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Israel-Palestine conflict: Peace, a forgotten word, renews its claim in the Holy Land | World News

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Awad Darawshe, shot in the abdomen, bled to death under the stage at the trance music festival that Hamas gunmen transformed into a killing field. A Palestinian Israeli paramedic, he died in a desperate attempt to save the lives of Jews at the Tribe of Nova peace-and-love gathering that marked the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

The family of Awad Darawshe, who was killed by Hamas at a music festival, at their home in Iksal, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. Long derided as naïve, even traitors, the bridge builders between Israelis and Palestinians sense opportunity in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times) The family of Awad Darawshe, who was killed by Hamas at a music festival, at their home in Iksal, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times)

Darawshe, 23, was at the festival as part of a small team of paramedics working for Yossi Ambulances, an Israeli company recruited to take care of routine medical emergencies. His colleagues fled when the shooting began, but he “felt compelled to help people as one human being to another,” said Mohammad Darawshe, a cousin who is a prominent mediator between Palestinians and Jews.

A young Palestinian Israeli citizen committed to peace and killed by Islamic Hamas terrorists in the Jewish homeland, Awad Darawshe may appear to be an apt symbol of the utter defeat of the bridge-builders still committed to a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, often marginalised, mocked as naive and targeted as traitors, some of these stubborn advocates of peacemaking now see an opportunity, however remote, in the aftermath of Hamas’ slaughter of more than 1,400 Israelis.

The calls for a war like no other to root out Hamas “once and for all,” a consensus in Israel’s national unity government and much of Israeli society, will blunt their voices for now. The peacemakers are in the minority as a devastating invasion of the Gaza Strip looms.

Festive offer

But the Hamas attack has shattered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conviction that the conflict — insoluble in his view — could be managed by “mowing the grass,” in the dismissive Israeli expression for periodic weeding out of Palestinian militancy.

That state of drift, in which peace had become a forgotten or even risible word, now feels untenable. The Israeli cultivation of Hamas — intended to ensure that Palestinians remained split between the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the rulers of Gaza, so making Palestinian statehood impossible — is a policy in shreds. The notion that the Palestinians would drift passively off into the ether as Israel normalised relations with Arab states such as Bahrain or Morocco looks more misplaced than ever.

So, even as Israel bombards Gaza in response to a Hamas attack that shook the country to its foundations, the question arises: What can supplant “a mad dash to hell,” in the words of Salam Fayyad, a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority?

Rula Daoud, a director of Standing Together, at home in Jaffa, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. Long derided as naïve, even traitors, the bridge builders between Israelis and Palestinians sense opportunity in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times) Rula Daoud, a director of Standing Together, at home in Jaffa, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times)

“It is clear that war is not the solution and the status quo is no more,” said Rula Daoud, a Palestinian Israeli director of Standing Together, an organisation that works for peace. “My liberation as a Palestinian cannot come through the blood of Jewish babies. But I recognise that the Palestinian feeling that ‘Finally somebody struck back’ is the normal reaction of a people occupied and ruled over. We need different voices.”

What ‘peace process’?

The voices in Iksal, a small Arab-majority town near Nazareth in northern Israel where the family of Awad Darawshe has lived for centuries, were subdued, overcome by grief at his death during three days of mourning.

A crowd of friends and relatives gathered outside the home of the Darawshe family under a white canopy. People — Arabs mainly, but also Jews — talked, prayed and recalled a brave young man who never raised his voice.

The parents of Awad Darawshe, from left, Mousa and Hoda, read notes left for them by Awad’s classmates at their home in Iksal, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. Long derided as naïve, even traitors, the bridge builders between Israelis and Palestinians sense opportunity in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times) The parents of Awad Darawshe, from left, Mousa and Hoda, read notes left for them by Awad’s classmates at their home in Iksal, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times)

Bitter coffee was served, accompanied by sweet dates — “because life is this combination,” said Darawshe’s cousin Mohammad, director of strategy at the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society, which promotes Jewish-Arab dialogue.

“Our government has not done enough to make peace,” said Shai Piron, a former Israeli education minister. “I came here because all those who believe that killing is not the answer, and that life is more important than death, must be partners for peace.”

In the quiet and mingling of this town made up largely of descendants of Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War — known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as the Nakba, or the catastrophe of mass displacement — it was not easy to imagine that another nadir of Israeli-Palestinian relations had been reached this month.

