News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) Nahum Barnea, one of the country's leading journalists, wrote in the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharonot Monday, "We have no one to trust but ourselves" and cannot count on the United States. Despite American President George W. Bush's enthusiastic speeches in Israel last week in which he pledged to stand beside Israel, Barnea wrote, "America is tired, castrated, and torn from within. All that it is able to provide its Middle East allies, at the moment, are words."

The Ma'ariv newspaper editorialized that Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni should not have demanded that Arabs "forget the Nakba, as a condition for independence." Nakba is the Arabic word for "catastrophe," a term one analyst explains that Arabs in Palestine used, historically, to refer to when they were cut off from their Syrian kin in the early 20th century. Since the creation of the "Palestinian" nationality, the term has been changed to refer to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. "Peace with the Palestinians will be possible only when we recognize their disaster and our part in it," the editorial stated.