No Jewish refugees from Arab countries? Encountering the delusional world of Hanan Ashrawi.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
03 September '12..

Now we know : there is no such thing as Jewish refugees from Arab countries. You heard it from no less than Hanan Ashrawi, PLO executive member and spokesperson.

Here is what Ashrawi wrote in an article printed in a number of Arab media outlets.

“The claim that Jews who emigrated to Israel, which is supposed to be their homeland, are ‘refugees’ who were uprooted from their homelands is a form of deception and delusion.”

Denial is a river in Egypt, but it’s also, sadly, the default position of many Arabs and Muslims when it comes to facts they would rather not acknowledge. The Holocaust? It didn’t happen. Israel? It doesn’t exist – not on Arab maps, anyway. Jewish refugees from Arab countries? They left willingly. Arab and Muslim antisemitism? A fabrication ( Arabs and Jews have always lived in harmony, haven’t they?) “There are no cats in America”, sang the delusional mice migrants.

What is new about Hanan Ashrawi’s assertion is that she is probably the most senior Palestinian official to have made it in over 60 years.

Her motivation? Alarm, even desperation. The Palestinian monopoly on victimhood is being challenged. Deputy foreign minister of Israel Danny Ayalon is stepping up his campaign to raise awareness of the Jewish refugee issue. He will be holding a conference this coming weekend in Israel ; he will be taking the issue to New York for the next UN General Assembly meeting on 21 September.

Calic - Let's talk about refugees

Dan Calic..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
15 April '12..

This month a meeting took place with little fanfare, addressing a subject that has sat on the sidelines throughout the peace process, having received only the slightest media attention. The topic of the meeting was about refugees.

No, not Palestinian refugees; Jewish refugees.

For many years the world has heard about the "right of return." This refers to Arabs who became displaced during the defensive war Israel was forced to fight when the surrounding Arab countries attacked it the day after declaring independence in 1948.

The plan was for Israel to be destroyed "in a few weeks," allowing Arabs to return to their home. Yet these plans were dashed as Israel won the war. After Israel's victory, not a single Arab country took these Arabs in - they were intentionally left to become "refugees," so the world would perceive Israel as the villain.

For more than 60 years now, most of them have lived in camps. As part of any peace agreement with Israel, Mahmoud Abbas has demanded that they and their descendants be allowed to return. Today they number more than five million. Their return would mean Jews would no longer be the majority in the only country designated as their homeland.

If they are not allowed to return, Abbas has demanded compensation.

Compensating those complicit in a plan to destroy Israel seems a logical absurdity.

Mutual compensation

What is virtually never given media attention is the issue of Jewish refugees. For centuries, Jewish communities existed in many Arab countries. Their combined numbers were estimated to be roughly 850,000. The UN partition vote in 1947 brought tremendous upheaval for them.

Phillips - The algorithm of malice

Melanie Phillips
Daily Mail
09 December '11

http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2011/12/the-algorithm-of-malice.html

Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, has just released the third of his little information videos setting out certain essential facts about Israel and the Arabs to counter the lies of the delegitimisation campaign. You can watch it here. Those who dismiss this as just more Israeli propaganda should think again. For it states truths which are absolutely fundamental to the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, but which have been turned on their heads and replaced by equally fundamental lies (the kind of lies absorbed and regurgitated by all too many who post comments below this blog).



There are two big and connected points made by this little video. The first is that the widely-held belief that the Arabs were the only refugees from the Arab war against the newly reconstituted country of Israel (a war which started in 1948 and continues to this day) is totally untrue. There were many more Jewish refugees from Arab countries. As a result of the 1948 war, some 500,000 Arabs left Palestine – most of them as a result of having been told to do so by Arab regimes certain of destroying the new Jewish state. But some 850,000 Jews were then attacked, stripped of their citizenship and ethnically cleansed from their homes in Arab states -- causing the destruction of ancient Jewish communities in those countries which had well predated the arrival of Islam in the Middle East. And what happened to those refugees? They were absorbed without fuss into Israel, where they form around half of the population, and into other countries.

