‘Israel won’t give up J’lem sovereignty’
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will make it clear in his discussions with US and European officials abroad that Israel will not accept any limitations on its sovereignty in Jerusalem, sources at the Prime Minister’s Office said, immediately before his plane took off from Tel Aviv on Monday afternoon.
For full article, visit http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellitepagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1249418685029
Plans for largest East Jerusalem settlement filed for approval
A plan for the building of a new settlement, Ma’aleh David, in the middle of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem was filed for approval by the relevant municipal committee at the Jerusalem Municipality. The plan calls for the construction of 104 housing units on the land where the former headquarters of the Judea and Samaria police was housed in the neighborhood of Ras al-Amud.
For full article, visit http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1109426.html
Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene
The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating a situation on the ground that will render such a solution impossible. The dream underlying Israel’s plans is encapsulated by a wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?
For full article, visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/18/west-bank-israel-settlers-palestinians
Huckabee: 2-state solution ‘unrealistic’
“The question is, should the Palestinians have a place to call their own?” he asked. “Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.”
However, Huckabee backed away from a suggestion he made in 2007 that the Palestinian state could be formed in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
“It wasn’t so much of a plan, I think, as it was a speculation,” he said. “I was speculating. My question was, why does it [the Palestinian state] have to be here?”
For full article, visit http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1249418638530&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Settlers attack, wound a Palestinian young man in Jerusalem
Resident Husam Al Za’tary, from Jerusalem, works at a bakery in West Jerusalem. He was attacked while waiting at a bus stop as he was heading back home.
He was approached by a group of young settlers who first insulted him for “being an Arab”, and then violently attacked him, and were even joined later on by another group of settlers, students of a Talmud School in the area.
For full article, visit http://www.imemc.org/article/60703
Right-wing settlers absent as Palestinians brace for Al-Aqsa invasion
Hundreds of Palestinians congregated at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in an effort to stave off an anticipated invasion of the area by right-wing Israeli religious groups Thursday afternoon.
The messianic Jewish movement Chabad called on its followers to go to Al-Aqsa to “conquer and Judaize the holiest place on earth, which is being desecrated in such a disgraceful and shameful way.” Several religious groups organized a march to the holy compound scheduled for Thursday. None of the groups, however, showed up at the mosque for their scheduled march.
For full article, visit http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=37149
Access to the compound, which houses the Al-Aqsa mosque, was restricted to Muslims with Israeli IDs, aged at least 50 for men and of any age for women.
For full article, visit http://english.ramattan.net/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=40223
Johann Hari: Israel’s Voice of Reason? An Exclusive Interview With Amos Oz
Oz is sitting in the coffee shop of Joseph’s bookstore in Golder’s Green, north London, looking older and more fragile than his vigorous black-and-white author’s picture. He is 70 now, his hair wispier and whiter. He greets me with a gravelly voice, and we order black coffees. It seems far away and long ago, but Oz once dreamed of bombing this city. He was once a child of what he calls “the Jewish intifada” – the stone-throwing, death-defying Jewish rebellion against British occupation. He believed the state that would emerge from the rubble would be a model of justice and idealism for all mankind. If you were a child in Gaza now, Mr Oz, would you be dreaming the same dreams against Israel? “I don’t even have to imagine the answer to this question – I know it,” he says. “Because I was a kid in Jerusalem in ‘48 when the city was besieged, shelled, starved, [and] the water supply [was] cut off. And I know the horror, and I know the despair, and I know the hopelessness, and I know the anger, and I know the frustration.” He says he was “not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a brainwashed little fanatic, a stone-throwing chauvinist. The first words I ever learnt to say in English were ‘British, go home!’”
For full article, visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/israels-voice-of-reason-a_b_176724.html
Faithful gather for Good Friday in Jerusalem
Thousands of Christian clergymen, worshippers and pilgrims thronged the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City, chanting hymns and bearing crosses as they marked Good Friday by retracing Jesus’ final footsteps.
Hundreds attended prayers Friday morning at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christian tradition says Jesus was crucified and resurrected.
For full article, visit http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090410/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_holy_land_good_friday
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