Word: barak
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...Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Janis Joplin sang the great truism first, but this weekend Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made it his own. Propped up only by meager support in Israel's parliament, and with Orthodox sentiment set firmly against him, the beleaguered PM has apparently decided things can't get much worse. So on Sunday, Barak informed supporters of his plans to push "civil reforms" through the legislature, a move that caught many of his closest confidants off-guard. The proposed changes - which would effectively secularize the country by eliminating many...
...comes just three weeks before the September 13 settlement deadline established by PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, who has pledged to unilaterally proclaim a Palestinian state if an accord is not reached with Israel by that date. The failure of last month's peace talks at Camp David stung both Barak and Arafat, and left many doubtful that an agreement could ever be reached. Now Barak appears to be signaling that Israel could be adopting a more secular tone, in the hope that the Palestinians will offer equitable concessions. And though this may seem like political suicide - Barak runs the daily...
...Israel was gleeful over the veep selection of Senator JOSEPH LIEBERMAN--"a very Jewish Jew," as one Israeli diplomat noted--the Senator and the Israeli government don't always walk in lockstep. Lieberman opposes the U.S. release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, and he signed a letter to Barak protesting Israel's plans to sell China a sophisticated early-warning aircraft. He also visits Arab countries on Middle East trips. In 1991 he spent a week in Riyadh, where the Saudi royal family fixed kosher meals...
...Israel would backfire on him, says a senior White House aide, so he's looking for a way to sidestep the Sept. 13 deadline. Meanwhile, Mideast envoy Dennis Ross has flown to the region to gauge prospects for a second U.S. summit with Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Both men have been hinting lately that they want round...
...Labor party, which governed Israel for the first three decades of its independence, has borne the brunt of the resultant hostility, and despite apologizing for its past ill-treatment of the Sephardim, it continues to suffer their ire. Shas recently bolted Prime Minister Ehud Barak's coalition, and last week helped defeat his nominee for president - the ur-Ashkenazi Shimon Peres - instead electing an Iranian-born legislator from the opposition. But the contempt for European Jewry implied by Rabbi Yosef's depiction of Holocaust victims signals a new low, and the fact that it came as part of a sermon...