(Video) The Truth About the Refugees: Israel Palestinian Conflict

Danny Ayalon
Dec 4, 2011

Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the historical facts relating to the issue of refugees in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The video explains the reason there are still refugees after more than six decades is because of Arab leaders' recalcitrance to accept their brethren and the United Nations which created a separate agency with unique principles and criteria. The video also highlights the issue of the Jewish refugees who were forced out of their homes in the Arab world, and were subsequently absorbed by the State of Israel.



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Glick - Funding the enemy

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
20 September '11

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/09/funding-the-enemy.php


Speaking Sunday at the UN's conference of donors to the Palestinian Authority, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon warned that while Israel supports economic assistance to the PA now, that is liable to change within the week.

As he put it, "Future assistance and cooperation could be severely and irreparably compromised if the Palestinian leadership continues on its path of essentially acting in contravention of all signed agreements which also regulate existing economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority."

Ayalon's position is eminently reasonable. Unfortunately, it contradicts utterly the official position of the Government of Israel.

The government's position was transmitted on Friday to the same donor conference that Ayalon was participating in. According to the government document, "Israel calls for ongoing international support for the PA budget and development projects that will contribute to the growth of a vibrant private sector, which will provide the PA an expanded base for generating internal revenue."

Israel's move was reportedly championed by the Defense Ministry and the IDF senior brass, which reportedly adamantly opposes cutting off any aid to the PA, including aid to the US-trained and financed Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday, senior Defense Ministry officials argue that an aid cutoff is liable to lead to the PA's collapse and PA employees - which comprise the majority of Palestinian workers - may become violent.

As one Defense Ministry senior official told the paper, "It is important that we retain financial stability, even after their unilateral moves. Stopping money transfers could lead to a financial crisis which could lead to a violent escalation."

In other words, the Defense Ministry argues that if the donor countries stop paying off the Palestinian militias - including the US-trained and funded Palestinian army - then their supposedly moderate forces will turn to the terror business to support themselves.

Aside from being strategically insane, this position bespeaks an unjustifiable unwillingness on the part of the leftist-dominated Defense Ministry to understand the basic nature of the Palestinian cause and what it requires from Israel.

(Video) Israel Palestinian Conflict: The Truth About the Peace Process

Uploaded by DannyAyalon
Sep 12, 2011




Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the historical facts relating to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The video explains that the reason there is no successful peace process is because of decades of Palestinian and Arab recalcitrance and the main reason for the conflict is not Israel's presence in the West Bank, but successive Palestinian leaders resistance to Jewish sovereignty.



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Divest This! - Stop Being So Illegal!

Jon
Divest This!
07 August '11

http://www.divestthis.com/2011/08/stop-being-so-illegal.html

An intriguing spat opened up recently after Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon posted this video on YouTube which articulated the position that the legal status of territories in the West Bank and Gaza are “disputed,” and not “occupied,” (thus implying that a working out their final status would require a political, i.e., negotiated, rather than a legal solution).

Ayalon’s presentation was simply a YouTube-y animated version of what has been the position of the Israeli government (and many respected legal scholars) for decades. But for those who cannot stomach anything but their own opinion that these areas represent “illegally occupied territories,” Ayalon’s case was too much to bear.

Unsurprisingly, the Palestinian Authority bristled at the notion that another side’s legal and political opinion should be given any legitimacy. And Israel’s detractor’s abroad (even Hussein Ibish who, in other contexts, would make an interesting interlocutor) rushed to defend an enforced “consensus” that Israel is an occupier, and an illegal one at that.

One can understand the importance of this Palestinian interpretation and why they feel that it must be not only defended at all costs, but that all other possible interpretations should be banished from public discourse. After all, if the territories are “disputed” rather than “occupied,” then a resolution to their status (and ultimately peace) requires talk, debate and (possibly) compromise. In short, it requires the same amount of diplomacy and reasonableness that was required to resolve other territorial matters, such as the status of Northern Ireland (which was only solved when everyone put down their guns and began talking).

