Israel holds its first transgender beauty contest

TEL AVIV, Israel — Nearly 30 transgender women strutted down the catwalk in skinny jeans, crop tops and stiletto heels at a Tel Aviv club on Thursday, vying for a chance to enter the first “Miss Trans Israel” beauty pageant.

Tel Aviv has emerged as one of the world’s most gay-friendly travel destinations, standing in sharp contrast to most of the rest of the Middle East, where gays can face persecution.

Israela Stephanie Lev, the pageant’s organizer, said that in the past it was “terrible” living as a transgender woman in Israel. But today, people are more accepting, she said.

“Definitely we are achieving, enlightening the people to accept and empower transsexuals,” she said.

Among the contestants was Talleen Abu Hanna, a 21-year-old from a Catholic Arab family in the northern city of Nazareth. She said she came to the audition because she wants to do something with her life.

“I have this something, I am a dancer, and I am a singer, I play the trumpet. I have something to give the people,” she said. Although Israel’s more conservative Arab society is often unaccepting of gays, Abu Hanna said her family accepts and supports her.

“We are normal people. This is normal,” she said.

Elian Nesiel, a 20-year-old contestant, said she believes that being transgender is “gradually accepted more and more.”

“Yes, it’s a process, like everything,” she said.

Israel is generally tolerant toward gays and transgender people. Gays openly serve in Israel’s military, as does at least one openly transgender soldier. In 1998, a transgender singer, Dana International, won the popular Eurovision song contest.

But homosexuality is shunned in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Last year, an extremist ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed a teenage girl to death at a Jerusalem Pride parade.

Finalists will compete at a pageant in May, and the winner will represent Israel at the Miss Trans Star International pageant to be held in Spain in August.

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

Two killed in shooting on Tel Aviv thoroughfare, Israel mystified by motive

TEL AVIV - An unidentified gunman killed two people and wounded at least three others on a bustling thoroughfare in central Tel Aviv on Friday before fleeing, Israeli authorities said.

Security camera footage aired on Israel's Channel 10 television showed the assailant, who appeared to be in his mid-to-late 20s and wore protective eyeglasses and a windbreaker, browsing dried fruit at a delicatessen on Dizengoff Street. He then pulled a machine pistol from his backpack and stepped onto the pavement, shooting wildly.

With the suspect still at large, police declined to offer a motive.

"All possible angles are being investigated," spokeswoman Luba Samri said. "Large-scale police forces are conducting searches for him."

Nati Shakked, owner of the next-door Simta bar where there were several casualties, told Israel's Channel 2 TV: "It was a terrorist attack, without a doubt."

Israel has seen a wave of Palestinian street attacks since October, fuelled in part by Muslim anger over stepped-up Jewish visits to Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque complex, also sacred to Jews, as well as the lack of any progress towards peace with Israel. The violence has been encouraged by Islamist groups that preach Israel's destruction.

There was no immediate claim by Palestinian armed groups for Friday's attack.

Israel has also been bracing for a possible attack by Islamic State, which has a small but growing following among Israeli Arabs. An Islamic State audio message circulated on social media last week threatened to strike at Israel "soon".

Israeli media showed images of an abandoned ammunition clip at the scene of the shooting that appeared to have come from a Spectre M4 machine-gun - a weapon rarely seen in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

While mob killings and lethal domestic violence are fairly commonplace in Israel, random shootings by civilians are rare. — Reuters

Israel gives France intelligence on Paris attackers – media

JERUSALEM - Israel's spy services are helping France investigate the Paris gun and bomb attacks, Israeli media said, with one radio station suggesting the assistance drew on surveillance of militant groups in Syria and Iraq.

Israel had no advance warning of Friday's rampage that killed at least 129 people, but within hours of it happening gave France information about some of the Islamic State militants who claimed to have carried it out, the top-rated television station Channel Two said, quoting an unnamed senior Israeli official.

Without providing details, Channel Two said Israeli intelligence saw a "clear operational link" between the attack in the French capital, Thursday's Beirut suicide bombings and the Oct. 31 downing of a Russian airliner in the Egyptian Sinai.

Israeli spy services are monitoring Syria and Iraq—where Islamic State insurgents have conquered swathes of territory—which may have yielded intelligence on the organisation of the Paris attacks, Israel's Army Radio said.

Israeli officials contacted by Reuters had no comment, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters on Saturday: "I've instructed Israel's security and intelligence services to assist their French counterparts and counterparts from other European countries in any way possible."

A Western diplomat said last year that Israel was providing the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State with information gleaned from international travel databases about Western citizens suspected of joining the insurgents. — Reuters

With Israeli vote in, Netanyahu could remain thorn in Obama’s side

WASHINGTON - After six years of testy relations, US President Barack Obama may have to resign himself to the likelihood that he has not seen the last of Benjamin Netanyahu.

A better-than-expected showing by the Israeli prime minister in Tuesday's closely fought election raises the prospect that he could remain a thorn in Obama's side, with the two men increasingly at odds over Iran diplomacy and Middle East peacemaking.

US officials responded cautiously as they waited to see whether Netanyahu or his center-left challenger, Isaac Herzog, would get the nod from Israel's president to begin the long and messy coalition-building process.

Clearly the result that many of Obama's supporters had hoped for—a repudiation by Israeli voters of Netanyahu's hard-line approach—was not to be. Exit polls showed that his Likud party had erased its rival's pre-election lead, putting the two sides in a dead heat.

