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"The protest wave has calmed down," some Israeli journalists said Friday of the Burmese military junta's success in driving thousands of demonstrators off the streets, using excessive violence.

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[ 10 October 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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WHEN I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations" I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.

To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.

To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.

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The state has recently agreed to grant West Bank resident status to some 5,000 people who seek family reunification with their Palestinian families, sources in the defense establishment told Haaretz.

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A zoo. This is one of the ways that Palestinians describe the conditions under which nearly 1.5 million of them have been living: in an area of some 360 square kilometers, closed in on three sides by sophisticated barbed-wire fences, concrete walls and military lookout towers, and to the west by Israeli navy ships that seal them off from the sea. Overhead, in the sky, unmanned aircraft and hot air balloons continually photograph whatever happens inside this closed cage, which has seven gates connecting it to the world, all of which are sealed off almost hermetically.

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While the world holds its breath in anticipation of the Mideast Summit in Annapolis – which, no doubt, will constitute a historic landmark, giving a most significant boost to the economy of that small town in Maryland – the Israeli right wing comes up with a new peace initiative, launched by MK Benny Elon, chairman of the National Union and the Moledet Party, as "The Israeli Initiative," "a new way of thinking about the conflict, in learning from our mistakes, and in rereading the regional map toward a revitalized and genuine quest to achieve The Right Road to Peace." Elon also praises his plan in the media as being "beyond Left and Right." And it has already been endorsed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback.

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UNRWA, the UN organization that helps Palestinian refugees, was unable to keep its promise to give students at its schools in the Gaza Strip NIS 100 each with which to buy clothes for the Id al-Fitr holiday. Why? Because Israel would not allow it to bring the cash into the strip.

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Israel's torture.

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Soldier "F" testimony: "Some 'tough guys' developed it into 'an ideology', according to which we have to react brutally even for minor events. A woman threw a sandal at me. I kicked her with my foot at her crotch. I broke her. She can't have children any longer. Next time she won't throw sandals at me... and when another woman spat at me she got the butt of my gun in her face. She can't spit now."

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Azmi Bishara is one of just 13 Arab members in Israel's Knesset, and as such he has pledged loyalty to the state. But then he expressed support for the intifada, his parliamentary rights were rescinded and now he's on trial for sedition. Bishara's fate may determine what happens next for Israel's one million Arab citizens.

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[ 18 October 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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A dense row of policemen from the Palestinian Presidential Guard is deployed in the streets of Ramallah whenever the entourage of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) passes through, or whenever a high-ranking guest visits him. Judging by the dramatic manner in which the Israeli media dealt two days ago with the "assassination attempt" against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, one might have concluded that the plotters were pulled from among the ranks of the Presidential Guard at the last moment, when they were just about to shoot at Olmert's car when he was on his way to taste the cooking of Saeb Erekat's wife.

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The Shin Bet is refusing to allow a 21-year-old Rafiah man who is sick with cancer and in need of immediate medical care to come to Israel, even though he obtained permission from the Israeli Defense Forces' Coordination and Liaison Administration.

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Inmates at Ketziot Prison fear that the Israel Prison Service is planning to break into their tents again, three days after a similar incident led to clashes and to the death of one prisoner, Mohammed al-Ashkar.

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[ 25 October 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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More than anything, Rabin was the typical representative of my generation, the "generation of 1948" - and not by accident was this generation defined by a war.

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If the plot of land belonging to Dr. Salam Fayad, the Palestinian prime minister, were located 50 meters west of its present location, in the level part of the village of Deir al-Ghusun, it would now be growing thorns and thistles. If it were located 50, or at most 100 meters, to the west, Fayad's plot would have found itself on the other side of the separation fence, on the other side of Gate 609, which soldiers open and close three times a day to allow entrance to those who have managed, after investing considerable efforts, to get permits in order to get to their land.

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A month ago, as she faced a roomful of journalists in Italy, writer Arundhati Roy was asked what it is like to be an icon of peace-seekers around the world. "First of all," she advised her audience, "always be suspicious of icons." And indeed she does not behave like one. She is generous and curious in listening to others, she answers her own phone and does not have any personal assistants. "Secondly," she continued, "I am not a pacifist. I come from a feudal society. Being a pacifist in a society like that means accepting the existing order. My whole life I have been involved and have engaged in various kinds of resistance, which is the opposite of pacifism."

