NOVANEWS
1 Haaretz
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
International academics seek to keep ‘biased’ department at Israeli university open
Ben-Gurion University’s politics and government department has been accused of having an ‘anti-Zionist’ bias.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/international-academics-seek-to-keep-biased-department-at-israeli-university-open-1.402450
By Talila Nesher
Tags: Tel Aviv University
More than 150 Israeli and international academics have asked Israel’s Council for Higher Education to ignore a call for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to consider closing its politics and government department unless major changes are made to it. The department has been accused of having an “anti-Zionist” bias.
Faculty members from universities including Yale, Columbia and Cornell signed a petition to say they were convinced that the recommendations of an international committee assessing eight of Israel’s political science departments were politically motivated. They are asking the council to ignore the section about closing the Ben-Gurion University department.
The council is also being asked to affirm its commitment to academic freedom.
“Such an affirmation would be particularly important at this time, when free speech, judicial independence and the autonomy of civil society – indeed the heart and soul of Israeli democracy – are all under attack by powerful right-wing forces in Israel,” the petition states.
The Council for Higher Education endorsed the committee’s findings late last month, so it would have to reverse itself if it were to accede to the petition’s request.
The international committee, headed by Thomas Risse, a professor of international relations at the Otto Surh Institute for Political Science at the Free University of Berlin, called on Ben-Gurion University to hire more faculty and make other changes. More controversially, it also said it was “concerned that the study of politics as a scientific discipline may be impeded by such strong emphasis on political activism.”
Neve Gordon, a professor in the department, has come under fire for speaking out in support of boycotting Israel.
In a widely condemned step, in August the Im Tirtzu movement, which describes itself as working to strengthen Zionist values in Israel, demanded that the university “put an end to the anti-Zionist tilt in its politics and government department” and threatened to encourage donors to stop contributing to the university.
The signatories to the petition, meanwhile, said the committee that recommended shutting down the department has a history of political maneuvering.
According to the signatories, the committee did not want Ian Lustick, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, on the committee because he was considered too left-wing on Israel. The committee’s original chairman, Robert Shapiro of Columbia University, resigned in protest and was replaced by Risse.
The petition was signed by professors including Judith Butler, who is leaving Berkeley for Columbia, as well as Yale’s Immanuel Wallerstein, Sidney Tarrow of Cornell and Columbia’s Ira Katznelson.
In Israel, signatories include Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University, Menachem Klein of Bar-Ilan University and Yoav Peled of Tel Aviv University. Other signatories are from countries including Brazil, Cyprus, England, Germany and Mexico.
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2 Forwarded by Sam
December 20, 2011
[This is what Israel terms ‘freedom of religion’! D]
Coordination of Government Activities in the TerriHome pageNews FlashNews FlashChristmas 2012
Toward the Christian holidays and Christmas (19.12.11 – 20.1.12), the minister of defense and the IDF`s chief of staff have approved a few simplifications for the Christian population in the Gaza strip and the West Bank:
Date: 12.12.11
Approval to give entrance visas for Christian Palestinians from the West Bank to Israel (without age limitations) for the entire period of Christmas.
Exit approvals for up to 400 Palestinians through Ben Gurion airport for the holiday period under security inspection.
Exit approvals for up to 500 Christian Palestinians from the Gaza strip to Israel and the West Bank for family visits and religious ritual purposes – under the age of 16 and over the age of 35.
A limit of 200 visit licenses will be handed for Christians from the Arab countries to the West Bank during the holiday time.
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3 Forwarded by Alexandra
The Miami Herald World Wires
Tuesday, 12.20.11
Israeli travel ban cuts studies short for Palestinians
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/08/2537494/israeli-travel-ban-cuts-studies.html
By SHEERA FRENKEL
McClatchy Newspapers
JERUSALEM — For more than a decade, Emal Abu Aisha has run a women’s center in the Gaza Strip that provides women with training and classes to improve their education. But Abu Aisha, 42, said she had been denied that opportunity herself.
