Two prominent Jewish personalities from Israel and two Palestinians will speak at the next Doha Debates being held at the Qatar Foundation headquarters on Wednesday. The motion for the day will be: “This House believes the Palestinians should give up their full right of return.” Yossi Beilin, a member of the Israeli Knesset, who initiated the secret Oslo talks, and Bassem Eid will support the motion. Ali Abunimah, co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and the child of refugees and Dr Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian who teaches at Haifa University will speak against the motion. Read more about Prominent Jews to speak at Doha Debates 

Should the Palestinians give up their right to return to their homeland after decades of misery and sufferings in refugee camps across the world? A huge majority of the participants at Qatar Foundation’s Doha Debates yesterday rejected the idea when they overwhelmingly defeated the motion that suggested Palestinians should give up their full right to return. Only 18.4 per cent of the participants voted for the motion. The debate was marked with the presence of two prominent Jewish personalities from Israel, opposing each other. Equally interesting was the presence of two Palestinians facing each other on the two sides of the panel. Read more about Doha Debates backs Palestinian refugees' right to return 

Those looking for Obama’s views on the Mideast won’t find a great deal. In 2004, he disappointed Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada by giving a speech to Chicago’s Council on Foreign Relations endorsing the U.S. alliance with Israel. Speaking before Jewish audiences during his Senate campaign, he reassured them that his Swahili first name, Barack (“Blessed”), is a close relation of Baruch in Hebrew. His current bestseller, “The Audacity of Hope” — a carefully crafted manifesto positioning him for his 2008 run — has a page on a recent trip to the Mideast, where he talked to both Holocaust survivors and Palestinian villagers. Read more about Obama and the Jews 

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s maiden speech to the pro-Israel lobby last week saw a man described by early supporters as an ardent dove on Israel take flight as a bird of considerably more hawkish mien reports The Jewish Weekly. But Ali Abunimah, a Hyde Park Palestinian-American activist, and co-Founder of The Electronic Intifada “said that until a few years ago, Obama was ‘quite frank that the U.S. needed to be more evenhanded, that it leaned too much toward Israel.’ It was vivid in his memory, said Abunimah, because ‘these were the kind of statements I’d never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere rather than at the end of his career.’” Read more about Obama Pivots Away From Dovish Past 

Joel Pollak wants people to believe comparisons between Israeli policies and apartheid are nothing but a fraud, “The trouble with the apartheid analogy” (March 2). He castigates former US president Jimmy Carter for quoting a six-year-old letter from Nelson Mandela to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman making the apartheid comparison, and accuses me of perpetrating a hoax and admitting I made the whole thing up. There is no possible basis for Pollak to say I intended people to believe the memo was written by anyone other than myself. Although the Mandela memo was only a piece of satire, it is not necessary to believe it to understand the Israel-apartheid comparison is grounded in an ugly reality. Read more about No fake analogy 

Seeking to assure supporters of Israel that he is as ardent a backer of the Jewish state as are rivals such as Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and John Edwards, D-NC, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, delivered a very pro-Israel address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of Chicago at the end of last week. But now comes a very interesting blog entry by the pro-Palestinian blogger Ali Abunimah at The Electronic Intifada, who alleges that Obama has changed to a far more stridently pro-Israel position as his national aspirations developed. “The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood,” Abunimah writes. Read more about Obama, Israel, and the Jewish Vote