Peace talks must not neglect Jewish refugees

Bataween
Point of No Return
22 December '10

Three cheers for Danny Ayalon, who is cranking up his campaign for justice for Jewish refugees by posting the following rebuttal to Rachel Shabi's rather mean-spirited effort on the Guardian's Comment is Free. 'The Jewish refugee issue was never given a speaking part' in international forums, he writes memorably.

"For a long time now, we have been wanting and waiting to sit down and talk. After all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not short of talking points that need to be urgently resolved. Unfortunately, however, instead of both sides discussing the problems, the Palestinians seem more comfortable issuing demands.

One of the topics that we could discuss is refugees, what some describe in the familiar mantra as the "right of return". The slogan itself is, of course, a misnomer – a right is a legal function and must be grounded in law to have applicable force. Yet, as with so many of the cliches and familiar refrains surrounding the Middle East, there are two sides to the refugee story, with the Israeli side one of the best-kept secrets of the conflict.

While those Arabs who fled or left mandatory Palestine and Israel numbered roughly 750,000, there were more than 900,000 Jewish refugees subsequently expelled or forced out from Arab lands at around the same time. Before the state of Israel was re-established in 1948, there were almost 1 million Jews in Arab lands; today there are around 5,000.

As opposed to the Arabs in mandatory Palestine, who had been waging a civil war on the Jewish community for decades, the Jews in Arab lands were loyal citizens and residents, and had not been involved in any violence. Sadly, however, the Arab leadership of the time treated them as a "fifth column", and began taking draconian measures to facilitate their expulsion.

On 16 May 1948, two days after the state of Israel was re-established, the New York Times reported that the Arab League had recommended to its member states to freeze all bank accounts belonging to Jews, discharge all Jews in civil service positions and arbitrarily subject Jews to mass imprisonment. Several Arab regimes went further and inspired pogroms and mass murder against their Jewish populations. Just a decade after the Nazi persecution began in earnest, it was now the turn of the Jews in the Middle East to suffer similar edicts.

(Read full "Peace talks must not neglect Jewish refugees")

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Palestinian Arabs prove they don’t want a state

Fresnozionism.org
22 September '10

The negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are supposed to result in “two states for two peoples”. Even US negotiator George Mitchell thinks so. Here is what he said last week at Sharm el-Sheikh, where Israeli and PA negotiators began a second round of talks:

Our common goal remains two states for two peoples. And we are committed to a solution to the conflict that resolves all issues for the state of Israel and a sovereign, independent, and viable state of Palestine living side by side in peace and security. [my emphasis]

The ‘two peoples’, for Mitchell, are the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. And finding a solution means, in particular, that the PA will drop its claims against Israel.

I’ve argued that the PLO/Fatah which presently dominates the PA does not accept either of these principles. They do not believe that there is a Jewish people — they insist that there is only a Jewish religion — and they do not accept the rights of the Jews to any of the land, which in their view is ‘owned’ by the Palestinian Arabs. This has been a consistent theme, which the US and the ‘peace processors’ have just as consistently ignored.

(Read full post)

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Turns Out Fayyad Is Not A 'People' Person

Daled Amos
22 September '10

You say eether and I say eyether,
You say neether and I say nyther;
Eether, eyether, neether, nyther,
Let's call the whole thing off!
Fred Astaire, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Well, this isn't going well at all--is it?

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad angrily left a UN Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee meeting and canceled a scheduled subsequent press conference with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon in New York on Tuesday, after Ayalon refused to approve a summary of the meeting which said "two states" but did not include the words "two states for two peoples."

"What I say is that if the Palestinians are not willing to talk about two states for two peoples, let alone a Jewish state for Israel, then there's nothing to talk about," Ayalon told the Post in a telephone interview. "And also, I said if the Palestinians mean, at the end of the process, to have one Palestinian state and one bi-national state, this will not happen."

(Read full post)

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Moderate Fayyad can't stomach "two states for two peoples"

Elder of Ziyon
21 September '10

From YNet:

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad left a meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon outraged on Tuesday following a dispute about terminology to be used in the meeting summary.

