Comments (0)Israel’s Supreme Court Rules Against Road Segregation
October 25, 2009Jerusalem
JTA Wire Service
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled against an Israeli army order to close a road near Hebron to Palestinian traffic.
A three-judge panel agreed Thursday with a petition from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel saying that preventing Palestinians from traveling on the road to protect Jewish residents of a neighboring community is a “disproportionate action.”
The petition was submitted on behalf of the residents of 22 villages in the Hebron Hills in the southwestern region of the West Bank.
The court gave the Israeli army three months to create an alternate plan for protecting the area’s Jewish residents.
According to the civil rights group, the ruling was the first by the Supreme Court on the topic of segregated roads.
Peres: Thought of Israeli Nukes Dissuades Iran
Shimon Peres said that the fact that Israel is suspected of having nuclear weapons is dissuading Iran from striking the Jewish state.
The Israeli president also said that contrary to the thinking of some Palestinians, Israel “is not abandoned” by the Obama administration.
In an interview published last Friday with the French daily le Figaro, Peres said he thought “the Palestinians committed a little error by thinking that the United States had abandoned Israel” by insisting this summer that Israeli settlement expansion be frozen immediately.
“The contrary was true,” he said. “We are not abandoned.”
President Obama has dropped earlier demands for a settlement freeze in order to move forward with peace negotiations.
Asked if Israel possessed a nuclear weapon capable of dissuading Iran from striking the Jewish state, Peres said that “the bomb is not the danger, it’s those who detonate it who can represent a danger. Israel always said that it would not be the first to introduce the bomb to the Middle East. But it doesn’t bother us to be suspected of having the bomb because suspicions are a dissuasion. If we can have dissuasion by suspicion, why not? We’re not against it.”
Goldstone: Waiting for Obama to Specify Flaws
Richard Goldstone called on the Obama administration to justify its claims against his findings in a United Nations report on the Gaza war.
In an interview Thursday with the English Arab news network Al Jazeera, Goldstone said he was still waiting to hear from the United States.
“I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are,” he said. “I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are. The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full and good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed.”
Goldstone also told Al Jazeera that he is certain that most of his critics have not read the report, which was accepted by the U.N. Human Rights Council last week and sent on to the U.N. Security Council. Israel did not cooperate with the investigation into last winter’s military offensive.
“I’ve no doubt many of the critics—the overwhelmingly majority of critics—have not read the report,” he said. “And you know what proves that, I think, is that the level of criticism does not go to the substance of the report.”
Goldstone added that he regrets that the criticism has been so “personal.”
This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.