Eminent physicist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of June's Israeli Presidential Conference in support of an academic boycott of the nation. A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry said, "Never has a scientist of this stature boycotted Israel."

A new report says Ben Zygier, Israel's mysterious "Prisoner X," was jailed for sabotaging a mission to recover Israeli soldiers' bodies.

A United States official confirmed that Israel launched an airstrike against Syria on Thursday night, escalating an already volatile situation while the United States decides whether to carry out its own strikes against the Assad regime.

Texas Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert, the patron saint of marginally literate Nacogdoches bigots, has taken time from his busy schedule of indulging big oil to advise America on how it can prevent future Bostons: Build a huge wall and keep an eye on those Mexican fundamentalists.

Phone conversations are almost always awkward, and rarely more awkward than when you're calling someone for the very first time and apologizing for the time your military killed eight Turkish citizens in a raid on a flotilla bringing aid to the blockaded Gaza strip. And yet! Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did just that today, calling his Turkish counterpart Recep Erdogan, apologizing for the "operational mistakes of the Israeli military," and starting down the path toward the normalization of relations between the countries:

President Obama arrived in Israel today on his first state trip to the country and the first leg of his tour of the Middle East. He is expected to discuss the crisis in Syria and Iran's disputed nuclear program with the leaders of Israel. He also plans to go to the West Bank on Thursday to meet with Palestinian officials, but there are not many expectations for progress towards peace.

A high school teacher in Israel incited a major student protest today after she accidentally emailed several juniors an internal "burn book"-like document containing many disparaging and insulting comments made by the school's teachers about their students.

Big week for Israel: First came news about Palestinian only buses and now an exciting announcement about a Hebrew edition of Playboy. The English-language edition of the magazine has been available in the holy land for years, but this version will include Israeli models and articles by Israeli writers. Owner, publisher, and probably all-around excellent person Daniel Pomerantz has big plans for the venture.

Following complaints by West Bank settlers that Palestinians posed a "security risk" to fellow bus riders, the Afikim bus company will begin running separate buses for settlers and Palestinians traveling into the State of Israel, beginning this Monday morning. The bus plan has been in the works since last fall. Israeli officials insist that this segregation of bus passengers is not actually segregation:

A byzantine international spy scandal has been unravelling over the past two weeks with no end in sight. It involves double-agents, Mossad assassinations, nuclear sabotage, and the too-good-to-be-true code name "Prisoner X."

The Instagram account of an Israeli soldier has been thoroughly scrubbed after a photo posted recently generated significant criticism both from the soldier's followers and from the Internet writ large.

Alan Dershowitz, O.J. Simpson's lawyer and a man who spent the middle of the last decade spit-shining the idea of institutionalized American torture, would like us to have a moral debate.

The U.N. General Assembly has voted to grant Palestine "non-member observer state" status. The U.S. and Israel opposed.

Jodi Rudoren, the weirdly named Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, likes to keep in touch with friends and readers via the social networking web sites Twitter.com and Facebook.com, as literate human beings in the developed world are often wont to do these days. But she is a Timeswoman! And since someone, somewhere, might object to Rudoren's musings if they are reproduced without the intercession of a bureaucrat tasked with draining them of all immediacy and character, she is now being assigned a Twitter Editor.

After eight days of intense fighting during which nearly 150 Palestinians and five Israeli were killed and hundreds of others were injured, both the Israeli government and Hamas officials have agreed to the terms of an Egypt-brokered ceasefire that is set to go into effect at 9 PM local time (2 PM ET).

By launching rockets from densely populated civilian areas, we are told, Hamas is guilty of using "human shields." It is deliberately conducting military operations near civilians in order to deter Israel from responding, for fear of killing civilians. There is one problem with this formulation: Israel has not been deterred. The humans are not shielding Hamas. The Israeli Defense Forces are killing them. They're not "human shields." They're just dead.

Police in Israel are on the hunt for two suspected terrorists as an apparent bomb explosion aboard a civilian bus in Tel Aviv injured at least 21 people.

Silvan Shalom, the Vice Prime Minister of Israel, just had his Facebook and Twitter accounts completely compromised by a group that calls themselves the ZCompany Hacking Crew.

Anderson Cooper's live report from the heart of Gaza was interrupted early Sunday morning when a large explosion nearly blew his broadcast off the air.

There's been a whole lot of cognitive dissonance going on in the Middle East on Sunday, as violence — and the death toll — continues to escalate despite reported efforts by both sides to reach a ceasefire. Today, an Israeli strike in Gaza City aimed at a militant allegedly involved in rocket attacks against Israel killed 12 Palestinians. According to a Palestinian health official, the 12 dead included five women and four children, and the Israeli Defense Force admitted that the targeted Hamas commander was not injured.