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New Mega-Leak Reveals Middle East Peace Process
An anonymous reader writes "There's been yet another mega-leak, this time of 1,600 papers describing the Israeli/Palestinian peace process negotiations. It's independent of Wikileaks and came to light via al-Jazeera, showing perhaps that the mega-leak meme is here to stay whatever happens to Assange. The papers show a weak Palestinian side offering ever greater concessions to Israel, which flatly rejected this as being insufficient: 'We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands,' Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told the Palestinians, 'and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it.'"
Pretty close to it, yes. Courts in Israel are civil courts, not based on Jewish religious law. Legislation is passed by a civil legislative body, not a religious one. Religions are considered equal before the law. There is no official state religion, and there is freedom of religion and of worship.
There is one weirdness, which is marriage. There is no "civil" marriage in Israel; there are only religious marriage under the auspices of the various religions practiced by the people being married. This can cause problems for non-Orthodox Jews, for interfaith marriages, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel has details.
Also note that in Israel being Jewish is not necessarily a religious matter; it's an ethnic matter. You can be an atheist and still be considered Jewish ethnically.
This can matter for things like military service, where ethnic minorities are generally exempt from the draft (though accepted as volunteers).
In any case, I suppose it depends on your definition of "separation of religion and state". It's not exactly a black-and-white line; there are gradations. Would you say that religion and state are separated in Germany, say?
Even wikileaks leaves itself wide open to astroturfing with manufactured 'leaks' to suit someone's agenda. It doesn't even have to go that far if someone somewhere is deciding what to leak and what to bury.
Wikileaks do their best to verify the leaks before publishing them. IIRC, they sent some people to Iraq to confirm the authenticity of the leaked video, before publishing "Collateral Murder", for example. While it's possible that they will make a mistake sooner or later, I don't think that what you're describing is so easy.
You know what the saddest thing about the whole Middle-East crisis is ? The people fighting are the same people on both sides.
Genetic research has shown that the Palestinians and the Israeli's are the SAME people. More specifically the Palestinians are the descendants of the so-called "ten lost tribes" - it's not even conjecture, it's basic proven science. In the years since the diaspora (and the classic story about why that happened is simply not true: the Romans never displaced any culture, so to think they did it in Israel is silly).
Here's what science says happened: A lot of Jews left Israel during the Roman occupation, settling around Europe in two major groups. The Azkanazi in Eastern Europe and the Sephardi in Spain. These two groups were the two not-lost tribes. What happened to the other ten ? They were not scattered and dispersed or lost, that legend is false. They stayed right there where they were, over time they converted to Islam.
When the other two tribes started coming back they found a largely Arab culture with an Islamic religion living in the area and claiming it as their homeland.
They could not believe that these Muslim Palestinians were fellow Jews (especially since it didn't fit their legends that all the tribes left), and the Palestinians would never have thought that their ancestors were Jewish Israelites.
But the scientific evidence is extremely strong - they share a very direct common ancestry and were one people just about 1700 years ago (in other words, almost exactly when the diaspora started).
An inevitable war between brothers, over a homeland that historically belongs as much to one as the other... and they still can't figure out a way to get along. Now that is human nature at it's worst, in a nutshell.
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