Sixty Years of Israel

This historic montage is essential background and part of the buildup to the PeaceMaker game which has captivated Izzy Bee and others who've had a chance to play it on a fast connection, especially people who have lived through some of the "strategic game scenarios". I wish the makers had separate Hamas and Fatah factions; without this, the game seems a little out of date. Wonder if Olmert , Abbas, Blair and Rice ought to try their hands at this before the facts on the ground blow up in our faces.

PeaceMaker: How it all Started

Here's the inventor of the extraordinary PeaceMaker explaining his concept. He has gone on to produce a series of games, and "playing the news" on www.playthenews.com has created alot of excitement. Current events are in flux, and you can voice your opinions and predict how the real players on the global stage may screw things up. Commentary by other players is often enlightening. Or infuriating. Check it out. Israelity Bites.

Peace Maker : Gameplay for Global Gain?

Cyber war-gaming exercises by Israeli intelligence helped inspire a new kind of computer game, aiming at conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. If that happens, we'll all be winners. This game has won accolades and was developed by young Israelis, Americans and Palestinians on the drawing board at Carnegie-Mellon U. It's downloadable online, and worth it.
Izzy Bee recommends it!

Spy or die! Shin Bet seeks ailing informers

Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights alleges that since last June — when Hamas took control of Gaza from its Fatah rivals loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas — at least 30 other patients seeking urgent medical help were denied passage by Shin Bet because they refused to act as informers. In the past, most collaborators worked from within Fatah, and when they were chased from Gaza last June, it was a blow to Israeli intelligence..."This violates all conventions against torture," says Miri Weingarten, spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv-based Physicians for Human Rights. Israeli authorities deny carrying out such practices at Erez and dismiss them as Palestinian propaganda.

According to Time Magazine reporters, who interviewed several patients who claim to have been denied urgent medical care by intelligence agents at the border, dozens of Gazans have been pressured to spy since last summer's coup by Hamas. If these accusations are true, this deplorable practice should be re-examined and an investigation launched.

Hamas and Israel seek each other's destruction, and the devastated landscape of blasted-out buildings and shell craters around Erez bears the scars of this conflict. As one Erez security official says: "We're the last line of defense against the suicide bomber coming into Israel."

Israelity bites.

Professor casts doubt on 'Wandering Jews' in exile and brands them converts

She's an amazing Amazigh preistess who drove back Arab invaders from Morocco back in the eighth century.
Professor Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian,has just penned a controversial academic treatise in Hebrew, which translates as 'When and How was the Jewish People Invented?'. In it, he extols this Berber warrior queen and high priestess, Dahia al-Kahina, as an appropriate and overlooked Jewish heroine and suggests that the Jews as a people were never dispersed and exiled from Eretz Israel. Most are converts, he insists, and Eastern European Jews can trace Khazar origins.
The Haaretz reporter Ofri Ilani takes Sand to task for shattering a 'national mythology' and undermining the historic birthright to the Holy Land.

..he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the
Christian gospel.

Professor Sand is likely to be written off as a self-hating crank, and the timing of this piece, coinciding with Purim festivities and Good Friday, means it won't get much notice. Izzy Bee wonders if shifting Sands is merely being contrarian, or seeking publicity for deliberately heretical views. Suggesting that an hour in memory of "the Nakba" be instituted as part of pan-Israeli Memorial Day Independence Day holidays won't go far, I reckon.

Conflict getting closer?

People are bracing for increased violence inside Israel during these holidays as the daily news reports bode ill. A recent poll showing that 84 per cent of Palestinians condone rocket attacks and the mass murder at Yeshiva Mercaz Harav made many Israelis take notice, as did Osama bin Laden's brand new tape, calling for Gaza to be retaken by jihadists through "fire and iron", and not negotiation. Peace talks indeed have stalled, and since the big show of concern Annapolis, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict. (Security sources pointed out that more Palestinians have died from the homemade Qassam rockets than Israelis, due to misfires, backfires, and militant incompetence.)

There is a sense of despair and anger at every checkpoint, and that bubble of protection we'd grown accustomed to inside Jerusalem seems to have burst. Terrorist attacks seem less random now, and the targets are not just of opportunity; they appear to be specifically political. Earlier this week, a right wing Rabbi was stabbed while walking in the old city. He was a member of Ateret Cohanim, which aids hardline Jewish settlers to purchase property in the Arab and Christian sections of the Old City.

