Justices Decline to Say if Jerusalem-Born Americans Can Claim Israeli Birthplace ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times by John H. Cushman - March 26, 2012 - 12:00am WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a lower court to decide whether Congress has the authority to allow Americans born in Jerusalem to claim Israel as their birthplace on their passports. The decision postpones resolution of a long-running dispute between Congress and the executive branch over the power to set foreign policy, in this case the highly fraught issue of whether to formally recognize Israel’s claim that Jerusalem is its capital. » Read more

Draw the Line: How Israel Erases Itself ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Beast by Gershom Gorenberg - (Opinion) March 26, 2012 - 12:00am One day in the late 1980s, my wife and I visited a staffer at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for an off-the-record conversation. The walls of his office were decorated with large maps produced, he mentioned, by the CIA. One showed the West Bank, with the border between it and Israel precisely depicted. Our careful journalistic distance from the interviewee evaporated. We shamelessly begged him for a copy, which he politely gave us. » Read more

Israelis Fear Blame For US-Iran War ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Al-Monitor by Barbara Slavin - (Opinion) March 27, 2012 - 12:00am A thread of anxiety ran through a conference of liberal American Jews and Israelis Sunday [March 25]. The worry: that Israel would bear the blame for any military confrontation between the United States and Iran. Retired brigadier general Shlomo Brom, a former director of strategic planning for the Israeli Defense Forces General Staff, told an audience at the J-Street convention that he had participated in talks with the George W. Bush administration before it attacked Iraq in 2003. » Read more

A settlement boycott can work ATFP World Press Roundup Article from NOW Lebanon by Hussein Ibish - (Opinion) March 27, 2012 - 12:00am Peter Beinart’s recent call in the New York Times for Jewish Americans to boycott Israeli settlement goods has been met with angry responses from many Jewish Americans. This includes some who are opposed to the settler movement. The most important of these objections hold that a boycott cannot work because Jewish Americans won’t go along with such a program and there isn’t much to boycott anyway. Both arguments hold little water. » Read more