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The god of big things

[ 02 November 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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REJOICE, REJOICE: the Foreign Minister has decided to set up a special team for dealing with the "core issues" of peace with the Palestinians.

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[ 07 November 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 08 November 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Alan Johnston, the BBC corresponded kidnapped in Gaza, related in an interview that at a relatively early stage, he started suffering from all kinds of aches because of the water he drank. This was the same water that the kidnappers drank, but Johnston's unaccustomed body sent warning signals: This is not water that is fit for drinking. And this is the water that reaches most of the taps in the Gaza Strip. Salty, in a few places brackish to contaminated, with an oily consistency. That is clearly felt when bathing.

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ISRAEL IS an island in the global sea. We live in a bubble. This week I was sharply reminded of this.

I was returning home from Germany. On the eve of the flight, all TV networks, from CNN and BBC to the German channels, were reporting on the events in Pakistan. In the airplane, I opened Israel's largest circulation tabloid, Yedioth Aharonoth, in order to read about the Pakistani mess. I did not find any mention of it on page 1. Nor on page 2. I found a small item on page 27. The first pages were devoted to something much more important: the shouts of protest by right-wing football hooligans when they were requested to stand up in memory of Yitzhak Rabin.

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"Armed Hamas policemen who were stationed in the streets and watching the masses of people marching toward the square, gazed down at the ground. Out of shame. They saw themselves the way the marchers to the memorial rally for Yasser Arafat saw them - like Israeli policemen on the first Land Day in Israel. It was women whose votes had led to the defeat of Fatah in 2006, so it was significant now that many women came to the rally. I saw one woman go up to an armed policeman and dare him: Kill me, you Shi'ite."

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Umm Zuhir, 87, remembers mainly how the soldiers kept telling her: Keep quiet, quiet. She repeatedly asked to open the windows of her house a little: "I'm sick, you also have a mother, I'm suffocating," she said, and they told her, "Keep quiet," or didn't answer at all. "But it should be mentioned that they didn't steal anything," she added.

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THE ANNAPOLIS conference is a joke. Though not in the least funny.

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The release of another 440 Palestinian prisoners is a nice gesture to the Israel Prisons Service. It lessens the terrible overcrowding in the jails, albeit only slightly. And it eases the burden on the security establishment, which has not completely succeeded in avoiding its obligation to allow some family members to visit their loved ones once every two weeks.

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Haaretz has obtained a copy of the joint document as discussed by the Israeli and Palestinian official representatives, and a Palestinian source told the paper he believes the gaps between the two sides are still great. The source, however, said he did not know what changes had been inserted since November 17, the day the document was dated.

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"Neither side will make any move to change the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip until the agreement is fully implemented," says one item in the Palestinian draft of the joint accord for Annapolis.

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I WAS awakened from deep sleep by the noise. There was a commotion outside, which was getting louder by the minute. The shout of excited people. An eruption of joy.

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"When a truck unloads its garbage, it sounds like a battle is going on in the wadi," says Umm-Ahmed Musalah. And she knows whereof she speaks: Her house is located right at the entrance to a dump in the Palestinian village of Na'alin, about three kilometers north of Modi'in. In the two years since the site began operating, a big mound of garbage has accumulated on top of the wadi, and its outer edges are steadily encroaching on the vegetable garden and small orchard behind the house. Some of the trees have already dried out.

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"THE TUMULT and the shouting dies, / The captains and the kings depart…" Rudyard Kipling wrote in his unforgettable poem "Lest We Forget" ("Recessional")

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This is most definitely not a pastoral picture: Two village council heads are standing in front of the garbage dump of one of the villages, Beit Liqia, and counting, one by one, all of the environmental hazards. The village's houses are 200 meters away. There are people who burn garbage (mainly to separate metal from old cables or the iron from tires) and then black smoke forms and wafts around the windows of the crowded homes. Around the garbage dump are olive groves. Nobody harvests the olives there any more. At the garbage dump in the village of Beit Anan they burn the waste. Though it is situated relatively far from the village houses, it is also located among olive groves and alongside the narrow road. The smoke and the smell of burning plastic and organic waste accompany travelers.