But the status quo of Israeli control over millions of Palestinian lives always incubated violence. By the time Hamas struck Oct. 7, possibilities of peace had long since faded.

They began to unravel in 1995 with the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli fanatic, just two years after Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hands over peace on the White House lawn. After his death, the rapid, government-backed growth of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank, the division and corruption of the Palestinian leadership, and the spread of absolutist religious fanaticism on both sides all contributed to undoing the handshake.

The United States and other Western governments still mouthed the words “peace process” over the past decade, but they increasingly knew that neither existed.

Netanyahu, having led Israel for a total of more than 16 years, has worked hard to consummate the burial of the idea of Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in peace and security. In his current government, he has appointed Itamar Ben Gvir as minister of national security. A far-right, pro-settler politician, Ben Gvir stole the hood ornament off Rabin’s Cadillac in 1995 and proclaimed, “Just as we got his car, we’ll get him, too.”

All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: “Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.”

The peace camp increasingly hung by a thread. “The propaganda against peace activists has been horrible,” said Mickey Gitzin, director of the New Israel Fund in Israel, an organisation dedicated to the protection of liberal democracy in Israel. “We were the traitors, the anti-Zionists, the anti-Israelis! We were supposedly the naive ones who did not know the game. But we have been screaming that strengthening Hamas in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority was wrong.”

The strategy was intended to cement the notion that there was no viable Palestinian partner for peace. Certainly, a partner was hard to find, with Hamas committed in its charter, if not always in its shifting statements, to the destruction of Israel. Many Palestinians drifted toward a one-state idea that most Israelis read as code for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.

“Without a peace track — and there has been none for way too long — bouts of escalation are easy to predict,” said Fayyad, the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, a moderate whose reforms fleetingly made Palestinian statehood look plausible a dozen years ago.

Gitzin, like many Israelis, has experienced “a feeling of devastation, of being killed from within,” since the Hamas-led slaughter of more than 1,400 people.

Mickey Gitzin, the director of the Tel Aviv branch of the New Israel Fund in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. “The propaganda against peace activists has been horrible,” Gitzin said. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times) Mickey Gitzin, the director of the Tel Aviv branch of the New Israel Fund in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Oct. 20, 2023. “The propaganda against peace activists has been horrible,” Gitzin said. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times)

Among the more than 200 hostages believed to be held in Gaza is Vivian Silver, 74, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist who was a founding member of the Israeli-Palestinian Women Wage Peace movement, founded in 2014.

For activists such as Silver and Gitzin, allowing settlers to establish unprotected homes in the West Bank, drawing in Israeli troops to their defense, reflected a growing settler stranglehold on policy. There are now more than 4,50,000 Israeli settlers in the territory that has been occupied by Israel since 1967, excluding east Jerusalem, where 2,20,000 others live.

“The most extreme elements of the settler movement are in this government,” Gitzin said. “That makes any progress toward peace impossible.”

Promise in the pain

For the bridge builders, the worst setbacks have always held, tucked deep in their pain, the promise for change. If peace looks impossible today, it also looked remote in 1973, when a similarly blithe and distracted Israel was taken by surprise in the Yom Kippur War, only to recover and prevail.

Within four years, in 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was in Jerusalem addressing the Knesset. Within six years, Israel had made peace with Egypt, giving up Sinai to that end.

Those, of course, were different times. There was bold Arab leadership, and bold Israeli leadership, accompanied by determined US diplomacy in a world not driven to lurching paroxysms of outrage by the cacophony of social media.

Still, the current disaster also appears to be a watershed moment, with near unanimity that something must give.

“The trauma and pain have to stop,” said Gershon Baskin, a longtime peace activist. “One day a new generation will stand up and say enough.”

That is always conceivable, but this conflict, rooted in irreconcilable narratives of competitive suffering, has always favoured vengeance over compromise, even if the outlines of such compromise have long been clear.

“I am a realist, and realistically two states are still possible,” said Mohammad Darawshe, the promoter of Jewish-Arab dialogue. “It may be nice to dream of one shared homeland, but Israelis will not give up their state. And Palestinians also need their own state, with the two strongly interconnected.”

But what of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the land that would be Palestine? “The vast majority of them, perhaps 95%, are on 3% of the land that can be swapped for an equal amount of Palestinian land,” he said. “Then the relocation of the remaining settlers would become conceivable. But you need the will.”

That, in turn, he conceded, would require new leadership on both sides. Another requirement for progress would almost certainly be the unification of the Palestinian national movement, with Hamas ousted from governing Gaza.

