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political detours .....

political detours .....

It is crunch time for the Bush administration as it continues to hold out hope for a peace agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. 

But even US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice let out a sign of her frustration at the lack of progress on the ground, particularly on the part of the Israelis. 

On her way to Jerusalem for meetings with officials there and then with Palestinian officials in Ramallah, Ms Rice discussed some of the items on her agenda with the reporters travelling with her on the plane. 

These include the concrete and sensitive issues of continued Israeli settlement activity and Israeli roadblocks in the West Bank. 

During her last visit in March, Israel promised to remove 61 roadblocks. But the UN says only 44 have been dismantled, and most of them had no or little significance. 

When asked whether she would ask the Israelis to dismantle more roadblocks, she replied with a somewhat exasperated laugh: 'The first thing we're going to do is review the ones that were supposedly removed.' 

Rice Seeks Mid-East Breakthrough

terrorists who stole Jerusalem for Israel...

Although it would be 30 years before any of its personnel admitted it, the "madness" was perpetrated by the most extreme of the Jewish nationalist underground groups, Lehi, more commonly known to the British as the Stern Gang, ordered by a three-man leadership which included the future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. What cost the life of the count who ran the Swedish Red Cross during the Second World War and was the nephew of King Gustav V, was not the two Arab-Jewish truces he had managed to negotiate – the second of which was close to collapse when he was killed. It was the longer-term peace plan which sought, however vainly and perhaps naively, to tackle the very issues which still lie at the heart of the world's most intractable conflict today: borders, Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. It was on the last point that Bernadotte had most incensed Israeli opinion, by recommending first that the city should be in Arab territory, and then, in a report heavily influenced by Britain and the US and submitted to the UN Security Council the very day before his death, that it should be under international supervision.

Geula Cohen, a former Knesset member on the nationalist far right who in 1948 was a 17-year-old broadcaster on Lehi's clandestine radio, recalls the chilling threats she personally directed at Bernadotte over the airwaves in the weeks before the assassination. "I told him if you are not going to leave Jerusalem and go to your Stockholm, you won't be any more." Did she still think, 60 years later, it was right to kill him? "There is no question about it. We would not have Jerusalem any more."

 read more at the Guardian and see toon at top

nobel peace prize...

Jews protect Palestinians in harvest of hate

Israelis cross religious divide to shelter olive farmers from settlers' attacks

By Donald Macintyre in Awarta, West Bank
Friday, 10 October 2008

In the shade of the trees where they have been picking olives all morning, in this wadi, south-east of Nablus, a Palestinian farmer, Jamal Otman Koarik, and two of his daughters share a lunch of home-baked bread, zatar, oil, courgettes and salad with three visitors. It's a bucolic scene that could have happened any time in the past century. But what makes it notable in 2008 is that the guests who have been helping Mr Koarik pick the olives are Israeli Jews: a rabbi, an anthropologist and a youth worker, Hellela Siew.

These Jewish people deserve a decent portion of the Nobel Peace Prize... see toon at top.