verge of a full-scale military conflict. An Israeli-Iranian war could throw the Middle East into one of its most destructive clashes in modern history, one that could polarise the world’s powers, dragging in the US, a reliable ally of Israel, and Russia, Syria’s strongest ally and hence Iran’s strategic ally. And yet, neither has so far chosen to escalate further. Why?

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