A press conference scheduled to take place in New York after the meeting, which was held as part of the Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC) meetings, was subsequently canceled.

The dispute followed Ayalon's demand that the meeting summary refer to the notion of "two states for two peoples," rather than just "two states."

"I wanted that at the very least it will note two states for two peoples. I demanded to know what they meant. One Palestinian state and one bi-national state, or another Palestinian state?," the deputy minister told Ynet. "I made it clear that we were out of the picture if the summary didn’t say two states for two peoples."

If Ayalon's summary is accurate, this is a fascinating glimpse into even the so-called moderate Palestinian Arab psyche.

The terminology "two states for two peoples" was controversial when Netanyahu first announced support for that principle last year. It has been emraced for years by the far left, including Gush Shalom. It goes without saying that Western leaders like Tony Blair support that formulation as a given.

(Read full post)

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Obami’s Latest Israel Gambit Flops

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
13 April '10

Once again, the Obami’s bullying has come to naught. Bibi Netanyahu and his government are not amused nor persuaded by the Obami onslaught over Jerusalem housing permits or the suggestion that an imposed peace deal might be in the offing. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said it would reject any moves by the Obama administration to set its own timeline and benchmarks for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, potentially establishing a new fault line between the U.S. and Israel. … Senior White House officials, such as National Security Adviser James Jones, have also discussed recently the prospects of Washington proposing its own Mideast plan, though U.S. diplomats stressed this past week that such a move wasn’t imminent or agreed upon.

These developments have rankled Mr. Netanyahu’s government, which is already at odds with Mr. Obama over the issue of Jewish building in disputed East Jerusalem.

“I don’t believe this will be accepted by the administration because it will be a grave mistake. … The solution has to be homegrown,” Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal late Sunday. …

“The longstanding Israeli position, not of this government only, but of successive Israeli governments, is that the Israelis and the Palestinians have to live together in peace and that an agreement has to be negotiated between them directly,” said a senior Netanyahu administration official.

Of course this was entirely foreseeable.

(Read full post)
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Ha'aretz's J Street Promotions, Continued

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
22 February '10

You got to give them points for consistency. Ha'aretz has systematically ignored substantive criticism of J Street's policies, methods and funding, and so it comes as no surprise that the paper ignores the latest development in the reported snub of a J Street delegation by deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon.

It's not that the paper has ignored the controversy. To the contrary. Coverage includes two news articles (see here and here) and at least one Op-Ed condemning the alleged snub, which appeared today.

While the paper which has paid the matter substantial coverage until now, it nevertheless ignores the fact, that as reported in the Jerusalem Post today, the Foreign Ministry claims that J Street has lied about the whole affair. The Post reports:

The American “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby group J Street made “untrue assertions” about an alleged boycott of the congressional delegation it recently brought to Israel, and about Israel allegedly apologizing to the group for the slight, a senior Foreign Ministry official told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
“[Deputy Foreign Minister Danny] Ayalon did not prevent the delegation from meeting with senior Israeli officials,” as claimed by J Street last week, said Barukh Binah, Foreign Ministry deputy director-general and head of its North America Division.

(Read full article)
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On not saying you’re sorry

Fresnozionism.org
18 February '10
Posted before Shabbat

Everyone seems to want Israel to apologize, or ‘clarify’, or in some way abase itself today.

In connection with the Dubai assassination, the Dubai police chief has called for the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, to be arrested. British Foreign Secretary David Milliband has called the use of British passports in the operation an “outrage”, and called in the Israeli ambassador to discuss the incident.

If the Mossad did kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, then good for them — nobody deserved it more than Mabhouh. Hamas admitted that Mabhouh was responsible for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, has helped plan Hamas terrorism for years, and was recently involved in bringing Iranian weapons to Gaza. Israel doesn’t need to apologize; in fact the Mossad should expand its activities and kill more Hamas leaders.

Israel is at war and doesn’t need to apologize for shooting back.

(Read full post)
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Israel to J Street: We Know You're Not Pro-Israel

Stop pretending.


