Israeli Singer Accompanies the MacBook Air Commercial

VC Café the tech-blog that tracks Israeli tech startup news from a Silicon Valley perspective reports that the woman's voice behind the Apple MacBook Air commercial is 29 year old Israeli singer Yael Naim: Israeli singer serenades launch of MacBook Air. The article goes on to say that Yael was born in Paris to Tunisian parents who immigrated to Israel when she was 4 years old.

12-year-old Kfar Sava girl defeats 20 men (in chess tournament)

Ha'aretz reports this weekend on this cute story: click here for the full original article. Following is an excerpt and highlight from the story:

...
The most important official event of the tournament took place on Tuesday in a long row of chess games played by grandmasters from Israel, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. At the same time, dozens of Jews and Arabs participated in the Galilee competition, which offered $20,000 in total prize money.

But most of the spotlight was on a simultaneous exhibition match between a 12-year-old Israeli girl, Marsel Efroimski, and 20 chess players seated next to each other who waited anxiously for the young girl's fast-paced moves. Efroimski, the child of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, lives in Kfar Sava and is a seventh grade student. She says that since age eight, she has been playing chess. Her inspiration and her primary influences came from her father and grandfather.

"Chess is a game that requires a lot of thought," Efroimski said. "I know that it's not a game that draws crowds, but it's a very interesting game and in Ma'alot-Tarshiha, there were actually people who were interested and came to watch the games or participate."

The 20 courageous players did not stand much of a chance against the girl who in November was crowned the world youth chess champion in the under-12 girls category at the championships that were held in Turkey. The title earned her an invitation to receive the congratulations of President Shimon Peres.

Within an hour of beginning the chess matches at the community center in Ma'alot-Tarshiha, 20 victories were credited to Efroimski, who stood throughout the entire competition, as is customary, and merely sprinted from one chessboard to the next.

The little discussed plight of a million Jews who were expelled from Arab lands decades ago

From a previous Haaretz weekend magazine : All I wanted was justice
By Adi Schwartz

One family’s 50-year fight for restitution of an Alexandrian hotel sheds light on the little discussed plight of a million Jews who were expelled from Arab lands decades ago

Below extensive excerpts, read entire original article here

Albert Metzger never left his hotel. Although he owned another six hotels in Alexandria, and was actually in charge of the entire hotel industry in northern Egypt, for him the seaside Cecil Hotel was the jewel in the crown. From the time he built it in 1929 Metzger lived there, in a private apartment on the first floor, supervising every movement and every employee closely. Within a few years the hotel in the heart of Alexandria Bay had become famous, and turned into one of the most famous meeting places in the Levant. British author Lawrence Durrell, who lived in the city for a few years, commemorated it in his "The Alexandria Quartet."

One morning in November 1956, however, Albert Metzger was forced to leave. The gallery of famous guests who used to stay at the hotel - from Al Capone, to Josephine Baker, to Winston Churchill - couldn't help him. Nor could the fact that the battle of El Alamein had been planned on its first floor, at a time when the hotel had served as the headquarters of the British Police. Nor could the fact that Metzger himself had built and created the place ex nihilo.

That morning Metzger went from being a wealthy businessman whom everyone in Alexandria knew, to being persona non grata, an enemy among his fellow Egyptians. In the days following the outbreak of the Sinai Campaign, Egypt had decided on a campaign to punish its Jewish community, which numbered about 50,000 souls. The Jews lost their citizenship, their businesses and bank accounts were confiscated, and they were not allowed to work. The Cecil Hotel, like hundreds of other assets, was taken away by the Egyptian regime for one reason only: Its owners were Jewish.

Overnight Metzger turned from multimillionaire to penniless refugee. Even when he decided to leave the country and try his luck elsewhere, the authorities refused to allow him to take out money, property, jewelry, books or pictures. Only one suitcase full of clothing, weighing 20 kilograms. He left by car accompanied by his family and headed for the Libyan border, leaving behind an entire life that had gone down the drain.
...

"They told me I'd never win," says Patricia Metzger, 69, in a phone conversation with Haaretz from Dar es Salaam, "but I'm a very stubborn woman. I wanted to return to Alexandria and run the hotel, but the Egyptians told me 'Forget it, it's over.' They kept dragging things out, and in the end they offered us very low compensation. They didn't want to give up the hotel, and that's why they said that if we didn't accept their offer, they would bury the matter for a few more years. I cried when I heard the sum they had offered us for this beautiful hotel, but I agreed, because in any case this may be the longest lawsuit in history. All I wanted was justice."