Peace, how?

Faced with a chaotic government response to the Hamas attack, volunteer organisations have helped console the many Israelis who feel abandoned. Citizens have stepped in to replace a dysfunctional government.

They are trying to keep the peace in the ways they can.

“We are just trying to hold together and survive,” said Daoud of Standing Together.

Activists from Standing Together replace signs that call for escalation in the fighting with posters championing solidarity between Jews and Arabs in Haifa, Israel, on Oct. 18, 2023. Long derided as naïve, even traitors, the bridge builders between Israelis and Palestinians sense opportunity in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times) Activists from Standing Together replace signs that call for escalation in the fighting with posters championing solidarity between Jews and Arabs in Haifa, Israel, on Oct. 18, 2023. (Amit Elkayam/The New York Times)

She has been working hard to prevent a recurrence of the 2021 riots between Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens, who account for more than 20% of the population. Seething resentments were exposed then, but for now calm has generally prevailed.

Among the grieving, several Israeli families have appealed for restraint, too, even as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continues.

Yonatan Ziegen, the son of Silver, the peace activist, declared publicly that “more dead babies” were not the answer; peace was needed.

Fury in Israel still runs high. For many Israelis, to accept the biggest single day of slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust without an overwhelming military riposte against Hamas would be to invite the very fate that a Jewish homeland and the ironclad principle of “Never Again” were intended to prevent.

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“We cannot live next to Hamas,” said former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose detailed 2008 peace plan was rejected at the last minute by the Palestinians.

Back in Iksal in northern Israel, Hoda Darawshe, the mother of the dead Awad, said, “He was the most beloved one; there was nobody else like him.”

As she spoke, rain started falling.

“Even the sky is crying,” she observed.

Its tears were soft on the lacerated Holy Land of bitter coffee, sweet dates and the eternal chimera of peace.

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Circle to Search: Share part of your screen!

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According to recent reports, Circle to Search, a feature introduced with the Samsung Galaxy S24 series in January 2024, might soon undergo an upgrade. Initially allowing users to copy text from selected areas, it’s now rumored to include the capability to capture and share screenshots of specific screen sections.

This enhanced functionality, observed in the latest version of Circle to Search, enables users to not only copy text but also capture and share screen images. A video shared by a tipster on X showcased this update, revealing new options of Copy and Share upon selecting an area. Even adjustments to the selected region don’t remove these options, ensuring a seamless experience. Users can either copy the image to the clipboard for further editing or share it directly through various apps.

Previously, the visual lookup feature solely facilitated text copying. While Android devices offer a three-finger swipe-down gesture for quick screenshots, it captures the entire screen, necessitating subsequent cropping. This new functionality streamlines the process, allowing users to select and share specific screen sections in just two steps.

Interestingly, Google recently addressed concerns about accidental activations of Circle to Search in a podcast featuring its developers. They acknowledged the issue and assured users of an impending fix. This indicates ongoing efforts to refine the feature for a smoother user experience.

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Discounted OnePlus Nord CE 3 price in India: Check it out!

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The OnePlus Nord CE 3 has recently undergone another price reduction in India, marking a significant update for potential buyers. Initially introduced to the Indian market in June 2023, this smartphone received its first price adjustment in November of the same year. The base variant, featuring 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, was notably listed at a price Rs. 2,000 lower than its launch price, signaling OnePlus’s commitment to providing competitive pricing to its customers.

The OnePlus Nord CE 3 is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and ships with the Android 13-based operating system. It boasts a triple rear camera setup, enhancing its photography capabilities, and supports SuperVOOC charging, ensuring rapid replenishment of its battery. The inclusion of these features positions the Nord CE 3 as a compelling option for smartphone enthusiasts seeking a balance between performance, affordability, and innovation.

The recent unveiling of the OnePlus Nord CE 4 in India marks the continuation of OnePlus’s commitment to delivering cutting-edge technology to its users. Serving as the successor to the Nord CE 3, the Nord CE 4 is expected to build upon the strengths of its predecessor while introducing new enhancements and features to further elevate the user experience.

When considering the revised pricing of the OnePlus Nord CE 3, it’s evident that OnePlus aims to make its devices more accessible to a wider audience. The reduction in price, particularly on platforms like Amazon and the OnePlus India website, presents an opportunity for consumers to acquire a high-quality smartphone at a more affordable rate.

Let’s delve deeper into the specifications and features of the OnePlus Nord CE 3 to understand its capabilities and appeal to potential buyers.

