Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!

We gather here at difficult times, when it seems that the Palestinian cause has been almost eliminated from the international agenda. The Western world is hailing the new "peace vision" of Sharon's disengagement plan. The day this plan passed in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) last week was hailed by Le Monde as a historical day. Who would pay attention to the two line news piece that on that same day, the Israeli army killed 16 Palestinians in Khan-Yunes

Standing against the claws of the wall

Along the route of the separation barrier in the West Bank, a new culture is springing up: on one side, soldiers and bulldozers; on the other, Israelis and Palestinians embracing the land and the trees, trying to save them both. Last week, Sharon decided he was secure enough in the role of man of peace to start pushing the wall towards the settlements of Ariel and Kedumim, deep in the West Bank, about 20 kilometres from Israel. And since then the Israelis and Palestinians have also been there

Focus--The PF Interface

This appeared as chapter 3 of Interface Strategies: Reference set computation, Mit press, 2006

Znet interview with Tanya Reinhart

Q: Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, "Israel/ Palestine - How to End the War of 1948," is about? What is it trying to communicate? R: Israel - backed by mainstream Western media - describes its war against the Palestinians as a war of defense, a necessary response to Palestinian terror, a noble instance of the global war against terrorism. It is amazing how still now, after two years of massive Israeli destruction of the Palestinian society, so little is known about the real facts of how this war developed, and what Israel's role in it is. The first aim of this book is to bring these facts to light

The Israeli left is opting for suicide

To judge by the political discourse, being a leftist today means supporting Sharon. Even when his government decides yet again to postpone the evacuation of the illegal outposts to an unknown future date, the pundits explain that the mere fact that he even raised the matter for discussion in the government is indicative of the seriousness of his intentions. Sharon will evacuate Gaza first, they say, and afterwards the outposts, and in the end maybe even the West Bank. And those who most believe that Sharon will dismantle settlements are the parties of the Left. On what basis

The address for protest is Labor's headquarters

Translated from Hebrew by Edeet Rave

From Aqaba to Sharm : Fake Peace Festivals

The Sharm El-Sheikh summit of Sharon and Abbas is hailed in the Western media as the opening of a new era. This is the climax of a wave of optimism that has been generated since the death of Arafat. In the last four years, the Israeli leadership singled Arafat out as the main obstacle for peace. Adopting the Israeli perspective, the media world believes that his departure would enable a renewal of the peace process. This, in the media world, is coupled with the faith that Israel is finally led by a man of peace. Sharon, who might have had some problems in the past, so the story goes, has changed his skin, and now he is leading Israel to painful concessions

NDE of Thick Composites in the Aerospace Industry — An Overview

Designers are turning to thick fiber reinforced composites, with increasing success, in order to meet the unique structural requirements which arise within the aerospace industry. These composites offer many superior properties, especially in the design of solid rocket motor cases, where there is a tremendous potential for advantage in strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios over conventional materials [1,2]. The increased use of thick fiber reinforced composites presents quite a challenge to the NonDestructive Evaluation (NDE) community. To inspect these materials, conventional NDE techniques must be modified and/or new techniques must be developed to permit interrogation of the full material thickness and adjacent bondlines. Thick fiber reinforced composites exhibit a degree of anisotropy that is orders of magnitude above that of previously employed structural materials (i.e., metals). This anisotropy stems not only from the basic construction of the composite (oriented fibers imbedded within a matrix), but also from what are currently considered “acceptable flaws” within the material (varying degrees of delamination, matrix cracking, porosity, etc.). Successful NDE requires that one be able to distinguish the signals from these “acceptable flaws” from those deemed unacceptable. For the detection of some types of flaws, conventional techniques can be applied to composites with only slight modification, whereas for others, new techniques must be developed. For instance, recently, a large (expensive) solid rocket motor segment sustained an accidental impact. Standard ultrasonic inspection techniques successfully revealed delaminations between a number of layers in the composite case beneath the point of contact. Structural analysis, however, indicated that additional information regarding the degree of fiber breakage was needed. Unfortunately, since no NDE technique was available to assess the degree of fiber breakage, the contractor had to assume the worst and, consequently, scrap the motor