"Looks like the White House will need to let the champagne chill a bit longer," Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations, tweeted about the election outcome.

The election came just two weeks after Netanyahu defied Obama with a politically divisive speech to Congress attacking US-led nuclear talks with Iran. The final days of campaigning only served to deepen tensions between the right-wing leader and Washington.

Even as they insisted publicly on non-intervention in the Israeli campaign, Obama's aides were taken aback by Netanyahu's reversal of his previous declaration of support for creating a Palestinian state, a longstanding cornerstone of US policy.

Netanyahu also drew a rebuke from the US State Department for suggesting on election day that left-wingers were trying to get Arab-Israeli voters out "in droves" to sway the election against him.

"Netanyahu has managed an uphill climb in the last few days," said David Makovsky, a former member of Obama's team in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that collapsed last year.

"The way he has survived was to cannibalize part of the right and also adopt policy positions that are bound to create further friction with Washington," said Makovsky, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "He's going to be in the next government one way or another."

Netanyahu could have the easier path to forming a cabinet, which would put him on course to becoming Israel's longest serving leader.

That prospect may not bode well for repairing US-Israeli ties after Netanyahu's congressional speech, which he delivered at the invitation of Obama's Republican opponents despite strong objections from the president and many of Obama's fellow Democrats.

Hoping for an Obama-friendlier government

US officials had left little doubt of their hope for an election outcome that would create a new ruling coalition more in sync with—or at least less hostile to—Obama's agenda, especially with an end-of-March deadline looming for a framework nuclear deal in negotiations between Tehran and world powers.

As a prime minister, Zionist Union leader Herzog would be expected to take an Obama-friendlier course less confrontational over Iran and more open to renewed peacemaking with the Palestinians.

It would also be a chance to get past six years of slights, mutual suspicion and even antipathy at the top of the US-Israeli relationship and return to traditional bipartisanship in Congress on the issue of Israeli security.

That will not be easy if Netanyahu remains in office—though some analysts suggest that tensions with Obama could be eased along with the threat of international isolation if the rivals decide to form a broad-based national unity government.

Efforts already were under way in Washington to lower the temperature.

"People say a lot of things during campaigns," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told CNN when asked about Netanyahu's apparent reversal on Palestinian statehood.

"What we're focused on is the Israelis moving forward, forming a government and we will work with whoever is prime minister to see if we can make progress in what is a very tough and difficult area to do so," she said.

Nancy Pelosi, the House of Representatives Democratic minority leader, said that as someone who loves Israel, she was "near tears" during Netanyahu's March 3 address, calling his remarks an "insult to the intelligence of the United States."

But on Tuesday, she said the US-Israeli relationship would stay strong, whoever won, and declined to weigh in before the result on whether Netanyahu's speech hurt him.

"It's a very, very ... intellectual relationship, security relationship and an emotional one as well," she told reporters.

Underscoring the partisan divide over Netanyahu, Republican US Senator Ted Cruz said: "His electoral success is all the more impressive given the powerful forces that tried to undermine him, including, sadly, the full weight of the Obama political team." —Reuters

Israel hits back after rockets fired from Lebanon

MARJAYOUN - The Israeli military fired a barrage of shells into southern Lebanon in retaliation on Sunday after Katyusha-style rockets slammed into the Jewish state, officials said.

The exchange of fire hit uninhabited areas of both Israel and Lebanon without causing casualties or damage, officials on both sides said.

The Israeli government accused the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah of being responsible for the rocket fire and threatened an even tougher response to any further attacks.

The UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon (UNIFIL) said two rockets fired from the El Khiam area had struck open ground near the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona.

The Israeli army responded with 32 rounds of artillery fire directed at the area from where the rockets originated, it said.

Tension has spiked on the border between the two countries since Lebanese troops gunned down an Israeli soldier driving near the frontier on December 16.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hezbollah of being involved in the rocket fire.

"Hezbollah deploys thousands of rockets and missiles among the civilian population. So it is committing a double war crime under the patronage of the Lebanese government and its army, who do nothing," he said.

Netanyahu's defense minister warned Beirut that tougher reprisals could follow.

"We will not tolerate fire from Lebanon on our territory... We consider the Lebanese government and army responsible for this morning's fire," Moshe Yaalon said.

"The Israeli army responded by firing a large number of shells at the area from where the rockets were fired. If necessary, it will be even tougher," he added.

UNIFIL commander Major General Paolo Serra called on both sides to "exercise maximum restraint".

"This is a very serious incident... and is clearly directed at undermining stability in the area," he said.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon echoed the call for calm.

"The secretary general urges all actors to exercise maximum restraint and prevent further incidents with destabilizing and escalatory potential in the region," his spokesman said.

Lebanese troops and UNIFIL peacekeepers were carrying out patrols in the area after the exchange of fire, an AFP correspondent reported.

The Lebanese army said it had found four rocket launchers.

Israel's border with Lebanon has been largely quiet since the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

The last time a soldier was killed on the frontier was in August 2010, when two Lebanese soldiers and a journalist also died.

In August, four Israeli soldiers were wounded by an explosion some 400 meters (yards) inside Lebanese territory, in a blast claimed by Hezbollah.

Earlier this month, Hezbollah said one of its top leaders was killed near Beirut and blamed Israel for his murder, a charge denied by Israel, which warned against any retaliation.

UN peacekeepers were deployed along the border following the 34-day war in 2006 which killed some 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers. — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com