Michael Goldfarb
The Weekly Standard
16 February '10

Israel's deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, lowers the boom on J Street:

"The thing that troubles me is that they don't present themselves as to what they really are. They should not call themselves pro-Israeli," Danny Ayalon, the deputy to hard-line foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, told Jewish leaders today.

It's funny because that's what troubles me, too. Of course, Ayalon can be less than diplomatic at times. He was last seen dressing down the Turkish ambassador on Israeli TV, but he did offer a humble apology for that, promising the use of "more acceptable diplomatic means" in future protests. J Street isn't likely to ask for any such apology and is even less likely to get one. Still, I can make a well educated guess about what the group will say -- Ayalon has "no right to decide who is and is not pro-Israel based on whether they agree with your views." At least that's how J Street responded to Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, when he questioned the group's pro-Israel bona fides.

(Read full post)
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Land swaps and right of return

Fresnozionism.org
13 February '10

News item:

Israel and a future Palestinian state should agree to land swaps that would make settlement blocs part of Israel proper and certain Arab towns now in Israel part of a future Palestinian state, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in an interview published on Saturday.

Ayalon also said that the Palestinian demand to stop settlement construction as a precondition to negotiations was unrealistic, and would be like Israel demanding that the PA, as a precondition to talks, give up its demand for a “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.

In an interview with the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Alawsat, Ayalon said Israeli Arabs “would not lose anything” by joining the Palestinian state as part of a land swap.

“If Israeli Arabs say that they are proud Palestinians, why should they not be proud in the Palestinian state?” the Israel Beiteinu minister asked. This population could contribute to building the Palestinian state due to its high socioeconomic status, he said.

I don’t know how much of the above was simply rhetorical, but a few comments:

A) Israeli Arabs have always been violently opposed to land swaps, for two reasons. One is that they know that they are far better off economically and more secure physically as citizens of Israel than of ‘Palestine’. The other is that they believe that the land of Israel belongs to them and that ultimately they will control it. Here’s my favorite quotation to demonstrate this:

(Read full post)
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From enlightenment into darkness at Oxford and Cambridge

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
09 February '10

From the blog of the Community Security Trust – the self-defence organisation of the British Jewish community:

Last night Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, spoke at the Oxford Union. A meeting that was frequently disrupted by members of the audience reached its low point when one person shouted “Kill the Jews” in Arabic, before being thrown out of the meeting.

... There is a detailed account of the meeting on The edge of where? blog, which has this revealing vignette about the attitude of at least one person in the audience:

Outside the debating chamber, all the while, protestors were shouting ‘free free Palestine from the river to the sea’. When Ayalon argued that this chant amounted to a call for Israel’s destruction, and asked where Israeli Jews would have to go for Palestine to be free ‘from the river to the sea’, the woman sitting next to me said ‘back to where they came from!’ I couldn’t resist and had to ask her where exactly it was that she expected Jews to go ‘back to’, to which she replied, ‘well you’re in England, you appear to be doing fine’. I didn’t think it worthwhile to point out that actually my grandparents ‘came from’ Poland and Czechoslovakia, and that the reason I am in England today is that in the 1930s they were not ‘doing fine’ in the countries they ‘came from’.

This follows the disinviting by Cambridge Israel Society of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, one-time darling of the left for his revisionist history of David Ben Gurion but now apparently a non-person because he tells the truth about the Arab threat to Israel.

(Read full story)

Related: 2 Press Releases: Oxford Union to take disciplinary action against students who disrupted Deputy FM Ayalon. Ayalon looking into possibility of pressing charges against student who shouted "Slaughter the Jews" at Oxford Union event
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Israel's Turkey Policy: Why It's Apologizing to the Aggressor

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
15 January '10

(A different presentation on what took place the other day and could bear further inspection. Y)

Several readers have asked me why Israel apologized to Turkey’s government about a recent incident. The Turkish ambassador to Israel (who is a very good guy) was summoned to hear Israel’s complaints about some of the Turkish government’s latest slanders against Israel. He was seated lower than Israel’s deputy foreign minister and there was no Turkish flag on the table. I’m sure there was no intent to insult him or Turkey but it became a big diplomatic issue.