Back on the agenda
Patricia Metzger's campaign to achieve justice sheds light on a little-discussed aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict: In the wake of the War of Independence and the establishment of Israel, two major population movements took place in the Middle East. The one that is frequently mentioned is the Palestinian exodus, but at the same time almost one million Jews were forced to leave Arab countries where they had lived for hundreds of years. According to official Arab statistics, some 850,000 Jews left those countries from 1948 to the beginning of the 1970s, and about 600,000 of them were absorbed in Israel. For the sake of comparison, the United Nations data estimate the original population of Palestinian refugees at 720,000.

Moreover, the property the Jews left behind in Arab countries was much more valuable than the property of the Palestinians: The mount of Jewish-owned land alone is estimated at 100,000 square kilometers - four times the size of Israel.

Before the Annapolis summit and now, prior to the visit to Israel of U.S. President George W. Bush, several Jewish organizations are trying to put this subject back on the world agenda. Prof. Irwin Cotler, a Canadian MP and former justice minister, wrote a detailed opinion in November on behalf of the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries organization, along with its director and another legal expert...

An expert on human rights, Cotler points out that the definition of refugee in international law - as a person with "a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion" - clearly applied to the Jews from Arab countries. Indeed, the onternational community has already recognized the suffering of these Jews - including in statements by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the 1950s. In 2000, during the Camp David negotiations, then U.S. president Bill Clinton said that Israel was full of Jews who had lived in Arab countries and immigrated to Israel because they had become refugees in their own countries.

Cotler's detailed opinion mentions that the Arab world's refusal to accept the existence of the State of Israel gave rise to a negative attitude and discrimination against the Jews, and even to violence. The 1948 decision by the Arab League in effect determined the policy that Jews would be considered "members of the Jewish minority of Palestine" - i.e., citizens of an enemy country, Israel. The decision also stipulated freezing Jews' bank accounts, imprisonment of Zionists and confiscation of their property. For all these reasons the Jewish population in the Arab countries declined during the first years after Israel's establishment: in Yemen from 55,000 to 4,000; in Iraq from 135,000 to 6,000; in Aden from 8,000 to 800; in Egypt from 80,000 to 50,000; in Libya from 38,000 to 4,000; and in Syria from 30,000 to 5,000.

In each country the situation was different. Ada Aharoni, a native of Cairo who left with her family in 1949, remembers a happy childhood, but also the swift decline after the Partition Plan of the UN General Assembly in 1947.
...
Aharoni's family decided to leave for Israel. The ships, which couldn't sail directly to Israel, first arrived in Marseille. "Father had deposited all our money in a Swiss bank in Cairo," she recalls, "and the first day we arrived in Marseille, we went to the bank. There the branch manager told him that there wasn't a single cent, because Egypt had confiscated the account."

The shock caused Aharoni's father to suffer a heart attack, from which he had difficulty recovering. His elder brother, a judge in the supreme rabbinical court in Cairo, died of cardiac arrest while on the plane to Paris. The grandmother of her best friend refused to leave the land of her fathers, threw herself down the stairs and died on the spot.

Jewish 'nakba'
The second anti-Jewish wave in Egypt, which took place in 1956, hit the Metzgers. The family had arrived in the 19th century from France, but Albert, and his father, were born in Egypt and spent almost their entire lives there. Only a few years earlier he had received the title "emir," because of funds he raised for charitable projects and his status in Egyptian society. But with the outbreak of the Sinai Campaign in October 1956, the situation deteriorated.

Some 1,000 Jews were arrested immediately upon the outbreak of the war, and about 500 places of business were confiscated. In the mosques of Cairo and Alexandria a government order was read calling for Jews to be treated as "enemies." Bank accounts were blocked, and Jewish managers and salaried workers were fired. Judges and lawyers were expelled from the professional organization, and Jewish engineers, doctors and teachers were not allowed to work.
...
Prof. Aharoni believes that a major mistake is being made. In her opinion, this is not only a matter of doing historical justice to entire communities that were lost, but also a matter of great importance to the present. She discovered that first hand when, a few years ago, she gave a course at the University of Pennsylvania entitled "The Nakba [Arabic for 'catastrophe'] of the Jews of Egypt and Arab Countries." Over half the 50 students in the class, she recalls, were Arabs from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Palestinians and Israelis, as well as several Iranians. They all expressed great anger when she presented the subject of the course, and claimed that "nakba" refers only to the tragic events experienced by the Palestinians in 1948. However, she says, toward the end of the course one of the participants, a Palestinian PhD in sociology, got up and said in amazement: "We checked the data carefully, and the numbers and facts you gave us were in fact correct. I'm surprised that you Jews, who are known to be intelligent, enlightened and smart, haven't publicized this important and interesting story. How is it that we never heard this story? Why don't you tell the story of the nakba of the Jews from the Arab countries?"