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A bad odor

[ 05 December 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 07 December 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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IT WAS like an atom bomb falling on Israel.
The earth shook. Our political and military leaders were all in shock...

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While all eyes were turned to the meeting at Annapolis late last month, Hamas' government in the Gaza Strip tightened its grip on three important civilian institutions: the court system, the municipality and the Central Palestinian Bureau of Statistics.

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Who says there is no cooperation between the Palestinian Authority/Fatah and Hamas? Indeed, ever since June the two sides have been working energetically, in a kind of pas de deux of demonstrative pirouettes, so that the Gaza Strip will become another quasi-state entity with its three governing authorities - executive, legislative and judiciary - separate from those in Ramallah. All three branches are acting outside the delegated powers of the PA president, with the help of a separate police force and a system of taxation, collection and other payments. Two non-states for one people.

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THE MOST famous words ever spoken in Gaza were the last words of Samson (Judges, 16, 30): "Let me die with the Philistines!"

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The United Nations and Palestinian parliament members are mediating between Hamas and the Palestinian Central Statistics Bureau (CBS) over a census taken in the Gaza Strip.

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At first glance it looks like people bowing down to other people. Maybe an ancient rite of worship before the weapons that hang nonchalantly from their erect bearers, who smile slightly, perhaps a plea for favor from the master. How easy it is from this photograph to infer a relationship of domination, when it is clear who is who on each side. How easy it is to conclude that the dominated side accepts the domination, the hierarchy, as part of Creation. Pierre Bourdieu writes in "Masculine Domination" that the ruled impose on the relationship of domination categories that have been formulated from the point of view of the rulers, and thus they cause these relations to seem natural.

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Merry Christmas, Santa! ... and pass me that truncheon.

[ 22 December 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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FORGET THE Qassams. Forget the mortar shells. They are nothing compared with what Hamas launched at us this week:

The chief of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, has approached an Israeli newspaper and proposed a cease-fire. No more Qassams, no more mortars, no suicide bombings, no Israeli military incursions into the Strip, no "targeted liquidations" of leaders. A total cease-fire. And not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank, too.

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Employees of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics began collecting data Monday for a population census in the Gaza Strip after a hiatus of several weeks. In August, the PCBS began a comprehensive survey of populations, economic enterprises, homes and other buildings in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

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The negotiations over the future of our land, from the sea to the river, and the two peoples living in it, are proceeding along two parallel channels. It has been that way since the Madrid and Oslo talks for 17 years now. One channel is between the Palestinians and Israelis - such as Tuesday's meeting in Jerusalem between chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. The other is being conducted between the Israelis and themselves. Will the only genuine point of contact between these two channels be another explosion of blood, as occurred in 1996 and 2000?

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Israeli "Defense" Minister Ehud Barak is definitely the most dangerous politician in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad can only dream of having the powers – political and military, conventional and non-conventional – that Barak already possesses. Netanyahu and other far-right Israeli politicians say what they think and are earmarked as extremists, so they are under permanent scrutiny. Barak is more extreme than Netanyahu, but he's an extremist in disguise.

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http://tinyurl.com/28km27

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As two of the authors of a recent document advocating a one-state solution to the Arab-Israeli colonial conflict, we intended to generate debate. Predictably, Zionists decried the proclamation as yet another proof of the unwavering devotion of Palestinian - and some radical Israeli - intellectuals to the "destruction of Israel". Some pro-Palestinian activists accused us of forsaking immediate and critical Palestinian rights in the quest of a "utopian" dream.

Inspired in part by the South African Freedom Charter and the Belfast Agreement, the much humbler One State Declaration, authored by a group of Palestinian, Israeli and international academics and activists, affirms that "the historic land of Palestine belongs to all who live in it and to those who were expelled or exiled from it since 1948, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status". It envisages a system of government founded on "the principle of equality in civil, political, social and cultural rights for all citizens".

It is precisely this basic insistence on equality that is perceived by Zionists as an existential threat to Israel, undermining its inherently discriminatory foundations which privilege its Jewish citizens over all others. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was refreshingly frank when he recently admitted that Israel was "finished" if it faced a struggle for equal rights by Palestinians ...

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MEPHISTO, the demon who bought the soul of Faust in Goethe's monumental drama, describes himself as "a part of that force which always wants the bad and always creates the good."