So how does Israel view Turkey right now? Let me begin by saying that there is absolutely no illusion about the nature of the Turkish government and its hostility to Israel. The problem does not stem from specific Israeli actions but from the ideological and political direction of the semi-Islamist regime in Turkey.

That doesn’t mean that the Gaza or other issues are of no importance. There were frictions between the two countries in the past. But the key factor is that the current Turkish government is systematically anti-Israel. By the way, previous Turkish governments were sympathetic to the Palestinians generally but the current regime is sympathetic to Hamas as an ally. It has also moved very close to Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. At the same time, in contrast to its predecessors, the current Turkish government does not view Israel as an ally. (I’d question whether, at least in its private thinking, it views America as an ally either.)

So if everyone in Israel's government understands how hostile the Turkish regime is, why is it working so hard to patch up relations to the greatest extent possible?

1. There is no sense in making the quarrel worse than it is. Israel does not want to give the Turkish regime excuses for more hostility.

2. Especially important is the conviction that the conflict should remain as much as possible between governments and not between nations. As one Turk put it: remember Israel’s problem with Turkey is with the captain and crew, not the passengers. Israel is aware that Turks are very patriotic so any hint of blaming or insulting "Turkey" must be avoided. One day, it is hoped, there will be another government which can return to a friendly policy toward Israel. There is also a special interest in retaining the best possible relationship with the Turkish armed forces (as well as the many Turkish civilians) which, though their power is greatly reduced, oppose a semi-Islamist Turkey and believe that Iran and Syria still do pose a threat to their country.

(Read full article)
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Time for Prime Minister Brown to take decisive steps as Israeli Deputy FM says relationship with UK “insufferable”

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
05 January '10

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon is reported by the Jerusalem Post today as describing the current situation between Britain and Israel as “insufferable”, adding that “normal relations between the two countries” would be difficult to sustain under current circumstances.

Ayalon was referring to the increasingly common practice by Palestinian extremists and their many supporters in the UK of abusing the British legal system to threaten visiting Israeli dignitaries with arrest for alleged war crimes. Former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, it will be recalled, had to cancel a trip to London in December after a court authorised a warrant for her arrest over Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. It has now emerged that a group of IDF officers had to cancel a trip last week for the same reason.

(Read the rest of this entry)
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Tell it to the Vatican: Christianity is not land or shrine bound

Jewish Israel
15 December 09

When it comes to Vatican negotiations and property issues, Jewish Israel sort of feels like we’ve been there and done that here, here, here, here... wait, simply go to the search facility in the upper right -hand corner of this screen and search for “Vatican”. This writer has been addressing the issue of the Vatican’s designs on Mt. Zion since October 2005 when I penned “Vatican’t “, and it just won’t go away.

Mention Vatican property and tax issues in Israel and the subject of the Cenacle Shrine (Last Supper Room or Coenaculum) on Mt. Zion inevitably comes up, as evidenced by recent local and international headlines here, here,here, here and here.

So it was a little disconcerting to know that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, that great champion of interfaith cooperation and Christian rights in the Holy Land, was handling negotiations for Israel. Although, he clearly declared his intentions to “assert Israel's right to all parts of the King David's Tomb compound if the issue is raised during upcoming meetings at the Vatican.”

Well, according to YNET, it seems Daniel kept to his word, as their headlines on December 10th announced “Israel's talks with Vatican fail” . The report cited that “the failure mostly stems from disagreement in respect to the Vatican's demand for sovereignty at the Last Supper Room on Jerusalem's Mount Zion.” (hat tip to JI member Toby).

Meanwhile a December 11th joint Israel-Holy See statement described the most recent round of talks between the two sides as being held in “an atmosphere of cordiality and mutual understanding”, with talks resuming on January 7th. (hat tip to JI member Yisrael).

How important is the Upper Room shrine to Christianity?

(Read full article)

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