Aharoni was curious to know why it was so important to him that the story be publicized. "Because it rescues my honor and that of my people," he replied. "It makes us Palestinians realize that we're not the only ones who suffered from the Arab-Israeli conflict. It makes things much easier for us. This information enables us to stand erect and opens opportunities for a sulha [reconciliation]. The condition for a sulha is that the side that causes injustice to the other side has to pay for it. Full reconciliation is reflected in the sulha ceremony where the payment is made. Now I understand that those Jews already paid for the sulha, when they lost all their property and were forced to disperse, just like us Palestinians. The conditions of the sulha have already been fulfilled. If the Israeli government publicizes that, the two nations will be able to progress to a process of true peace. We won't feel that we are the only underdog, because the Jews from the Arab countries were victims. You also experienced a catastrophe, and the time has come to engage in a sulha and to stop killing one another."

Original Article in Hebrew:

זה היה ביתם
מיליון היהודים האחרים שגורשו ממדינות ערב לאחר הקמת מדינת ישראל, נשכחו משום מה
...
פרופ' אהרוני סבורה שזאת החמצה מצערת. לדעתה, לא רק שמדובר בעשיית צדק היסטורי עם קהילות שלמות שאבדו, אלא שיש בכך גם חשיבות רבה להווה. על כך היא למדה ממקור ראשון, כשהעבירה לפני כמה שנים קורס באוניברסיטת פנסילווניה על "הנכבה של יהודי מצרים וארצות ערב". יותר ממחצית מחמישים הסטודנטים בכיתה, היא מספרת, היו ערבים ממצרים, ירדן, עיראק, סוריה, ערבים פלשתינאים וישראלים, וגם כמה איראנים. כולם הביעו תרעומת כשהציגה את נושא הקורס, וטענו שהמלה נכבה מתייחסת רק לאירועים הטרגיים שעברו על הפלשתינאים ב-1948.

ואולם, היא אומרת, לקראת סוף הקורס קם אחד המשתתפים, דוקטור לסוציולוגיה פלשתינאי, ואמר לה בהשתאות: "בדקנו את הנתונים, ואכן המספרים והעובדות שנתת לנו היו נכונים. אני מתפלא איך אתם היהודים, שידועים כאינטליגנטים, נאורים וחכמים, לא פירסמתם את כל הפרשה החשובה והמעניינת הזאת? איך קרה שלא שמענו אף פעם את הסיפור הזה? למה אתם לא מספרים את סיפור הנכבה של היהודים מארצות ערב?"

אהרוני הסתקרנה לדעת מדוע כל כך חשוב לו שהסיפור הזה יפורסם. "כי זה מציל את כבודי ואת כבוד עמי", השיב לה. "זה מביא אותנו הפלשתינאים להכרה שאנחנו לא היחידים שסבלו מהסכסוך הערבי-ישראלי. זה מאוד מקל עלינו. המידע הזה זוקף את קומתנו ופותח אפשרויות לסולחה. התנאי לקיום סולחה הוא שהצד שגרם עוול לצד השני ישלם על כך במשהו. הפיוס המלא מקבל את ביטויו בטקס הסולחה שבו מתבצע התשלום. עכשיו הבנתי שהיהודים האלה כבר שילמו עבור הסולחה, כאשר הפסידו את כל רכושם ונאלצו להתפזר, בדיוק כמונו הפלשתינאים. תנאי הסולחה הרי הושלמו. אם ממשלת ישראל תפרסם זאת ברבים, שני העמים יוכלו להתקדם לתהליך של שלום אמיתי. אנחנו לא נרגיש שאנחנו האנדרדוג היחיד, כי גם יהודי ארצות ערב היו קורבנות. גם אתם עברתם קטסטרופה, ואכן הגיע הזמן לעשות סולחה ולהפסיק להרוג אחד את השני".

A Suicide Bombing that Killed 50 in a Crowded Mosque and the Deafening Silence of Hypocrisy

Back in December and prior to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto there was a brutal suicide bombing in a crowded Mosque that killed 50 people. Reuters reported the incident in the following manner:

A suicide bomber killed at least 50 people on Friday in a mosque in the home compound of Pakistan's former interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, in what appeared to be a political attack on the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha. About 100 people were injured.

The bomb, packed with ball bearings and nails, ripped through a crowd of hundreds at a mosque in Sherpao's home compound in a village called Sherpao, not far from Peshawar. The suspected bomber sat in a middle row among the worshippers and set off his bomb as prayers ended and people gathered around...

Editorial Comment
We've seen Arabs and Muslims take to the streets around the world in mass and in frenzied and violent demonstrations over a cartoon of Mohamed. At the same time absolute silence regarding the vile and viciously anti-American and anti-Semitic cartoons which are a staple in the Arab press. But maybe the height of hypocrisy is the utter silence regarding the copious blood letting by Muslims of Muslims as in this incident. And in response to this Mosque massacre there is no pan-Muslim uproar, no worldwide demonstrating by alleged moderates, instead just the deafening silence of hypocrisy.