In 2000, a new Israeli policy that banned Palestinians from the Gaza Strip from studying in the West Bank cut short her own education, in gender studies in the West Bank’s Birzeit University.
“From that moment till now I wasn’t allowed to continue my studies,” Abu Aisha said. “As a women’s activist, I run a center to help women, to teach them. But I can’t do the same for myself. I’ve gone as far as I can, and I need more education for myself.”
Over the past decade, Israel has adopted a policy of what it calls “separationism” between the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Palestinians who live in Gaza are forbidden from moving to the West Bank, unless they have first-degree relatives suffering from severe illness or are orphans seeking to reunite with their families.
The policy, which has been established through dozens of documents published by Israel’s Defense Ministry, argues that allowing Palestinians to travel between the territories – separated by about 30 miles – poses a security risk to Israel.
To many Palestinians, it means being cut off from family, employment or educational opportunities.
“When I left in 2000, I never thought that would be the last time,” Abu Aisha said. “As a woman, I don’t have the same opportunity in Gaza as I did” in the West Bank.
An Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman said Israel’s ban on students traveling, established in October 2000, wasn’t directed at women. But in practice, experts say, women bear the brunt of the problem because they lack opportunities outside the Palestinian territories.
Sari Bashi, the director of the Israeli organization Gisha, which promotes freedom of movement for Palestinians, has followed Abu Aisha’s appeals to study in the West Bank, and she pointed to six other similar cases of Palestinian women in Gaza who have been prevented from studying human rights and women’s issues in the West Bank.
“The ban on students traveling isn’t directed at women, but they are disproportionately affected by it. If a woman can’t reach a university in West Bank, she is far less likely than her male counterpart to be allowed to travel abroad to access a university or continue her studies,” Bashi said.
“Women who are trying to improve the status of women in Gaza, to do things that radicals in Gaza are not happy about – those are the ones that are thwarted.”
She added that for many of the students, pursuing studies in the West Bank meant access to a wealth of programs and degrees that aren’t available in much of the Arab world. The West Bank – better off and more stable than impoverished Gaza, which is under Israeli blockade – has more master’s and Ph.D. programs, a Roman Catholic university in the town of Bethlehem and the well-regarded Birzeit University, whose programs in women’s studies and human rights are unique in the territories.
Abu Aisha said her family was “understanding,” but that as a married woman and a mother of four she couldn’t travel outside the Palestinian territories.
“Why can’t I study in my home, where I know family and have friends? Why can’t I study in Palestine?” she said.
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4. LA Times
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
This Holy Land battle focuses on tourists’ wallets
Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority compete for Christian pilgrims’ business in Bethlehem, where scores of buses arrive each day to visit Jesus’ birthplace.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-israel-christians-tourism-20111220,0,510422,full.story
By Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Bethlehem, West Bank
A 45-foot-high artificial Christmas tree towers over Manger Square, and downtown Bethlehem is festooned with sparkling decorations. There’s even a picture of a saxophone-playing Santa Claus.
But Nabil Giacaman, co-owner of a souvenir shop called Christmas House, isn’t feeling the holiday spirit.
The third-generation woodcarver, who sells handmade likenesses of baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary, sees as many as 200 tour buses arrive every day from Israel to visit the Church of the Nativity, just a few steps from his store.
But the tourists are escorted directly from the bus to the church and back again. They’re rarely given time to browse the shops nearby and almost never spend the night in Bethlehem.
“My total sales the other day were $4.13,” said Giacaman, 27. “My shop is in the middle of it all, but it gets worse every year. We have tourists, but not profits.”
Parallel to the decades-old political conflict over the Holy Land, an economic battle is heating up between Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority over the market for Christian tourism.
At 1.1 million a year, the number of Christian pilgrims — those who describe their visit as chiefly spiritual in purpose — now surpasses Jewish tourism to Israel. Many of the top Christian sites are in the West Bank, and tourists have been returning in droves thanks to a recent lull in violence.
Many Christian pilgrims belie the image of austere travelers sleeping in religious hostels. These visitors, mostly Catholics and Christian evangelicals, spend about $200 a day on hotels, restaurants and souvenirs, compared with an average of $140 for all tourists, according to Israeli figures.
All this would seem to be only good news for Giacaman and other Palestinian businesspeople.
The reality is more complicated. Most visitors to the Holy Land arrive by air in Israel and join Israeli-led tours. So even when pilgrims visit Palestinian territory, local businesses do not necessarily profit.
Israel is moving aggressively to bring more pilgrims to the cradle of Christianity, and the Palestinians are trying to increase their share of what the visitors spend.
“We are putting a lot of emphasis on Christians,” said Oren Drori, senior deputy director of Israel’s Tourism Ministry, which recently opened a “religious affairs desk” to focus on the pilgrim niche.
The ministry has launched Christian-themed websites and a YouTube channel where visitors share their spiritual experiences. The government also provides free trips for government officials and religious leaders from Latin America, Africa and Europe to help generate interest by word of mouth.
Over the last two years, Israel has spent millions of dollars refurbishing Christian sites in Israel and trying to create new ones, such as the recently launched “Gospel Trail,” which allows hikers, bikers and motorists to retrace what may have been Jesus’ path through the Galilee region.
This year, Israel reopened access to the banks of the Jordan River, where Jesus was believed to have been baptized. The area had been largely closed as a military zone since Israel seized control of it from Jordan during the 1967 Middle East War.
For Christmas, Israel will offer free bus transportation to Bethlehem for midnight Mass, enabling pilgrims to avoid lengthy waits at Israeli checkpoints.
The Tourism Ministry is also promoting a Christmas Eve alternative to Bethlehem — which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority — by inviting pilgrims and foreign diplomats to the Israeli city of Nazareth to enjoy a Christmas market, parade, fireworks display and jolly Santa Claus for the kids.
Palestinians complain that they are being cut out of a market they once dominated. Palestinian tourism officials say Israel is discouraging visits to areas administered by the Palestinian Authority and is promoting attractions in other parts of the West Bank, such as the baptismal site at the Jordan River.
“We have more sites on our side, and Israel is using them to develop their own tourism, leaving us with a smaller piece of the pie,” said Palestinian Authority Tourism Minister Kholoud Daibes, contending that Israel collects 90% of pilgrim-related revenue. “They are promoting occupied territory as part of Israel.”
Palestinians are trying to increase their share of the market, constructing nearly 1,000 hotel rooms over the last year. A $20-million renovation of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity is planned.
But Palestinians say that Israel has an overwhelming advantage because of its easy access to the West Bank and its control over security. Last year, Israel began allowing Israeli tour guides to lead groups in Bethlehem. Only a few Palestinian guides are allowed to work in Israel, and legislation is pending that would require all Jerusalem guides to be Israeli citizens.
“They are trying to steal our tourists, but they can’t steal this place,” said Ziad Bandak, the Palestinian Authority’s presidential advisor on Christian affairs, motioning toward the 1,500-year-old Church of the Nativity. “You can’t be a pilgrim and not come here.”
Not far away, Bethlehem’s 250-room Intercontinental Hotel, a former Arab mansion decked out with poinsettias and garlands, is fully booked the last two weeks of December. The rest of the year, occupancy hovers around 60%, even though the amenities are comparable to those at Israeli hotels a few miles away in Jerusalem — and room rates are lower.
The reason, hotel officials say, is that Israeli tourism companies rarely direct visitors to Bethlehem unless Jerusalem hotels are sold out.
“The biggest operators are Israeli and all the traffic starts at Ben Gurion airport, so it’s an Israeli-controlled gate,” said Muhsen Shweiki, the Intercontinental’s office manager.
It doesn’t help that the hotel is a few yards from a 36-foot-high cement wall and watchtower, part of Israel’s separation barrier with the West Bank. For nearly a decade, visitors to Bethlehem have had to pass through military checkpoints to visit the birthplace of Jesus.
Shop owners have tried to cut the tension — and send a political message — by tweaking the traditional Christmas manger scenes they sell as souvenirs. In the new versions, a wall separates baby Jesus from the three wise men.
Israeli officials say their campaign to attract Christian pilgrims benefits both Israel and the West Bank.
“When it rains, it rains on everyone,” Drori said. “There’s a sense of competition, but it’s healthy and good.”
Many Arab Christians view the competition with an embittered eye, pointing out that the indigenous Christian population in the Holy Land has shrunk from about 20% in 1948 to less than 2% in Israel and the West Bank today.
“Most of this is just propaganda targeted at the West,” said Andre Moubarak, an evangelical Christian and Palestinian tour guide. “Meanwhile, the Christians who live here are ignored and almost extinct.”
Last year, he said, he attended Bethlehem’s midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but saw only diplomats, dignitaries, journalists and tourists.
“I didn’t see anybody I knew,” he said. “I left after 30 minutes.”
edmund.sanders@latimes.com
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5. Ynet
Saturday, December 18, 2011
http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/new-israeli-plan-to-build-23-settlement-units-east-of-o-jerusalem/
By Occupied Palestine
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)– The Israeli district committee for planning and building in occupied Jerusalem approved a plan to build additional 23 housing units in a new settlement outpost in Ras Al-Amud neighborhood east of the old city of Jerusalem.
Specialist in settlement affairs Ahmed Sob-Laban said this Israeli district committee approved a plan to add 23 housing units to two apartment buildings as well as to build a third building in place of a gas station and shops near settlement outpost Ma’aleh David, in which the building of 17 new housing units was endorsed two weeks ago by the same committee.
The specialist added this new settlement outpost is about 100 meters from outpost Ma’aleh David in Ras Al-Amud area and financed by notorious Zionist businessman Yousuf Sultan, a settler of Givat Ze’ev settlement north of Jerusalem.
This businessman claims he owns the land on which the gas station was built, he noted.
Source and more at the Palestinian Information Center
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6. NYTimes
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Finding Fault in the Palestinian Messages That Aren’t So Public
Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press
Palestinian Authority television has broadcast songs honoring Dalal Mughrabi, who helped kill Israeli civilians in 1978.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/world/middleeast/palestinian-messages-dont-match-israeli-group-says.html?ref=middleeast&pagewanted=all
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — A new book by an Israeli watchdog group catalogs dozens of examples of messages broadcast by the Palestinian Authority for its domestic audience that would seem at odds with the pursuit of peace and a two-state solution.
Instead, the authors say, their findings show a pattern of non-recognition of Israel’s right to exist, demonization of Israel and promotion of violence.
Of course, this is nothing new. For years, many Israeli and Palestinian analysts have said that what Palestinian leaders tell their own people in their own language — as opposed to English-language statements tailored to opinion in the rest of the world — is the truest reflection of their actual beliefs. This has had the effect of further entrenching the sides to the conflict and undermining confidence that it can ever be resolved.
“There is no doubt in my mind that in the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement, Israel is not considered legitimate,” said Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reflecting a widespread sense of disillusionment. “This is the inner truth of the Palestinians,” he said. “They really mean it. It is not what they say on CNN, but it is what they teach their children.”
But for many, the subject of incitement and media monitoring has become as contentious as some of the messages, especially since these pronouncements are often used to score propaganda points.
The book goes to the heart of this debate. Its authors — Itamar Marcus, the founder and director of the privately financed Palestinian Media Watch, and an analyst from the group, Nan Jacques Zilberdik — called their book “Deception: Betraying the Peace Process.”
“There is no preparation for living with Israel as neighbors,” Ms. Jacques Zilberdik said. “Instead, we see the opposite.”
Mr. Marcus, who set up Palestinian Media Watch in 1996, says that he wants to foster genuine reconciliation. His critics, however, note that he is a settler who lives in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem, a contested area of the West Bank that Israel intends to keep under any agreement with the Palestinians.
The book is a compilation of samples gathered over a year starting in May 2010, the month that the Obama administration began brokering indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks. That round culminated in September 2010 with a few direct but inconclusive meetings. Since then, the negotiations have stalled.
While Palestinian Media Watch acknowledges that there is less blatant incitement than in the past, with fewer direct calls for violence, it says that the Palestinian Authority still glorifies terrorists, “libels” Israel and promotes a culture of violence.
For example, Palestinian Authority television has broadcast song clips with lyrics honoring Dalal Mughrabi, a woman who in 1978 helped carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. Ms. Mughrabi was the 19-year-old leader of a Palestinian squad that sailed from Lebanon to Israel, where it killed an American photojournalist and 37 Israeli civilians, many of them children. Ms. Mughrabi and several other attackers were killed.
Another constant theme is the Palestinian denial of any Jewish historic or religious connection to Jerusalem.
Some of the examples publicized by the Israeli monitoring group are old ones that have been repeated over the years, and some of its interpretations are arguable.
“This is not a serious attempt to solve the problem of incitement,” said Ghassan Khatib, the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank. Mr. Khatib said that the authority had significantly reduced the level of incitement on the Palestinian side in recent years. “The question is,” he said, “are the Israelis improving or reversing in this regard?”
The watchdog group gives numerous examples of Palestinian Authority television hosts, including those on children’s quiz shows, who portray cities along Israel’s Mediterranean coast, like Haifa, Jaffa and Acre, as being part of “Palestine.” Some news reports refer to Israel as the Palestinian interior.
While the Israeli government and news media usually say the same things in Hebrew and English, Palestinians and Israeli critics say they also do little to promote the idea of a Palestinian state. Official Israeli maps do not show the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary that demarcates East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In Israeli officialdom, the West Bank is routinely referred to by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria. The Israeli education minister recently adopted a plan to take Israeli schoolchildren on trips to a historic Jewish holy site in the West Bank city of Hebron. This summer, the Israeli police briefly detained two rabbis for questioning over their suspected endorsement of a treatise co-written by a third rabbi that seemed to justify the killing of non-Jews, even babies, in wartime.
Some explain the overheated language as a natural expression of such a long-running conflict, and say that any real education in the language of peace is unlikely to come before negotiators resolve the core issues.
“Reconciliation comes only after matters have been settled,” said Radwan Abu Ayyash, a veteran Palestinian journalist and former director of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, the parent of the authority’s television and radio stations with headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
“Thinking of Jaffa and Haifa is still there as an old dream, as history,” he said, referring to the Palestinian refugees’ desire to return to the homes they occupied before 1948, “but it is not reality.”
Some Israelis struggle with the practice of monitoring the Palestinian news media, acknowledging the importance of knowing what is being said in Arabic, yet disturbed by how its dissemination is exploited by those not eager to see Israel make concessions.
“There is peace making and there is peace building,” said Itamar Rabinovich, who served as Israel’s chief negotiator with Syria and as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, explaining why the contentious messages in Arabic are so damaging. The lack of peace building, he said, is part of the failure of the Oslo peace process that began with accords signed in 1993 but has not yet produced a Palestinian state.
In one of the most egregious examples of Palestinian doublespeak, Yasir Arafat spoke in a mosque in South Africa in May 1994, only months after the signing of the Oslo accords, and called on the worshipers “to come and to fight and to start the jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”
As the ambassador to Washington at the time, Mr. Rabinovich said he found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to anyone who would listen that jihad, usually translated as holy war, could also mean a spiritual struggle, in order to justify continuing the peace process.
Still, he said, it is not by chance that those focusing on Palestinian incitement and publicizing it are “rightist groups who use it as ammunition.”
The issue of Palestinian double-speak is “important, and also inevitable,” said Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general who leads a program on Israeli-Palestinian relations at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “If it is possible to deal with it at all,” Mr. Brom said, “it has to be done in a mutual way and as part of agreements.”
For now, though, the Israelis and Palestinians are not talking to each other, but only to themselves.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 20, 2011, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding Fault in the Palestinian Messages That Aren’t So Public..
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7. Haaretz
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Israeli leaders are also advocates of ‘Greater Israel’
To recognize the message of Jewish terror, we must examine what ignites it. It is portrayed as revenge for attempts to evacuate illegal outposts. So the message is the ‘Greater Land of Israel.’
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israeli-leaders-are-also-advocates-of-greater-israel-1.402482
By Aner Shalev
It is easy to perceive terror. It is easy to perceive a terrorist wave. It is easy to discern a breach in the Jordanian border fence. It is easy to see a brick thrown into a military jeep. It is easy to discern a mass raid on a brigade base. It is easy to discern torched mosques. It is easy to detect black letters sprayed on a wall. But is it easy to understand their meaning?
It is easy to denounce terror. Easy for the political parties to condemn it. Easy for the army to condemn it. Easy for the rabbis to condemn Jewish terror when directed against the army. Easy for cabinet ministers to roll their eyes self-righteously and talk about the rotten apples that have suddenly sprouted here. Easy for the state to wash its hands of this terror. But is it easy to disclaim responsibility for its message?
To recognize terror’s message, we must examine what ignites it. This terror is portrayed as revenge for attempts to evacuate illegal outposts. If such outposts, located in the heart of Palestinian population centers, cannot be evacuated even on orders from the High Court of Justice, then no evacuation or withdrawal at all is possible. So the message is the “Greater Land of Israel.” But is this message coming only from the hilltop youth?
Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar spoke a few days ago about the dangers of establishing a Palestinian state and said the prime minister’s Bar-Ilan University speech advocating such a state should be reconsidered. After the Palestinian Authority’s unilateral bid for UN recognition as a state, its decision to join up with Hamas in Gaza and the growing strength of radical Islam in the region, the idea of two states for two peoples is no longer acceptable, the education minister claimed.
If a minister who does not belong to the radical right believes there is room for only one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, it would be interesting to hear what the more extremist ministers in Likud and the other coalition parties think. But if so, the integrity of the Land of Israel is not a message being conveyed exclusively by the hilltop youth. It’s a message originating in the government that is now spreading among the public. The idea of territorial compromise, which even rightist governments ostensibly adopted, is fading away before our eyes.
An attentive ear will also discern new and even more chilling nuances. The breach in the fence at Qasr al-Yahud in the Jordan Valley and the subsequent invasion of a Christian structure along the Jordan border are a new kind of threat, directed not only inward, but also outward. The Jordan has two banks, and both are ours, the hilltop youth cried. And we are forced to remember that according to various traditions, the Greater Land of Israel includes Trans-Jordan as well.
In the geopolitical sphere, the recent revolutions in the Arab world and the doomsday prophesies about the collapse of the peace agreements Israel has signed would appear to be good news to the Israeli right. No more peace process with the Palestinians. No more withdrawals and disengagements. Only one state, from the sea to the river.
With a bit of luck, we could even have more wars and occupy more land. The chief of staff, Benny Gantz, has already hinted at a possible reoccupation of Gaza.
At a ceremony marking the end of basic training that recently took place somewhere in Israel, the keynote speaker quoted Biblical verses. The verses he chose did not come from the prophets’ visions of peace and morality. Nor did he speak about our right to the land in the narrow sense of the term.
Instead, he cited maximalist verses from the Book of Joshua: “Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, to you have I given it, as I spoke unto Moses … From the wilderness, and this Lebanon, even unto the great river, the river Euphrates.”
Suddenly, when they speak about one state from the sea to the river, it is no longer clear which river they are talking about. If this is the message being sent by the Israel Defense Forces at this very moment, how can we complain about the hilltop youth?
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8. Today in Palestine
December 19, 2011
http://theheadlines.org/11/19-12-11.shtml