“It felt like Messiah had come,” says Avigail Shlesinger, 81, of the day Jerusalem was liberated from the Jordan army 46 years ago. Shlesinger, who is from a six-generation Jerusalem family, recalls what life was like in the Holy City during the time that the Jordanians were in control from 1948 to 1967. “It was a dangerous era,” she tells Tazpit News Agency. “There were areas in the city like King George Street where barriers had to be built to stop the bullets that Jordanian …More

Hezbollah denies responsibility for this morning's drone over Israel. [Arutz Sheva] Kate Upton is canceling her date with a Jewish senior for his prom. [Times of Israel] Some Islamic MPs in Jordan are stepping up hostilities toward Israel. [Times of Israel] Yet another politician is saying the Jews orchestrated the Holocaust to earn a Jewish state. This time it's someone from the UK. [Algemeiner] A casual dining restaurant in Delaware is taking flak after using social media to call customers "cheap Jews." …More

Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz insists that Israel must work with its regional neighbors to improve the environment. "I want people to understand that when locusts come from Egypt, this is a regional problem. To understand that borders are not hermetic seals—water, air, diseases and climate have no borders,” Horowitz said in a recent interview with Al-Monitor. Horowitz is planning a lobby group to promote cooperation between Israel and its regional neighbors—the first of its kind in the …More

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordanian King Abdullah II signed an agreement to coordinate efforts to defend Jerusalem and its holy sites. The agreement was signed Sunday in Amman following talks between the two leaders. Under the agreement, Jordan and the PA will cooperate "on the protection and care of al-Aksa mosque and all the Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem," the Palestinian Wafa news organization reported. The agreement also is designed to stop Israeli attempts to …More

Israeli President Shimon Peres spoke privately with King Abdullah II of Jordan, during a world economic conference in Switzerland. The president’s office released a statement today, stating “the two held a working meeting at which they discussed ways to advance the peace process in the region.” The two world leaders are in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum in Davos. The sit down with Abdullah, which Israel maintains friendly relations with, was just one of a number of “intensive …More

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a secret meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Amman to discuss a possible strike on Syrian chemical weapon stores, several Israeli news agents reported yesterday. The reports came out after a London-based Arabic paper ran an investigative piece on the subject, quoting numerous unnamed sources close to the matter. Israel Radio claimed late yesterday that several anonymous Israeli sources confirmed the meeting had taken place. The report alleged Bibi traveled …More

An Israeli group is using sports to bring together Jews, Arabs, and Palestinians through martial arts. Budo for Peace hopes to use martial arts to build trust between people and help engage in a tolerable global society. The organization’s name comes from the Japanese expression “the way of stopping conflict.” "We teach moral values based on the philosophy of martial arts, like respect, self-control, harmony," says Danny Hakim, founder of the group. "The whole idea is to be able to create …More

Noam Chomsky, the prominent American academic and critic of Israel, has made his first trip to the Gaza Strip. Chomsky, who is Jewish, is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a frequent critic of American foreign policy and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. He was in the Gaza Strip for a conference at the Islamic University, according to Agence France-Presse. "Our trip to Gaza was very difficult, but we arrived here and I saw several things which I hoped before to …More

Jordan reportedly has appointed a new ambassador to Israel. The appointment late last week of career diplomat Walid Obeidat was reported by the French news service AFP and Ammon News. The position has been vacant since mid-2010, when Ali al-Ayed left to become the country's minister of media affairs. Jordan did not fill the position immediately, citing the lack of progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Obeidat is expected to arrive in Israel …More

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached out to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to send greetings on the eve of the Muslim holiday Eid Al-Fitr. Netanyahu phoned Abbas to send the message Saturday, and also spoke about his commitment to bringing to justice the attackers who firebombed a taxi in the West Bank last week. Six Palestinians were injured in the attack. Far right Israeli activists are suspected to be responsible. Just a day before his conversation with Abbas, the Israeli leader sent a …More

Erik Sahlin, NoCamels - Israeli Innovation News Learning to get along through fighting? The idea might sound strange, but Danny Hakim, founder of the Israeli NGO Budo For Peace, believes that martial arts have more to them than just fighting techniques. “That’s the contradiction that people who don’t know much about martial arts straight away laugh about,” says Hakim. The Budo for Peace program aims to strengthen participants’ physical, mental and cognitive abilities and break down …More

An edition of the Talmud translated into Arabic is now on display at the National Library in Jerusalem. The 20-volume issue of the Babylonian Talmud took six years of work by 95 translators and researchers in Jordan’s Middle East Studies Center. The translated editions have mostly been sold in Jordan book fairs. "This is the first Arabic translation of the Babylonian Talmud, which represents the most important religious teaching in Judaism," Mohammad Najem, spokesman of the Center, told the AFP. "It is a …More