Lisa Goldman is a freelance Canadian-Israeli journalist, who blogs at On the Face. She lives in Tel Aviv.
While most Israelis would like to take the prospect of Israel-Syrian negotiations seriously, they find it impossible.
Why the visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories by the former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been, surprisingly, a media non-event.
Canadian-Israeli journalist and blogger Lisa Goldman travelled to Beirut last month to report for PJM on life in Lebanon a year after the war and returned shortly afterwards to film a story for Israel's Channel 10. Goldman wasn't surprised by the angry reaction to her reporting from Hezbollah's al-Manar station and al-Jazeera television. But she was taken aback by the distortions and lies printed about her in the English-language Daily Star. Since the Beirut-based newspaper didn't bother to get her side of the story, she responds here.
Last summer, she experienced Katyusha fire in northern Israel, and commiserated with Lebanese bloggers from her Tel Aviv apartment as their city was being bombed by Israeli Air Force, Canadian-Israeli journalist and blogger Lisa Goldman ventured into Beirut herself to experience Lebanon on the first anniversary of the war that shook both countries. This is the first in a series of her reports for PJM.
"The five-star Fatah refugees from Gaza wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts and speaking fluent Hebrew told hair-raising stories of teenage boys presumed loyal to Fatah being flung from the fourteenth floor of office buildings, their hands shackled and their mouths taped shut. Their unspoken message is interesting: suddenly Fatah represents the reasonable, civilized Palestinians. They speak Hebrew, they look like us and they sound like us, and Islamist militants threaten them just as they threaten Israel." By Lisa Goldman