Rutgers Gaza Event

NEW YORK — A student group at Rutgers University held a fundraiser in support of a blockade-busting flotilla to Gaza. The Nov. 4 event, which featured a halal buffet, was held by the campus organization BAKA: Students United for Middle Eastern Justice. The dinner and speakers were advertised as in support of the group U.S. to Gaza, which plans to sponsor a boat in a flotilla to break Israel’s Gaza blockade. BAKA reportedly used student activity fees to sponsor the event. The Anti-Defamation League reportedly and Rutgers Hillel opposed the event.

Speakers at Brandeis

BOSTON — Two Jewish student groups sponsored Israeli Occupation Awareness Week at Brandeis University.  Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace co-hosted four days of speakers and films on what they said is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The events at the school in Waltham, Mass., a non-sectarian university founded by the American Jewish community, took place Nov. 8 to 11.

Former President Recalls Rabin Fondly

NEW YORK — If Israel and the Palestinians cut a peace deal, Syria likely would ally itself with the West over Iran, and Lebanon would be truly independent, Bill Clinton said.
The former U.S. president also warned that Israel will need friends in the region for a future when attacks from Gaza are conducted, not with crude, inaccurate rockets, but with rockets that inevitably will make use of technological advances to stage GPS-like precision attacks.
Clinton spoke at a Nov. 4 memorial service in New York aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid marking the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. He said Rabin recognized early on that demographics in the Holy Land made a Palestinian state necessary to preserve Israel’s democratic and Jewish character.
Calling the day Rabin was shot “one of the saddest days of my life,” Clinton shared personal memories of Rabin, who died Nov. 4, 1995, after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
Clinton said he thinks of Rabin all the time, including five minutes before the wedding of his daughter, Chelsea, to Marc Mezvinsky, her longtime Jewish boyfriend. Clinton said he imagined having a conversation with Rabin, who would have said Clinton finally got something right by having his daughter marry a Jewish guy.