A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Israel is starting to lose its edge in convincing the international community that the conflict is simply about peace and not rights. Palestinian demonstrations on Israel’s borders and checkpoints have highlighted the sea change taking place.

Hillary Clinton‘s senior adviser for innovation at the US state department has lauded the way the internet has become “the Che Guevara of the 21st century” in the Arab Spring uprisings.
Speaking at the Guardian’s Activate summit in London on Wednesday, Alec Ross said “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than ever” as disaffected citizens organise influential protest movements on Facebook and Twitter.
The US has pledged to back the pro-democracy movements that have swept the Middle East and north Africa since January. Ross welcomed the “redistribution of power” from autocratic regimes to individuals, describing the internet as “wildly disruptive” during the protests in Egypt and Tunisia.
“Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part – but not entirely – because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual,” he said.
“One thesis statement I want to emphasise is how networks disrupt the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation state – from governments and large institutions – to individuals and small institutions. The overarching pattern is the redistribution of power from governments and large institutions to people and small institutions.”
Ross said that the internet had “acted as an accelerant” in the Arab spring uprisings, pointing to the dislodging of former Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in little over a month. The internet had facilitated leaderless movements, Ross added, describing it as the “Che Guevara of the 21st century”.
However, he said it was a “bridge too far” to describe the Egyptian uprising as a “Facebook revolution”.

A private, run-for-profit university has launched an aggressive expansion plan to jointly run at least 10 of its publicly funded counterparts, the Guardian can reveal.
BPP, which offers undergraduate and postgraduate business and law degrees at 14 UK study centres, said it was in talks about managing the business side of the universities’ campuses. Talks with three are at a “serious stage”, but commercial negotiations are yet to begin.
Under the model, universities would control all academic decisions, while BPP would be responsible for managing the campus estate, IT support, the buying of goods and services and other “back office” roles. BPP would not hold equity in the universities.
Chief executive Carl Lygo said his firm stood to make tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds from working with each institution, but that it would be “too radical at the moment” to bid to take over a university. “The partnership model is more palatable in the UK … we have a long tradition of higher education being publicly funded, rather than run for profit.”

There has been a sharp rise in the number of Palestinian structures razed by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank this year, with over 700 people left homeless, rights groups said on Wednesday.
So far, Israeli forces have demolished “103 residential structures … most of them tents, huts, and tin shacks, in which 706 persons lived,” Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said in a statement.
This was up from 86 structures in 2010 and 28 in 2009, B’Tselem said.
The Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank could not immediately be reached, but in the past Israel has said that it only demolishes structures built without permits.
B’Tselem said the Palestinians had no choice but to build illegally because Israel, which controls the occupied West Bank, rarely gives Palestinians permits to build.