The attack happened near the Old City's Damascus Gate, a busy area of Palestinian shops and cafes.

Emergency volunteers said the rabbi's bodyguard chased the assailant but he escaped, leaving behind a blood-stained knife.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and claims the whole city its capital.

Palestinians want the occupied portion, which includes the walled Old City and its holy sites, as the capital of a state which they want to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Shin Bet's snoop blog & cybergeography

Approved official blogging arouses Izzy's suspicions. When the intelligence corps enters into the cybersphere so openly, is the goal recruitment or disinformation? If you log on or register, will your computer get tapped? Paranoid, some would brand me, but this cyber-spy enterprise, with its glamourous mock silhouettes, feels bogus. Shin Bet is the Israeli equivalent of the FBI or MI5. Its motto is "מגן ולא יראה", which translates as "Defender (Shield) who shall not be seen". But apparently it wants to be heard in cyberspace, a place where screams are routine. The BBC blogger, Tim Franks, is quite intrigued with Agent Aleph's Hebrew-blogging quartet.

Shin Bet says Israelis are keen to learn more about their life.
The Israeli secret service has launched a new venture: it has started to carry an internet diary, or blog, written by four of its agents.

The agents discuss how they were recruited, and what sort of work they perform; they also answer questions sent in by members of the public.

The tone of the blog is chatty, at times even facetious.
The agents from Israel's internal security service, the Shin Bet, are shown in silhouette.

Agent Chet is the sole woman among them. She works in hi-tech.
She says she went to the agency because it offered her a better "work-life balance" than her previous job in the private sector.

There are parts of her job, she says, which she can't discuss even with her husband - but then again, at home, they don't much like talking about work.
Agent Aleph, dubbed "the expert" on the blog, attempts to debunk a few myths.

"We don't work in a basement," he says. "We don't spend the day wearing earpieces."
"And we don't get to have flashing blue lights for our cars. We have to sit in traffic jams like everyone else."

The blogs are intended to draw members of the public into other areas of the Shin Bet website - in particular the recruitment section.Some of the positions are advertised with a red star and the slogan "hot job".There is the opportunity to work on what are described as "irregular missions"; to work on one's own; and to acquire a variety of "special skills".

A Shin Bet official told the BBC that the idea was to inform the public that the agency offers work beyond just stopping Palestinian paramilitary attacks.

The official said that the agency had been cheered by the feedback from members of the Israeli public - keen to find out more about the jobs within Shin Bet, the pay and even the food.

Meanwhile, over on Facebook, Israeli settlers have questioned and expanded the computer's automatic listing program. Their demands that the social networking website list them as residents of Israel, even though they might physically be deep in the West Bank, have been met. There is no such country as Palestine, the settlers pointed out in a coordinated email campaign. Previously, Facebook automatically tagged all Jerusalem residents as living in Israel; now, alerted to political sensitivities, Facebook friends have the option of listing Israel or Palestine as the homeland in cyberspace. Online battles over cyber-turf have been underway for quite awhile. Advocacy websites routinely orchestrate corrective comments campaigns and many target Jihadist or anti-Semitic websites and blogs. And vice versa.

Here's a sample of this cyber-groundwork from the Israel Project:

The glorification of terrorists and terror activity is rampant throughout the World Wide Web. All major terrorist organizations maintain modern Web sites, where they proudly communicate the details of their attacks against civilians. Facebook groups are dedicated to lauding the mass murderers of Yeshiva students or glorifying Hassan Nasrallah. The leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, which fought a war in July 2006, has 3,315 members in his Facebook group.

Iran-backed terrorist groups such Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah publish their own sites, many of which link back to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the groups, as well as weapons and terrorist training.

The terrorist groups’ Web sites are: Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades,Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah

The Israel Project Founder and President Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi insists, “Facebook should be a safe space for people to network, not a recruitment and glorification tool for terrorists. It is sad and cynical that there are those who are using a site geared to connecting young people around the world to celebrate the murder of young people in a school.”

Interestingly, Israel Project has its own Facebook group as "part of its efforts to work for peace." They also provide chopper tours of eretz Israel for incoming foreign correspondents.