Israel to field electric cars

The Israeli government is sponsoring a campaign to encourage widespread use of electric cars.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert signed a deal last week with Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn under which the automotive conglomerate will produce electric cars for mass distribution in Israel beginning in 2011.
Project Better Place, a company headed by Israeli venture capitalist Shai Agassi, will construct a national grid of thousands of stations where the cars can be recharged.
The signatories said Israel would be a proving ground for turning electric cars into the mass transit of choice in an era of oil jitters and environmental concerns.
According to Olmert, the government hopes to eliminate gasoline-based transportation in Israel by 2020.

A Palestinian group claimed responsibility for killing an Israeli border guard in a shooting attack near Jerusalem.  Rami Zoari, 20, from Be’er Sheva, was killed the night of Jan. 24 in a shooting near Shuafat just outside northern Jerusalem. Another border guard was wounded. The Battalions of Struggle and Return, a previously unknown offshoot of Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, claimed responsibility, Israel Radio reported.

Yad Vashem launched a webite in Arabic about the Holocaust. The site, accessible at www.yadvashem.org, includes the historical narrative of the Holocaust, concepts from the Holocaust, academic articles, artifacts, maps, photos, archival documents and an online video testimony resource center, as well as other multimedia presentations, all translated into Arabic. The Arabic site follows the successful launch of a site in Farsi last year.  “In light of the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism that we are witness to in Arabic countries, we want to offer an alternative source of information to moderates in these countries to provide them with reliable information about the Shoah,” said Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev. In 2007, nearly seven million people from more than 200 countries visited www.yadvashem.org, including 32,500 from Arab countries.

Israeli officials proposed that Egypt take over responsibility for supplying the Gaza Strip. Israeli media quoted members of the Olmert government as saying that after tens of thousands of Palestinians overran the Gaza-Egypt border, there was an opportunity to demand that Cairo take care of the needs of the coastal territory. Egypt currently supplies some electricity to Gaza, but Palestinians there are otherwise dependent on Israel, a situation that Jerusalem wants to end, completing a “disengagement” begun in 2005. “We need to understand that when Gaza is open to the other side, we lose responsibility for it. So we want to disengage from it,” Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai told Army Radio. “We are responsible as long as there is no alternative.” Egypt controlled Gaza until Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Six-Day War. It has made clear it does not want to return to ruling the congested and impoverished territory.

Israel’s self-defence is more important than finding favour in foreign eyes, its foreign minister said. Tzipi Livni said in a speech that while the Olmert government is serious about trying to make peace with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, its efforts are hobbled by the power of Hamas and the threat it and other terrorists pose to Israel. That, Livni told the Herzliya Conference, means Israel must continue fighting in Gaza even as it courts Abbas, though the violence generates international censure and occasional accusations of poor faith. “I believe that we do not need to apologize for our existence or for protecting our citizens, even at the cost of criticism from the international community,” she said.