OnePlus Nord CE 3 Price in India (Revised)

The base variant of the OnePlus Nord CE 3, featuring 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, was initially launched in India at Rs. 26,999. Following its first price cut in November, the price was reduced to Rs. 24,999. Now, the same variant is available on Amazon at Rs. 22,990, representing a Rs. 2,009 reduction from its previous price. Furthermore, customers can benefit from an additional flat Rs. 2,000 instant discount on ICICI and HDFC Bank cards, bringing the effective price down to Rs. 20,990.

On the OnePlus India website, the 8GB + 128GB variant is priced at Rs. 22,999, marking a Rs. 2,000 decrease from the November price of Rs. 24,999. It is worth noting that this discount is exclusively applicable to the 128GB model, as the higher-end 256GB variant is currently listed as out of stock.

OnePlus Nord CE 3 Specifications and Features

Display:

The OnePlus Nord CE 3 boasts a 6.7-inch full-HD+ fluid AMOLED display with a resolution of 1,080 x 2,412 pixels. With a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, users can enjoy smooth and fluid visuals, enhancing their overall viewing experience.

Processor and Performance:

Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 782G SoC, the OnePlus Nord CE 3 delivers robust performance and efficient multitasking capabilities. With up to 12GB of RAM and up to 256GB of onboard storage, users can seamlessly navigate between apps and store their multimedia content with ease.

Operating System:

The smartphone ships with Android 13-based OxygenOS 13.1, providing users with a clean and intuitive user interface coupled with a plethora of customization options. OxygenOS is known for its smooth performance and timely software updates, ensuring that users stay up-to-date with the latest features and security patches.

Camera:

The OnePlus Nord CE 3 features a versatile camera setup, comprising a 50-megapixel primary sensor with optical image stabilization (OIS) and electronic image stabilization (EIS) support. Accompanying this primary sensor is an 8-megapixel sensor with an ultra-wide-angle lens and a 2-megapixel macro shooter, allowing users to capture a wide range of subjects with stunning detail and clarity. On the front, the device houses a 16-megapixel sensor for high-quality selfies and video calls.

Battery and Charging:

Equipped with a robust 5,000mAh battery, the OnePlus Nord CE 3 offers ample battery life to power through a full day of usage. Additionally, the device supports 80W wired SuperVOOC charging, enabling users to quickly replenish the battery and minimize downtime.

Connectivity:

The OnePlus Nord CE 3 supports a comprehensive range of connectivity options, including 5G, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, GPS, and USB Type-C. Whether it’s streaming multimedia content, browsing the web, or staying connected with friends and family, users can rely on the Nord CE 3 to deliver seamless connectivity and performance.

Security:

For enhanced security, the OnePlus Nord CE 3 features an in-display fingerprint sensor, allowing users to conveniently unlock their device with a simple touch. This biometric authentication method adds an extra layer of protection to safeguard sensitive data and personal information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the OnePlus Nord CE 3 offers a compelling combination of performance, affordability, and innovation, making it an attractive choice for smartphone enthusiasts in India. With its recent price reduction and competitive specifications, the Nord CE 3 presents a compelling value proposition for consumers seeking a high-quality smartphone experience without breaking the bank. As OnePlus continues to innovate and introduce new features with each iteration, the Nord CE 3 stands as a testament to the company’s commitment to delivering exceptional devices tailored to the needs of its users.

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Namma Yatri launches cab service in Bengaluru

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In its largest market, Bengaluru, ride-hailing company Namma Yatri has expanded its services to include cab-hailing, marking a significant shift from its previous focus on auto rickshaws. Namma Yatri, known for pioneering a daily subscription model as opposed to the commission-based model utilized by competitors like Ola and Uber, had initially concentrated on auto rickshaws in Bengaluru. However, it now features a distinct section on its app dedicated to booking cabs in the city. Additionally, Namma Yatri already provides cab rides in Kochi and Kolkata.

The decision to venture into cab services follows Namma Yatri’s separation from its former parent company, Justpay, and comes on the heels of a reported expansion plan announced on April 1st. The move also aligns with the broader trend observed in the industry, as both Ola and Uber have recently introduced subscription-based plans for auto-rickshaw drivers on their platforms. This strategic shift towards subscription-based models, akin to Namma Yatri’s approach, as well as that of Rapido, highlights a growing preference within the industry for alternative pricing structures beyond traditional booking fees or commissions.

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