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Rosh Hashanah: This is a year which began as I scrambled to get on a plane back to Israel in time for Rosh HaShanah, after being stuck in New York at the time of the September 11th attacks, which I happened to witness and photograph the collapse of the Twin Towers, from where I happened to be reporting in Lower Manhattan. The year finished for me with a last minute effort to document the story of 200 of Arafat's dissidents, all of whom are jailed and all of whom await possible execution for expressing dissent against the Palestinian Authority. Arafat portrays his dissidents as "collaborators", and most of the media buys it. This is a year in which our youngest daughter finished toilet training while our oldest son finished basic training…placing him in a front line unit on Har Dov on the Lebanese border, where Syria, the Hizbullah and the UNRWA camps in Lebanon pose a real threat to launch a war of attrition on Israel's northern frontier. World opinion and the UN are silent, despite the fact that Israel withdrew all of its forces from Lebanon according to UN security council resolution #425, back in May 2000… under the mistaken premise that the world would not allow any threat to Israel's recognized northern border. This is a year in which lawyers and human rights organizations have lined up to represent Marwan Bargouti, who proudly takes credit for the heinous murder of 23 Jewish men, women and children, making him the Middle East's Charley Manson. This is a year in which not one human rights organization woulf speak up for Arafat's 200 dissidents, even after some have already been murdered by Arafat's security forces. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Bitzelem, the Rabbis for Human Rights, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the UN are all silent. You might call it Politically Correct Murder . At a time when the US congress demands that the PA introduce democracy as a condition for US assistance to the PA, the fate of Arafat's dissidents speaks for itself. This is a year in which the Palestinian Authority has become the first entity since the Third Reich to introduce a juridical and educational system that promote a war against Jews. The difficulty in placing a news story on PA school system or PA justice system speaks for itself. This is a year in which the Palestinian Authority has introduced military training into its schools and summer camps , converting every PA educational institution into a military base for the Palestinian Liberation Army. If and when the PA organizes terror attacks that emanate from these schools, hundreds of Palestinian Arab children will die in the process. You can just imagine the sight of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education displaying the corpses of their young martyrs for media coverage. That will do wonders for Israel's image abroad. You can just imagine what the PLO support groups will do with those media images. This is a year in which I have covered more than forty murders, helping the media to interview loved ones of those who have been slaughtered. This is a year in which all PA groups compete with one another to take credit for drive-by murders and suicide bombs in every part of Israel. This is a year I which world opinion has somehow gotten used to cold blooded murder as an acceptable military tactic. This is a year in which small Jewish groups around the globe have expressed passionate support for the PLO cause, promoting the specious idea that all the PLO and PA want is independence beyond the 1949-67 "green line", which would means that Israel would have to cede Jerusalem. These groups also ignores the consistent PLO/PA demand for the "right of return", which means that the 531 Arab villages that were replaced in 1948 by Israeli towns, kibbutzim and moshavim would have to disappear. This is a year in which the Moslem religious authority in Jerusalem, known as the Wakf, has given orders to destroy all Jewish artifacts on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem , while allowing the Southern Wall to teter. When and if that Southern Wall collapses, the world will undoubtedly blame Israel and Moslems will run rampant throughout the world. Don't confuse world opinion with the facts. This is a year in which the two Arab nations that did not surrender after Israel War of Independence in 1948 - Iraq and Saudi Arabia - have emerged as the great adversaries and threats to Israel, despite the efforts of some people to pretend that the Saudis do not demand that Israel cede Jerusalem and allow for millions of Arabs to "return" to Israel. This is the year in which the US began to understand that the Saudis and the Iraqis pose a threat to American interests. Does that means that Israel will have an ally in the year to come? Time will tell.
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