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Every few weeks, Meretz USA's staff writes a news update, analyzing and summarizing recent news events, and linking to news articles selected from those posted daily on the Meretz USA website. Below, you will find an archive of these analyses, with the most recent on top.
We invite you, after reading these news analyses, to send us your reactions or suggestions about what you'd like to see us write about in future weeks. You can send these suggestions to mail@meretzusa.org.
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Notwithstanding the reprehensible terrorist attack north of Eilat last
week, kick-starting the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian violence, Israel's
summer has been defined by the emergence and swift growth of the Tent Protest
movement. For those of you who have
taken a summer vacation from Israeli news, the Tent Protest got its start as a
popular reaction to skyrocketing housing prices, but it quickly expanded its
message to the rising cost of living in Israel generally, and to the growing
gaps between average Israelis and the country's super-rich "tycoons".
Until I read this morning's Israeli
newspapers, I thought I was going to use this platform to discuss the flotilla
and the fly-in protest. After all, these
two related campaigns have dominated the Israel-Palestine conversation for several
weeks. It's what everyone's talking
about.
Prior to last week I'd never heard of Ras al-Amud. That's not
surprising. As an American Jew, I was
not meant to. I was not meant to know
that Ras al-Amud even existed,
because to know that it exists, that it is a Palestinian neighborhood in East
Jerusalem that is located just south of the old city and overlooks Silwan and Abu Dis, and that in 2003 it had a population of 11,922, is to
admit that Palestinians have a legitimate claim and right to Jerusalem.
The most unsettling aspect of Prime Minister Netanyahu's flat rejection
of the Fatah-Hamas agreement, signed this past Wednesday in Cairo, wasn't the
substance of his critique. It was the desperate
and amateurish haste with which he rushed to pronounce judgment and slam the
book.
developments of the next few months are likely to
shape the country for decades to come.
el - a coalition of political parties, public
organizations and grassroots movements to defend democracy - are neither
hyperbole, nor rhetorical flourish. The
situation is grave. Israeli democracy is
at a watershed moment. 
