Week in Review: August 8th, 2014

Shabbat shalom!  If only we could say that, knowing that our brothers and sisters in Israel could truly experience a Shabbat of peace, but that still does not look likely for a long while, as Hamas has declined to extend the latest 72-hour cease fire and has resumed rocket fire into Israel.  For a sense of what day to day life is like in central Israel the last few weeks, read our Summer Diary of an Israeli from Shaul Amir.

This last week also marked the 100th anniversary of the German invasion of Luxembourg and Belgium on their way to France that began World War I.  On the evening of August 3rd, 1914, Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, remarked as the lamps were being lit in the street below his office, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”  Today’s map of the Middle East and much of today’s turmoil there was literally created out of the ashes of that conflict and the Ottoman Empire that dissolved as a result of the war.  Arguably, there are lamps around the world that went out during 1914-1918 that haven’t been lit to this day.

Here are this week’s stories from the BJN: