Interview with Khaled Abu Toameh

 Charley J. Levine,  September 2013                    

http://tinyurl.com/p43ydf7

Khaled Abu Toameh, 50, an award-winning Israeli journalist and documentary filmmaker, has reported on Arab affairs for three decades. He writes for The Jerusalem Post and the New York-based Gatestone Institute, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank, where he is a senior adviser. Since 1989, he also has been a producer and consultant for NBC News. He grew up in the Arab Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiyye near Haifa and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He now lives in Jerusalem.

Q. What are the challenges of working as a journalist in the West Bank and Gaza?
A. Before the Oslo peace process began, Arab journalists had almost no problem traveling throughout the West Bank and Gaza, speaking freely with Palestinians. But ever since the Palestinian Authority came to the West Bank and Gaza, the situation has become much more challenging and dangerous. The P.A. expects you to serve as an official spokesperson and avoid criticism of its leaders.
With Hamas in power in Gaza, it’s become even more dangerous for independent Arab journalists. Because of the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement against Israel, journalists representing the Israeli media, like myself, face not only difficulties but threats and even physical violence when we go to Ramallah. The P.A. leadership in the West Bank promotes BDS against Israel and also fights normalization with Israel. It bans meetings between Palestinians and Israelis and condemns the Israeli media as extremely hostile, which makes it impossible to work there and endangers our lives.

Q. How does the Arab street respond to your reporting?
A. No one tells me that what I am reporting is inaccurate or untrue. I am often criticized, however, for reporting the facts. I am only reporting what many Arab journalists want to report. If I resided in Ramallah, I would not be reporting many things. There are P.A. journalists who post critical things on Facebook and risk prison. Those who ask the wrong questions at press conferences are sometimes detained or even tortured.
I live inside Israel, so my reality is sharply different. I receive more threats from pro-Palestine students and academics in the U.S. than I do from local Palestinians.

Q. What happened to the moderate Palestinian center?
A. Palestinians have been so radicalized that you will find very few Palestinians who will openly talk about making any significant compromise with Israel. No P.A. leader would dare to sign any agreement with Israel for fear of being condemned as a traitor. Israel has been delegitimized in the eyes of most Palestinians and this is the result of decades of indoctrination and incitement against Israel. This is true throughout the entire Arab world.
Ironically, this incitement intensified after the peace process began. The Palestine Liberation Organization leadership used the media, the mosques and every available podium to delegitimize and discredit Israel in the eyes of the Palestinians. By doing so, the P.L.O. has actually shot itself in the foot. P.A. leaders know that they have radicalized their people to the point where there are people who don’t want to hear about peace with Israel at all. I believe this is why [Mahmoud] Abbas will not sign any agreement with Israel. He simply doesn’t want to go down in history as a traitor.

Q. Is there anything Israel should be doing differently?
A. Israel is facing two camps in the Palestinian community. One is the radical camp that doesn’t believe in Israel’s right to exist and seeks its destruction. With that camp, there’s nothing that can be done. The second, less radical, camp is represented by some P.L.O. leaders in the West Bank who are unable to deliver [change or peace]. This is a camp that lacks grass-roots support. It has further been discredited due to its close relations with the U.S., Europeans and even Israel. So Israel is facing one camp that doesn’t want to deliver and another that cannot practically do so.

Q. United States Secretary of State John Kerry has tried to revive the peace process with multiple visits and public declarations. Can this break the logjam?
A. It’s a waste of time. You might be able to reach some sort of interim agreements with Abbas over certain areas that he’s actually in control of in the West Bank, but I doubt he’ll go even for that. Many in the international community see Abbas as a peace partner and this might be partially true, but so what? The question we need to ask is ‘Can this man deliver?’ What’s a peace agreement worth with Abbas when he can’t even visit his house in Ramallah that has been taken over by Hamas? The international community should go to the Palestinians and ask them to get their act together and start speaking in one voice and stop the indoctrination and glorification of suicide bombers. They must start preparing their people for possible compromise with Israel.

Q. What are Israel’s Arab citizens saying about Israel?
A. Arab citizens of Israel can act as a bridge between Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Arab dilemma is that their State of Israel is in conflict with their people, the Palestinians. While most Israeli Arabs would like to see a Palestinian state and a better life for the Palestinians, they would nevertheless prefer to stay inside Israel for two reasons: First, this has always been their home. Second, they have always been comfortable in Israel despite all the challenges facing them.
I am worried about the process of radicalization that is taking place among the Arab community inside Israel. I blame some of the domestic Arab community leaders for inciting their fellow citizens against Israel. I’m talking about some of the Arab Knesset members. And the Israeli establishment’s failure to address very serious problems within Arab society is no less problematic: unemployment, unequal allocation of public funds and investment in physical infrastructure.

Q. Does the composition of Israel’s government or the country’s political landscape matter to the Palestinians? 
A. Most Arab Israelis don’t see a difference between Labor and Likud. Sometimes, ironically, right-wing governments do more than the left wing. In this regard, I’ve never understood the P.A. leadership. When there’s a left-wing government in Israel, they reject it, and because of that Israeli left-wing governments fall. And when the right-wing government comes to power, they complain that they can’t make peace with them.

Q. Why is there such a pronounced Palestinian denial of Jewish history—from the Holocaust to the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and Western Wall?
A. It’s part of the campaign to delegitimize Israel: [The message is that] the Jews have no historical attachment to this land. We are told...even by moderates that there is no such thing as the Western Wall; it is the southern wall of the Al Aqsa mosque. We are told that there is no such thing as Rachel’s Tomb. We are told that there’s no such thing as Joseph’s Tomb; it’s just the tomb of a Muslim sheik. And all the archaeological discoveries are fake. That Jews come at night and plant items at excavation sites and in the morning call a press conference to present these items as something that demonstrates a connection.

There are different views about the Holocaust. There are those who might admit it happened but challenge the numbers; there are those who completely deny it. Finally, there are some who recognize it happened on the full scale. But the first categories are prevalent and they contend that Israel is using the Holocaust to extort money. The common sentiment says: Why should we talk about Jewish suffering? We have enough suffering of our own.

Q. What should Israel’s approach to peace be at this time?
A. Israel’s policy should be to talk to anyone who wants to talk and shoot back at anyone who shoots. I don’t see anything that Israel can do under the current circumstances. Some would say, ‘Why doesn’t Israel just get up and leave, unilaterally go to pre-1967 lines?’ I think that would be a recipe for another war. Any land you give to the P.L.O. will undoubtedly end up in the hands of Hamas and other extremists. We’ve been to this movie before and I’m not even sure the P.L.O. wants Israel to pull out of the West Bank, although they demand that in public. The P.L.O. knows that its survival in the West Bank depends on Israel’s security presence.

Perhaps our problem is not with Israel, but with our own over- stretched sense of importance

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/nicky-larkin-israel-is-a-refuge-but-a-refuge-under-siege-3046227.html

Nicky Larkin: Israel is a refuge, but a refuge under siege Through making a film about the Israeli-Arab conflict, artist Nicky Larkin found his allegiances swaying


Sunday March 11 2012

I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right -- as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?

Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel's incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.

Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions -- and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.

I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish -- from a country which is one of Israel's chief critics -- and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.

Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn't a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks -- neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.
These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.

But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. After all, the Palestinian mantra was one of "non-violent resistance". It was their motto, repeated over and over like responses at a Catholic mass.
Yet when I interviewed Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian government member, she sat forward angrily in her chair as she refused to condemn the actions of the suicide bombers. She was all aggression.

This aggression continued in Hebron, where I witnessed swastikas on a wall. As I set up my camera, an Israeli soldier shouted down from his rooftop position. A few months previously I might have ignored him as my political enemy. But now I stopped to talk. He only talked about Taybeh, the local Palestinian beer.

Back in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, I began to listen more closely to the Israeli side. I remember one conversation in Shenkin Street -- Tel Aviv's most fashionable quarter, a street where everybody looks as if they went to art college. I was outside a cafe interviewing a former soldier.

He talked slowly about his time in Gaza. He spoke about 20 Arab teenagers filled with ecstasy tablets and sent running towards the base he'd patrolled. Each strapped with a bomb and carrying a hand-held detonator.
The pills in their bloodstream meant they felt no pain. Only a headshot would take them down.

Conversations like this are normal in Tel Aviv. I began to experience the sense of isolation Israelis feel. An isolation that began in the ghettos of Europe and ended in Auschwitz.

Israel is a refuge -- but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.

The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.

An Irish artist is supposed to sign boycotts, wear a PLO scarf, and remonstrate loudly about The Occupation. But it's not just artists who are supposed to hate Israel. Being anti-Israel is supposed to be part of our Irish identity, the same way we are supposed to resent the English.

But hating Israel is not part of my personal national identity. Neither is hating the English. I hold an Irish passport, but nowhere upon this document does it say I am a republican, or a Palestinian.

My Irish passport says I was born in 1983 in Offaly. The Northern Troubles were something Anne Doyle talked to my parents about on the nine o'clock News. I just wanted to watch Father Ted.

So I was frustrated to see Provo graffiti on the wall in the West Bank. I felt the same frustration emerge when I noticed the missing 'E' in a "Free Palestin" graffiti on a wall in Cork. I am also frustrated by the anti-Israel activists' attitude to freedom of speech.

Free speech must work both ways. But back in Dublin, whenever I speak up for Israel, the Fiachras and Fionas look at me aghast, as if I'd pissed on their paninis.

This one-way freedom of speech spurs false information. The Boycott Israel brigade is a prime example. They pressurised Irish supermarkets to remove all Israeli produce from their shelves -- a move that directly affected the Palestinian farmers who produce most of their fruit and vegetables under the Israeli brand.

But worst of all, this boycott mentality is affecting artists. In August 2010, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign got 216 Irish artists to sign a pledge undertaking to boycott the Israeli state. As an artist I have friends on this list -- or at least I had.

I would like to challenge my friends about their support for this boycott. What do these armchair sermonisers know about Israel? Could they name three Israeli cities, or the main Israeli industries?

But I have more important questions for Irish artists. What happened to the notion of the artist as a free thinking individual? Why have Irish artists surrendered to group-think on Israel? Could it be due to something as crude as career-advancement?

Artistic leadership comes from the top. Aosdana, Ireland's State-sponsored affiliation of creative artists, has also signed the boycott. Aosdana is a big player. Its members populate Arts Council funding panels.

Some artists could assume that if their name is on the same boycott sheet as the people assessing their applications, it can hardly hurt their chances. No doubt Aosdana would dispute this assumption. But the perception of a preconceived position on Israel is hard to avoid.

Looking back now over all I have learnt, I wonder if the problem is a lot simpler.
Perhaps our problem is not with Israel, but with our own over-stretched sense of importance -- a sense of moral superiority disproportional to the importance of our little country?

Any artist worth his or her salt should be ready to change their mind on receipt of fresh information. So I would urge every one of those 216 Irish artists who pledged to boycott the Israeli state to spend some time in Israel and Palestine. Maybe when you come home you will bin your scarf. I did.

The Guardian's Assault on Peace in the Middle East

Ron Prosor - Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom

Posted: February 3, 2011

Never has a British broadsheet so openly served the agenda of Middle Eastern extremism. The Guardian must be commended for its transparency -- readers can no longer doubt its affinity for Hamas. Al-Jazeera, Qatar's equivalent of the BBC World Service, appointed the newspaper as its western gatekeeper for a cache of leaked Palestinian Authority documents. The self-appointed guardian of Palestinian truth has maximized its opportunity to pledge allegiance to the hard-line, national fantasies which have crippled the Palestinian cause for decades.

The Palestinian Authority is under attack. Middle Eastern extremists and western armchair revolutionaries are lambasting the PA leadership for, even in private, budging an inch towards the concessions needed to achieve peace. For one newspaper, the Palestinian leadership is not Palestinian enough.

From his London salon one senior columnist bemoaned the "decay of what in Yasser Arafat's heyday was an authentic national liberation movement." For him, it seems, Palestinian authenticity can only be achieved through the massacre of athletes at the Munich Olympics, the hijacking of planes or the suicide bombing of civilians in shopping malls and pizza parlors. In his eyes, negotiations are an affront to the romanticized fetishism of "resistance."

Mahmoud Abbas admonished such an outlook in a speech in 2006, but which is just as apt today. "They are sitting in comfortable places and have not got the dust of this homeland on their shoes," said the Palestinian president. "They give orders from afar, and reject offers from afar. Give orders to yourselves! Talk about yourselves. The people here will make the decisions."

The Guardian's first post-leak editorial described the concessions supposedly offered by Palestinian negotiators as "craven." Readers might struggle to notice a substantive difference between the paper's editorial line and the opinion piece by a Hamas spokesman splashed across its pages two days later. In fact, the newspaper's criticism of the Palestinian negotiators was so severe it risked out-Hamasing Hamas.

Sections of the western media have long failed to expose damaging myths about the Middle East. It transpires that the failure is willful, rather than naive. WikiLeaks already blew apart the false logic that places Israel and the Palestinians at the heart of every conflict in the Middle East. Arab governments have sleepless nights over Iran, as it pursues nuclear weapons and meddles in their affairs. The ups and downs of the Palestinian cause are less likely to keep them up at night.

Throughout the region, tensions are erupting without the slightest connection to Israeli-Palestinian relations. The eyes of the world are now firmly fixed on the unrest in Egypt, which erupted after revolution swept Tunisia. Yemen is disintegrating. In Lebanon an Arab state has fallen into the hands of a non-Arab power and is now officially, not just practically, under the control of an Iranian proxy. Hezbollah has successfully deposed Saad Hariri, whose own father was murdered in all likelihood by the Shia militia, Syria or a combination of the two. Its puppet is now the prime minister. It reads like the plot of a gangster movie. Certain commentators must be swooning at the "authenticity" of it all.

Blaming Israel comes naturally in this region. When a shark attacked a tourist in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, the local Egyptian governor suggested that Mossad were using sharks to harm Egyptian tourism. The Saudi police recently arrested an itinerant vulture as an Israeli spy. We fear that in interrogation, the bird sang. But even the most vivid imaginations would struggle to blame Israel for recent upsurges in regional instability.

Hamas and its Iranian backers hope the unrest will spread to the West Bank. A media axis between Doha and London seems determined to grant their wish. As David Landau, a commentator way on the left of the Israeli spectrum put it, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera "intended to poison the Palestinians against their leaders." Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, is in the firing line of the poison dart. He confided to the BBC that he fears for his life.

The leaks have made it less likely the Palestinians will loosen their current strategy of blocking talks. PA negotiators already needed to sell concessions to the Palestinian street. We didn't realize they also needed to sell them to Fleet Street.

Yet the leaks reveal that the negotiations taking place were more serious and productive than many realized. The commentators today attacking the Palestinian leadership dismissed the negotiations following Annapolis as a glorified photo opportunity. What is forgotten is how far Israel is prepared to go. They choose to overlook Ehud Olmert's final offer, the most "crystallized and detailed" ever offered by an Israeli prime minister.

The Hamas Charter states that, "Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors." The most destructive aspect of the Guardian's assault on the peace process is to concur, and suggest that in 19 years, negotiations have achieved nothing. The perfect resolution eludes us but progress has been made. Boosted by Israeli security concessions on access and movement, economic growth in the West Bank tops 8 per cent. In the last three years the PA has built 1,700 community development programs, 120 schools, three hospitals and 50 health clinics. Someone, it seems, might have finally concluded that building the infrastructure of a Palestinian state is more productive that attempting to destroy the State of Israel. Anyone with a sincere interest in peace must encourage further progress, and that can only be achieved at the negotiating table.

Christmas in Bethlehem: Tourism Police not Soldiers

By Avi Issacharof / Bethlehem December 24, 2010
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1205761.html

Christmas in Bethlehem. The holiday atmosphere was palpable in every corner this week. The city is decorated to the gills, with Santa mannequins on the streets and lots and lots of tourists. The hotels reported full occupancy and the restaurants vigorously prepared for guests. Some of the finest Middle Eastern singers will be performing tonight and tomorrow in Bethlehem and Sahour, in an attempt to entertain the visitors from all over the world, Israel, and even Gaza.

A group from Russia crowded into the Church of the Nativity to hear an explanation of the differences between the three churches in the compound: Roman Catholic, which is observing the holiday tonight; Greek Orthodox (of which the Russians are also members), which will only be celebrating Christmas on January 7th; and the Armenian Church. Abbot (Father) Spyridon sits in a corner of the Orthodox church. He was born in Bethlehem 60 years ago and has served in the church since 1970. “There’s a good feeling this year,” he says. “More stability and fewer problems. After all, Bethlehem is based on tourism.” Some Palestinian police officers are circling around among the tourists, but according to Abbot Spyridon, their job is not just to protect the visitors. “There are still quite a few problems here,” he explains. He speaks Russian, Greek, English, Arabic and a little Spanish, and has seen a thing or two throughout his life inside and outside the church. During Operation Defensive Shield he was home with his wife and seven children.

-What kind of problems?

“Between the Armenian and Orthodox churches. They each claim ownership. They argue about the status quo. The police protect us and keep the peace. The ones outside the church are the tourism police. The ones inside are supposed to solve the problems that come up here every so often, such as fights. Neither side is allowed to place anything new inside the church, certainly not in the area controlled by the other church. They have a meeting and reach an agreement. If anyone does anything against the agreement, it definitely leads to a fight,” says Spyridon. A few meters away from him one of the Armenian church staff is preparing for the prayer service. “There’s a skirmish here every five days,” he says. “Why? Because of cleaning. We argue about who is going to clean where, and we can’t manage to resolve it.”

-And what about the police?

“They don’t manage to separate them either.”

Nevertheless, besides one-on-one battles inside the church, Bethlehem is largely a Palestinian success story. Law and order are strictly maintained and traffic police are in evidence on every corner. Undercover officers in civilian dress will also be deployed this holiday for the first time, mingling among the crowd and making sure to maintain order. This year a total of 1,450,000 tourists visited the city, comprising a 60% increase over last year (according to Palestinian Ministry of Tourism data). Over the holiday alone some 90,000 guests from abroad will visit the city (and another 38,000 Palestinians from Israel and the territories). Russians are the most highly represented tourists (24%) and are followed by, in descending order: Poles, Italians, Americans, Spaniards and Germans. Six hundred thousand tourists stayed in Bethlehem accommodations this year; again, a 45% increase over 2009.

The Palestinian Tourism minister, Khouloud Daibes, says that the authority was active worldwide this past year to market the tourist sites in Jericho, Bethlehem and other places. “We are currently participating in every major tourism fair everywhere in the world,” she said in a talk with Haaretz. “The number of rooms in the city is expected to rise 50% for next year (from 2,000 rooms to 3,000). The number of tourists to Israel is growing as well, but that doesn’t mean tourists don’t encounter obstacles when entering Bethlehem. Although it has been made somewhat easier, we hope for further measures that will, for example, reduce the waiting time for tourist buses at the border crossings. There’s also room for improvement on the subject of Palestinian tour guides entering Israeli areas – we want free competition.”

On the other side of town, on the outskirts of Beit Jala, preparations are being completed for the March opening of the new industrial area, which is being established under the sponsorship of the French government. Top French companies, such as Renault, France Telecom, Schneider Electric and others, intend to open branches there. Already in the first phase it should provide some 300 jobs in the area, which despite the tourism boom is still suffering from unemployment.

The French Are Coming
Every few weeks a French diplomat visits the site, and it’s highly doubtful that many people in Israel are aware of what she does. President Nicolas Sarkozy dispatched a special envoy to the area, Valerie Hoffenberg, whose job is to handle the economic, cultural, commercial, educational and environmental aspects of the Middle East peace process. But Hoffenberg is far from sounding like yet another European diplomat who immediately charges and attacks Israel’s settlement policy. Her familiarity with the territory is admirable. “Today there are almost no checkpoints inside the West Bank, and we don’t hear the world talking about that,” says Hoffenberg. “A resident of Bethlehem who wanted to get to Ramallah used to have to go through many checkpoints, but they’re no longer there. This is an important message for the international community. True, Israel makes mistakes and has to be criticized for them. But it also has to be praised for positive actions. There aren’t checkpoints and there still aren’t terror attacks. That’s also a message for the Israeli public. I’m not one of those people who think that only economic peace will bring results. However, a change for the better must be effected on the ground, and we already see that change taking place. For instance, the private Palestinian sector is getting stronger – more and more Palestinian companies are being established in the West Bank.”

Hoffenberg says that the industrial area will open in two phases and is expected to stretch over a total of 500 dunams. According to her, 35 companies plan to open branches or representative offices on the site. “It’s going to be a green area that respects the environment,” she told Haaretz. “For us, opening this place is a pilot program. After all, all the other industrial areas planned throughout the West Bank never panned out. We hope that our investment, totaling 10 million Euros, will attract more investors and more companies here.”

“What you Israelis do is much better than what you say. Things have really improved here over the past two years,” remarks Hoffenberg. “There are fewer checkpoints, fewer settlements, and the Palestinian economy is improving. The problem is that not many people in the world know about that. I have to admit that I received the greatest assistance possible. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu himself approved the use of the road in Area C. The donor countries and of course the Palestinian Authority also mobilized to help out.” According to Hoffenberg, she chose Bethlehem because of its proximity to the border with Israel as well as the trademark. “If a product says ‘Made in Bethlehem,’ then anyone in the world will know where it’s from. It will have an impact.”

Kafr Bara school for autistic Arab children opens

By RUTH EGLASH 09/02/2010 05:12

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=186771

The first school for autistic Arab children in the center of the country officially opened its doors Wednesday with a ceremony that included a visit from Welfare and Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog.

The Center for Autism in Kafr Bara, near Petah Tikva, is run with assistance from the Education and Social Welfare ministries, as well as support from the local municipality and Alut, the Israeli Society for Autistic Children, among others. It will provide treatment and educational programs for children aged three through 21.“All children, including those that suffer from this type of disability, should be given the chance to become part of the community,” Kafr Bara Mayor Mahmoud Assi said in an interview Wednesday morning. “If they are not afforded this opportunity they will be alive, but not part of the world around them.”

Assi pointed out that there is a severe lack of awareness about autism in Israel’s Arab community and that a stigma exists surrounding the condition, which is also known as Pervasive Developmental Disorder. It includes impairments in social interaction, imaginative activity, verbal and nonverbal communication skills.“Many parents are not aware of what resources are available to them or that a center such as ours even exists,” he said. “If they do not know that there is a center to help them then these children will basically remain ignored.”Information published by the new center, which started operating informally several months ago, stated that 14 autistic children from the surrounding area attend the school daily. The children just ended a two-week vacation.

While there are more than 60 similar facilities run by the Education Ministry countrywide, only a handful are aimed specifically at the Arab sector, said a spokeswoman for Alut. She pointed out that Alut runs family centers that provide similar treatments and after-school programs for those in various frameworks.

A social worker Mohammad Igbaria, who heads Alut’s outreach to the Arab community, said that along with poor awareness and stigmas surrounding autism, there is also a serious lack of Arab professionals working in this field.“There are very few Arabic speakers available to work [with autistic children] and that means there is a big gap between the Jewish and Arab sectors in helping those with autism,” he continued.

Kafr Bara’s mayor also highlighted the problem, saying that while the center is receiving support from the government and from Alut, it is still short on many resources, including qualified Arabic-speaking professionals to help the children and their parents. “We need to increase the staff and either widen the government’s involvement or find a charity to increase funding for this project,” he said.“I have no personal experience with autism but I believe that every child, especially those with a disability, should be helped as much as possible and therefore it’s important to encourage these projects,” Assi said.

Democracy is flagging in both the Palestinian Territories

Aug 12th 2010 Gaza and Ramallah

The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/16793370?story_id=16793370&fsrc=rss

HANNA NASIR, the head of Palestine’s Central Elections Commission, is not prone to expletives. But the Christian nuclear physicist and former dean of Palestine’s leading university was full of them when the cabinet of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad (pictured above left), who runs the West Bank, recently cancelled the municipal elections he was organising. If anything, his rival prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas (pictured on the right), is even less keen to put his movement’s popularity to the test.

It was the third election the Palestinian Authority (PA) has annulled in less than a year. The terms of the PA’s presidency, parliament and municipalities have all now expired. With no date for fresh polls and in constitutionally uncharted waters, officials increasingly rule by fiat. How far, bemoans Mr Nasir, has Palestine fallen from the heights of 2005 and 2006, when he ran elections that international observers hailed as being among the fairest in the Middle East. Instead of building a democratic state, the PA is fast on its way to creating just another Arab autocracy.

Western governments which bankroll it do not seem unduly worried. Most of them view the PA as a necessary bulwark against an Islamist electoral tide, which in 2006 swept Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, into power in the Palestinian territories. Instead of accepting the Islamist victory, Western governments diverted funds from the PA’s democratic institutions into the PA security forces under the control of Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s previously (and fairly) elected president, whose secular Fatah party Hamas had beaten in the 2006 general election. When, the year after, Hamas chased Fatah out of Gaza, Western governments invested in an unelected emergency government established in the West Bank under Mr Fayyad, a technocrat appointed by Mr Abbas though not in hock to Fatah.

Western governments have hailed Mr Fayyad for his efficient rule. In contrast to Yasser Arafat, the PA’s capricious but charismatic first leader, Mr Fayyad has made the wheels of bureaucracy turn smoothly. His well-managed service-delivery is lubricated by Western largesse but also by the collection of electricity bills. Still, a growing chorus of Palestinian sceptics say they have yet to see evidence of the institutions Mr Fayyad has promised to build.

Nor do they see tangible signs of his promised state. Palestine’s biggest symbol of sovereignty, its parliament, has been emasculated. For three years Mr Fayyad’s government has rebuffed efforts to revive it and put legislation to parliamentary scrutiny. “The focus on Fayyad’s personal virtues has obscured a series of unhealthy political developments, and mistakes honest administration for sound politics,” says Nathan Brown of George Washington University in Washington, DC.

The result is that in both Palestine’s cloven halves, governance is remarkably similar. Both Hamas and Mr Fayyad rule by decree, merging executive and legislative arms into one. Both promise elections sometime in the future but in the meantime round up their opponents and silence unlicensed independent media outlets. As a signal of their intention to rule without the restraints of impending elections, Mr Fayyad has a two-year plan for government; Hamas has a ten-year one. Both try to replace popular participation with populism. Mr Fayyad ostentatiously parades in public, telling his people not to buy products made in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Mr Haniyeh, his Hamas counterpart in Gaza, takes to the pulpit in mosques and personally dishes out dollars to his beleaguered people.

In both parts of the Palestinian territories, most people accept their rulers’ decrees without a murmur, for fear they may otherwise be thumped. If they are lucky, dissenters are invited to tea with local intelligence officers. Repeat offenders are sent to prison. Applicants for a government job, such as a post as a teacher, must get a certificate of good conduct—in the West Bank from local security officials and in Gaza from the local mosque. So most people are wary of stepping out of line.

But such constraints have sown apathy in both Palestine’s halves. The main political factions either boycotted Mr Nasir’s local elections or were too disorganised to mount effective campaigns. Protests after their cancellation were meek and brief. Opinion polls say most Palestinians are more or less willing to put up with their muzzled lot, since they have been exhausted by their own intifadas (uprisings), by Israeli repression and by periodic chaos.

Western policymakers, now straining to get direct talks to resume between Israel and the PA, with luck in the next few weeks, seem in no mood to promote a new round of elections that could lead to another triumph for Hamas. Fatah, the faction they favour, is fractious and disorganised. Faced with Egypt’s proposal for a new caretaker government to succeed the rival governments in the West Bank and Gaza and to prepare for elections there, the American administration and the European Union have both balked. “The last thing many in Europe want is for Hamas to regain an executive role in the West Bank,” says a European official. “We prefer division and no elections to reconciliation and elections.”

Instead, some appear to favour grafting the model that prevails in Jordan, where King Abdullah intermittently suspends parliament and rules by decree, but maintains stability, refuses to threaten Israel and listens as keenly to his foreign backers as he does to his own people. Egypt may even have urged the PA to halt its local elections.

But such regional policies have drawbacks. Keeping the status quo means putting off the task of reuniting the West Bank and Gaza and building a single Palestine state. With scant hope of peaceful change through elections, challengers inevitably consider other, more violent, options. “We had a choice of seeking power by democracy or revolution,” says Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza. Like most Palestinians, his faith in democratic change has been undermined by Western-backed efforts to overturn or ignore the results when Hamas won in 2006. The ascent of Mr Fayyad, whose party won only two of the Palestinian parliament’s 132 seats in that election, has taught other aspirants that the ballot box is not the only way to the top.

Mr Fayyad is only 58, but his list of rivals, some of them armed, is long. And contenders are already baying to replace the PA’s increasingly frail president, Mr Abbas, now 75, who often says he wants to step down. Succession in Palestine may yet come by appointment, palace coup or something even bloodier, rather than by the ballot box.

Gaza: Open Air Prison?

http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/122589.html

British Prime Minister, David Cameron, exploited his visit to Turkey to curry favour with his hosts, using Palestinian propaganda hype, saying that Israel’s blockade turned the Gaza strip into a “prison camp”. Every last Israeli left Gaza long before Hamas' bloody take-over. Closing the borders and even war has not stopped the incessant rockets and terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens and border checkpoints. More than 30 terrorist attacks come out of Gaza each month.

Applying international law, Israel inspects the constant flow of goods through its borders into Gaza, in an attempt to exclude war material. Propagandists (and it seems European politicians) conveniently ignore the rules of war and international law, and claim these actions to be a form of occupation. They declare that Israel ruthlessly keeps Gazans in poverty.Visiting international politicians and aid agency representatives are taken to view the deliberately unrepaired damage of the war Hamas provoked.

Poverty stricken areas, including families living in plastic tents since their houses were destroyed in the war, are all on the carefully pre-arranged agenda. Israel is obligingly condemned. And more western tax payer money is pledged to the highest ever per capita aid program.

Although of little interest to the mainstream media, Gazan "poverty" is strongly questioned in the blogosphere. No accumulation of facts seems to be able to stop the constant flow of lies, cynically manipulated into very effective anti-Israel (and often anti-Semitic) propaganda.Even the Palestinian media reports a very different picture. There is an abundance of both basic and luxury goods. It is not clear if it comes via the Egyptian border, underground tunnels, or the thousands of trucks that the Israelis officially allow to stream through their border crossings. But the fact is that there is plenty, and often at very attractive prices.

Ordinary Palestinian citizens say that there is enough to go around - but the Hamas apparatchiks steal it. And what of building materials to house those wretched families? Somehow, they don't seem to rank in the Hamas list of priorities. A brand new shopping mall replete with luxury goods, a luxury hotel fancy restaurant, an olympic size pool and a fancy jail to lock up prisoners accused of crimes such as "passing information to the Palestinian Authority" do make it into the list of latest completed projects, though.Electricity shortages? Also an internal problem. Seems that Hamas collects electricity bills from the end user & then steals the money - expecting the Palestinian Authority and international donors to pay the Israeli suppliers. When the suppliers want their overdue money before providing more goods, who do you guess is blamed?But those wretched Palestinians are suffering.

Then again, life expectancy, infant mortality, and even cell phone penetration statistics show Gaza to be better off than other Muslim countries – and in many cases better than most places on earth!Forgotten is the Economist report of 2004 that the West Bank and Gaza rank amongst the most obese populations in the world. Clicking on the links embedded above will bring you to lots of reports and pictures showing the truth.

But what about the charge that Israel has turned Gaza into a large open-air jail? We all value freedom of movement. We want to be able to leave our country of residence either permanently or temporarily for vacation, to receive better medical care, to advance our education or business. But of course, we all know that no-one can get in or out. Don't we?Israel can be forgiven for being very cautious about allowing enemy aliens through its territory - after all Hamas has officially and openly declared its intent to wipe Israel off the map and sends regular rockets across the border to remind us all.

Nevertheless, many people do cross the border - usually for humanitarian reasons, often to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.But what everyone seems to forget is that Israel is not Gaza's only border. Fellow Arab country Egypt, which has supported the Palestinian cause since it was first invented, is linked to Gaza with a little more than 11 km of border, and an official crossing at Rafah.So why an open air prison? The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) regularly exposes the real problem in its monthly reports. Here it is from this month's bulletin:

Violations of the Right to Travel and Movement Gaza residents are still suffering from the unavailability of passport books since November 2008 until the end of this current month.

According to ICHR information obtained from officials from the Ministry of Interior of the Deposed Government, the MOI in the West Bank does not send passport books for citizens in Gaza Strip which entails depriving them from the right to travel and movement. In addition, it affects most of those in urgent need for traveling abroad for seeking medical care, university education, students and thousands of expatriates whose passports have expired and require renewal.
International travel, even via Egypt, requires a passport.

The PA won't issue Gazans with passports. Gazans can't travel. That's Israel's fault. Clear

The Privileged Slander: Why the Media Laps Up The Anti-Israel Lying Campaign

By Barry Rubin,Sunday,June27,2010

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/06/privileged-slander-why-media-laps-up.html

Israel is subject daily to scores of false claims and slanders that receive a remarkable amount of credibility in Western media, academic, and intellectual circles even when no proof is offered.Palestinian groups (including the Gaza and Palestinian Authority regimes), associated local and allied foreign non-government organizations, Western radical and anti-Israel groups, and politically committed journalists are eager to act as propaganda agents making up false stories or transmitting them without serious thought or checking.Others have simply defined the Palestinians as the “victims” and “underdogs” while Israel is the “villain” and “oppressor.”

Yet truth remains truth; academic and journalist standards are supposed to apply.While regular journalists may ask for an official Israeli reaction to such stories the undermanned government agencies are deluged by hundreds of these stories, and committed to checking out seriously each one. Thus, the Israeli government cannot keep up with the flow of lies.

So the key question is to understand the deliberateness of this anti-Israel propaganda and evaluating the credibility of the sources.An important aspect of this is to understand that Israel is a decent, democratic country with a free media that is energetic about exploring any alleged wrongdoing and a fair court system that does the same.

To demonize Israel into a monstrous, murderous state—which is often done—makes people believe any negative story.Some of these are big false stories—the alleged killing of Muhammad al-Dura and the supposed Jenin massacre—others are tiny. Some—like the claim Israel was murdering Palestinians to steal their organs-- get into the main Western newspapers while others only make it into smaller and non-English ones.

Taken together, this campaign of falsification is creating a big wave not only of anti-Israel sentiment but of antisemitism on a Medieval scale, simply the modern equivalent of claims that the Jews poisoned wells, spread Bubonic Plague, or murdered children to use their blood for Passover matzohs.Come to think of it even those claims are still in circulation. Indeed, on June 8, the Syrian representative at the UN Human Rights Council (oh, the irony!) claimed in a speech that Israeli children are taught to extol blood-drinking.

No Western delegate attacked the statement.Here are three actual examples of well-educated Westerners believing such modern legends reported to me recently by colleagues:--A former classmate, one told me, claimed that the Palestinians are living in death camps, being starved, etc. Asked to provide facts and provided with evidence to the contrary, he could provide no real examples. Finally, he remarked, `The truth is always somewhere in the middle.’”

--Hundreds of American college professors signed a petition claiming that Israel was supposedly about to throw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the West Bank though there was zero evidence of any such intention and, of course, nothing ever happened.

--A British writer of some fame claimed, on the basis of an alleged single conversation with a questionable source, that Israel was preparing gas chambers for the mass murder of Palestinians. When asked if she was really claiming this would happen, she stated that it wasn’t going to happen but only because people like her had sounded the alarm to prevent it.

And what of the accusations of genocide contained in an article by sensationalist Israeli reporter Uzi Mahnaimi (even though his stories almost always prove to be wrong the Sunday Times never learns) and the respected Marie Colvin's November 1998 in The Sunday Times reporting Israel was attempting to build an "ethno-bomb" containing a biological agent that could specifically target genetic traits present amongst Arab populations?

Or the Guardian's more recent distortion of documentation to claim that Israel was selling nuclear weapons to South Africa?There is no limit. When stories are proven wrong, the damage remains, apologies are non-existent or muted, and no lesson is learned because the same process is soon repeated. (In the Guardian, it is repeated not only on a daily basis but sometimes several times a day!) But perhaps readers could learn to disregard what they have repeatedly seen has been untrue?

Here is one example plucked from today’s mail. The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry claim Israel has seized seven oxygen machines intended for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and paid for by the Norwegian government. It said that a protest was being made to Norway. The story was picked up by several European newspapers. No evidence or specifics—what Israeli agency held them up? What dates? What hospitals were these for?--was provided.Note, as in so many of these stories, the Israeli goal is said to be murder pure and simple.

The message conveyed is: What kind of people would behave this way? The Israelis (or Jews in general) not only don't deserve to have a state, they don't even deserve to live. Wiping them off the planet would be doing the world a favor. Hmm, where have we heard this before?Asked to look into the oxygen machine story, an Israeli official did so and pointed out that there are no controls over such imports into the West Bank so there would be no basis for holding up anything going there. As for Gaza, those directly involved in the process of sending in aid note that no applications to import such machines has been filed, there is no record of any such machines arriving, and thus nothing had been held up.In short, the story is completely false, presuming that the Palestinian Authority health ministry won't provide documents and specifics.

But that isn't going to happen as it will just be on to the next false story, hoping for a bigger media response.Having seen so many such stories disproved over the years—as Israel’s credibility, while not perfect, has compared favorably with that of any Western democratic state—one might think a lesson would be learned. But as the great American journalist Eric Severeid remarked many years ago, nothing can protect someone when the media sets out deliberately to misunderstand and report falsely about them.In addition, they should only repeat, report, or believe stories based on credible identified sources citing specific names, dates, and details.

In addition, stories or claims should be internally logical and make sense given known facts. The idea that Israel enjoys killing or injuring Palestinians for fun does not meet that test.Honorable journalists and scholars should take note and approach these false stories more skeptically.

They should also reexamine their stereotypes and remember that their political views should be kept as much as possible out of their professional work.Not so long ago, the above points would have been taken for granted as the most basic and obvious principles. They need to be relearned.

THE LIES THE MEDIA AND NGOS TELL ABOUT GAZA

[All notes by Tom Gross – May 25th]

In recent days, the international media, particularly in Europe and the Mid East, has been full of stories about “activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”

The BBC World Service even led its world news broadcasts with this story at one point over the weekend. (The BBC yesterday boasted that its global news audience has now risen to 220 million persons a week, making it by far the biggest news broadcaster in the world.)

Yet the BBC and other media fail to report on the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets.

No, this would spoil their agenda. Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy. If we had their vast taxpayer funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the UK. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.

Of course there is poverty in Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. (When was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?)

But the way the BBC and other prominent Western news media are deliberately misleading global audiences and systematically creating the false impression that people are somehow starving in Gaza, and that it is all Israel’s fault, can only serve to increase hatred for the Jewish state – which one suspects was the goal of many of the editors and reporters involved in the first place.

STEAK AU POIVRE AND CHICKEN CORDON BLEU

If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.

The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza.

And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).
Please take a look at the pictures on the above website. They are not the kind of things you see in The New York Times or CNN or in Newsweek, whose international edition last week had one of the most disgracefully misleading stories about Gaza I have ever seen, portraying it in terms which were virtually reminiscent of Hiroshima after a nuclear blast.

In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this information (which is up on the club’s own website), I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.
In a piece for The Wall Street Journal last year, I documented the “after effects” of a previous “emergency Gaza boat flotilla,” when the arrivals were seen afterwards purchasing souvenirs in well-stocked shops.

And please see here for more pictures of Gaza’s “impoverished” shops.

STARVED OF WATER AND BUILDING MATERIALS?

While Western media, misled by corrupt and biased NGOs, continue to report on a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports on the Olympic-size swimming pool that opened in Gaza last week.

As reader Joy Wolfe of Manchester, England, a subscriber to this list, points out to me in an email: “How does an area that claims to be starved of water and building materials and depends on humanitarian aid build an Olympic size swimming pool and create a luxury lifestyle for some while others are forced to live in abject poverty as political pawn refugees?”

Another reader, Barry Shaw, writes from the Israeli town of Netanya:
“Gaza City recently opened an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Netanya does not have a municipal Olympic pool. Neither does Ashkelon, or Sderot. Gaza City is part of the Palestinian territory operated by the Islamic terror regime, Hamas. Netanya has been hit by repeated Palestinian suicide attacks, car bombings, and terrorist gunmen that have left over fifty of its citizens dead and more than three hundred injured. The Palestinians receive record amounts of international funding. The victims of Palestinian terror get nothing.”

Another subscriber, Michael Horesh, points out, “The Financial Times of London, a leading media beacon in international money matters and no friend of Israel, observes that ‘Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Snickers and Heinz ketchup are both cheap and widely available in Gaza… [as are] Korean refrigerators, German food mixers and Chinese air conditioning units.’”

AN INDUSTRY OF LIES

While middle class Palestinians plead poverty and receive excessive amounts of international funding, elsewhere in the world (in places like Congo and Zimbabwe and Bangladesh) millions of children really are dying of starvation and disease, all but ignored by those very same governments and aid agencies that pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the Palestinian coffers.

Of course, there is a whole industry of people (UN and EU staff, NGO workers, journalists) who make their living and have a vested interest in continuing to propagate lies about Gaza and West Bank.

As the boats of “humanitarian aid activists” (including a number of European politicians and journalists) left Turkey on Saturday I wonder if they understood what the crowd was chanting.
The crowd shouted: “Intifada, intifada, intifada!” “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed will return!”

GAZA’S OLYMPIC-SIZED SWIMMING POOL

The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports (May 18, 2010):
www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=285242

“Gaza – Ma’an – Gaza’s first Olympic-standard swimming pool was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club during a ceremony on Tuesday held by the Islamic Society.

“Gaza government ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, leaders of Islamic and national governing bodies, as well as club members and athletes were among those at the opening ceremony, where Secretary-General of the Islamic Society Nasim Yaseen thanked the donors who helped realize the project.

“Yaseen praised the As-Sadaka club for a number of wins in international and regional football, volleyball and table tennis matches.

“As-Sadaka athletes performed a number of swimming exercises in the new pool to mark its opening.”

WHO BURNED DOWN THE SUMMER CAMP?

(No, it wasn’t a rampaging mob of American supporters of Israel on an AIPAC lobbying trip.)
A UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children was burned to the ground on Sunday and the UN staff threatened with murder. Tens of thousands of Gazan children were due to attend the camp this summer, as they have every summer in recent years.

This is a rare occasion when the international media did report on Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, although most downplayed any criticism of Hamas or other Islamists in their reports.
***
“A SUMMER PROGRAM OF ARTS AND SPORT”

The BBC reported online:

Masked gunmen have attacked a UN summer camp being set up for children in the Gaza Strip, UN officials say.

The attackers burned tents and destroyed other equipment after tying up a guard.
They also left a letter threatening the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), John Ging…

“The armed men torched the camp, which contained recreational equipment and swimming pools, and completely destroyed it,” UNRWA spokesman Abu Hasna told journalists.

The camp is one of dozens of beach facilities set up by the UN offering a summer programme of arts, sport and other activities for some quarter of a million children in the Gaza Strip…
***
“TEACHING SCHOOLGIRLS DANCING AND IMMORALITY”

CNN explained that the Islamists of Gaza object to the fact that boys and girls were due to participate in activities together at the camp:

CNN began its online report: “A U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza was burned Sunday hours before it was due to open, witnesses said, blaming Muslim extremists who apparently object to boys and girls going to camp together.”

***
Reuters also reported:

“About 20 men, some carrying assault rifles, tore up large plastic tents and burned storage facilities at the site, where tens of thousands of children are due to attend camp sessions…

“Two days earlier, a previously unknown militant group, The Free of the Homeland, issued a statement criticizing the camp’s organizer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for, ‘teaching schoolgirls fitness, dancing and immorality.’”
***
The Al-Jazeera report online adds:

“Dozens of armed attackers also vandalized bathrooms… and assaulted a guard and tied him up… the men also left a letter with four bullets, threatening the agency’s Gaza director and sending a chilling message to the camp’s organizers.”

FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS AND NGOS IGNORE HAMAS’S WORSENING HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD

In an editorial, The Jerusalem Post reflects on the atrocious human rights situation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and notes that “an iron curtain of a strict theocracy is slowly descending on Gaza, but many human rights proponents still prefer to depict it as the embattled bastion of freedom fighters…

“Both foreign governments and NGOs, in their inaction, are signaling to Hamas that domestic oppression by its tyrannical regime is tolerable so far as the international community is concerned,” said the paper.

DOZENS MORE WEST BANK ROADBLOCKS TO BE DISMANTLED

Following a meeting between IDF OC Central Command and Palestinian security officials yesterday, Israel has announced the further dismantling of 60 roadblocks and the easing of travel throughout the West Bank. Most West Bank roadblocks have been dismantled since the government of Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel last year.

The Israelis explained that the success of the Palestinian security forces in fighting terror led to the decision to ease restrictions.

The IDF pointed out, however, that it will “continue to operate firmly against terrorism while sustaining liaison and coordination with Palestinian officials, in order to maintain the life routine and security of all residents” of the West Bank and Israel.

SHIMON PERES ATTACKS THE GUARDIAN’S BLATANT LIES

Israeli President Shimon Peres yesterday accused the British paper The Guardian of telling blatant lies about Israel in a front page story that slandered Israel in general, and Peres in particular.

It is quite something when the president of a country sees the need to criticize a foreign newspaper for failing to maintain elementary journalistic standards – failing to ask for his response before publishing a massive defamation of him, for example. But such are the depths to which The Guardian sunk yesterday. (As I noted on this email list, The Guardian recently had to apologize for running a notorious organ trafficking libel about Israel.)

Additional Israeli government sources added that “documents that Guardian journalist Chris McGreal – who has a long track record of writing anti-Israel pieces – used to run his story are completely fabricated.” (The alleged documents come from a new book by a publicity-seeking anti-Zionist American researcher.)

The story concerned an alleged offer to sell arms, including nuclear warheads, by Israel to South Africa in 1975. Quite why The Guardian decided this is now lead front-page breaking news 35 years later, is beyond me, given how much real current news there is in the world.
Of course, The Guardian has nothing to say about the arms sales by Britain and many other Western countries to Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Could its continuous singling out of Israel perhaps be because Israel is a Jewish state?