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There is no Israeli whose presence in the West Bank is neutral. Civilian or armed, soldier or woman settler, resident of a quality-of-life settlement or a nearby outpost, MahsomWatch activist or guest at a settlement, Bezek worker or client at a Palestinian garage. All of them, all of us, are in this Palestinian territory, in the West Bank, because our state occupied it in 1967.

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TZIPI LIVNI, as her name indicates, is the white bird of Israeli politics (Tzipi is short for Tzipora, "bird", and Livni comes from Lavan, "white"). As against the hawk Binyamin Netanyahu, the vulture Ehud Barak and the raven Ehud Olmert, she was seen as the immaculate feathered friend.

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About a month ago, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti was invited to the Italian Consulate in Jerusalem to receive a citation of honor from the government of Italy. The consulate submitted requests to the Israeli authorities for 15 entry permits to Jerusalem, for Barghouti and another 14 guests - family members and friends. The consulate was informed that 14 permits were issued. Only Barghouti did not receive a permit, he relates with a laugh.

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"I want to thank you for your support of Israel and in particular for waging a war against Iraq," [Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona] Metzger told Bush.

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WHICH OF the two men is the leader of the greatest power on earth and which is the boss of a small client state?

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The Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has been granted Palestinian citizenship for his work in promoting cultural exchange between young people in Israel and the Arab world.

The Argentine-born musician is believed to be the first person in the world to possess both Israeli and Palestinian passports after receiving his new documentation at the end of a piano recital in Ramallah in the West Bank at the weekend.

"Under the most difficult circumstances he has shown solidarity with the Palestinian people," Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian MP and presidential candidate, said at the recital held to raise money for medical aid for children in the Gaza Strip. [...]

Barenboim, a regular and lively commentator on the Middle East conflict, said he was "moved and very, very happy", adding that he accepted it because it "symbolises the everlasting bond between the Israeli and Palestinian people".

In a pointed reference to US President George Bush's recent comments on the Middle East conflict in which he talked of Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank, Barenboim added: "Now even not very intelligent people are saying that the occupation has to be stopped."

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"Daniel Barenboim, the world-renowned Israeli pianist and conductor, has received Palestinian citizenship" and a Palestinian passport, the Haaretz English edition reported on Monday, using a Reuters story. The Ynet version said that the Palestinian Authority had granted Palestinian citizenship to Barenboim, whereas The New York Times reported that the Argentinian-born Israeli pianist and conductor had agreed to accept Palestinian citizenship and an honorary Palestinian passport.

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SOMETIMES, SOMETHING is said about you, and you are not quite sure whether to take it as a compliment or an insult.

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Gaza Strip residents yesterday moved from worrying about the electricity cuts of the previous 40 hours to worrying about a water shortage. The municipality needs electricity to bring water to homes and the houses need it to pump water to the roof tanks.

Hence 40 percent of Gaza Strip homes - 600,000 people - had no running water yesterday, the Palestinian water authority said

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The security establishment was quick on Monday to boast of the success of its tactic of escalation against Gaza: Look, the number of Qassams declined. By the time these lines are published, the security establishment may spin another logical axiom: Since we renewed the supply of diesel fuel on a one-time basis, the Palestinians have gone back to firing Qassams. The conclusion: Continue the escalation. The logic of escalation is the middle name of the current defense minister, Ehud Barak, and many Israelis are adopting it.

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Hamas operatives had been sawing away the foundations of the wall between Egyptian and Palestinian Rafah for a few months to make it easier to blow it up when the time came, a source close to the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in Rafah told Haaretz yesterday. A central Hamas operative partially confirmed the report, although he told Haaretz it was PRC operatives who had prepared to breach the wall, while Hamas policemen did not interfere.

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IT LOOKED like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.

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Thousands of Gaza Palestinians crossed into Sinai for the second straight day yesterday, heading toward the Egyptian half of Rafah and El Arish on the peninsula's northern coast.

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Palestinian Authority civil servants begin a two-day strike today, demanding higher wages from the Salam Fayyad-led government in Ramallah.

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The fall of the Rafah wall was a fitting combination of planning and the precise reading of the social and political map by the Hamas government, mixed with a mass response to the dictates of the overlord, Israel.

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