Discovering MENA and other thoughts

Via Haaretz

Should Jews be allowed free access to pray at  Haram Al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary , one of Islam's holiest sites? The Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third most sacred site in Islam, adjoins the Western Wall and stands on what Jews insist are the first and second temples. Haram Al-Sharif has been an exclusively Islamic shrine since the Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century AD, but the mosque was built upon the Temple Mount, itself one of Judaism's most sacred sites. The Western Wall, the only remnant of the Jewish temple destroyed by Herod in 70 AD, is under direct Israeli control, and Jewish prayer has always been allowed there. Even Christians revere the site they consider the place where Jesus walked and reasoned with the rabbis — as well as chastised the Pharisees and money changers. The compound has been under factual if not legal Israeli sovereignty since Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, and is the holiest site in Judaism. That´s not the case of Haram Al-Shari...

One of the major obstacles that stand in the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis is the issue of Israeli settlements, colonies built in a territory that, according to Resolution 181 adopted in 1947 by the UN General Assembly and subsequent texts belongs to a (painfully still inexistent) Palestinian state. According to estimates, today about half a million Jews live as settlers in the more than 140 illegal settlements (so declared by the International Court of Justice) set up by Israel in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Dozens of Jewish children/teenagers (even though only a handful of them have been arrested) were involved in what looked like a "public lynching" of various Palestinian youths, right in the middle of Jerusalem, in Zion Square, an emblematic site meters away from the Old City of one of the holiest places in the world. One of the Palestinian boys nearly died, had not been for the emergency services. It looked that outcome had already crossed one of the attacker´s mind: according to The New York Times, one 15 year-old suspect was heard saying "For my part he can die, he´s an Arab". Moreover, scores of by-standers (most of them probably Jewish Israelis sympathizing with the criminals) witnessed the episode without intervening. On the same day, Jewish assailants tried to set fire to a Palestinian taxi (in which  a Palestinian family  was traveling) throwing what looked like Molotov cocktails. On top of that, a group of Palestinian journalists were allegedly attacked w...