* Rafah crossing opened Monday and Tuesday only to Omra pilgrims (Al Quds)

*The “8 countries” declare their commitment to achieve the goals of the Duvell partnership initiative in supporting economic reform in the region (Al Quds)

*Jerusalem Electricity company denounces attack on its networks in Anata and Shufat (Al Quds)

*Conference for supporting Aqsa and Ibrahimi Mosque recommends protection of religious sites (Al Quds)

*PA blames Hamas for financial deficit (Al Quds)

*$115 billion in aid to Israel since 1948; for Palestinians, $4 billion in installments (Al Quds)

*Egyptian elections: Islamists pass law in parliament to put obstacles to Omar Suleiman’s candidacy (Al Ayyam)

*Syrian ‘truce’ begins tensely; the regime is before the test of peaceful negotiations today (Al Ayyam)

*Security alert at Ben Gurion Airport to prevent foreign supporters from reaching the Palestinian territories (Al Ayyam)

*Right wing Israelis call for putting ‘Welcome to Palestine” activists on trial (Al Ayyam)

*Beit Lahyia: attacks by Israeli occupation forces continue (Al Ayyam)

*Israeli plan uncovered to build Jewish museum on three dunams of land from the Buraq courtyard (Al Ayyam)

*Agreement to expedite “brotherly” steps between Jerusalem and Rabat as the capitals of two states (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Israeli soldier stabbed near Carmel (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Yedioth: borders with Syria not in calculations of Israeli army (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Israeli occupation reopens northern entrance to Ram (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Israel admits it does not know Obama’s final position on Iran (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Gunter Grass criticizes Israel’s decision to ban him from entering the country (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Maha and Thaer return from Yarmouk camp and have wedding in Deir Istya (Al Hayat Al Jadida)

*Eastern Christian denominations celebrate Good Friday today (Al Quds)

Al-Quds: Jerusalem: Good Thursday for eastern Christian sectors at Church of the Holy Sepulcher

Al-Ayyam:1) The President, during his visit to the Yuri Yaki elementary school in Naturi, Japan; 2) Damage done to religious site in Bab Dreib neighborhood in Homs; 3) Maha and Thaer fulfill dream of wedding in Palestine

Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:  1) The President during his meeting with peace process envoy Imora in Tokyo; 2) Bride and groom Thaer and Maha during their wedding

That other Ben Gurion
by George S. Hishmeh

Who is the real David Ben Gurion?
There is no doubt that David Ben Gurion, who was born in 1886 in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, was correctly recognised everywhere as the founder of Israel, created in 1948 by a UN resolution. An issue, however, has recently been touched off, involving a damaging charge emanating from a just revealed hardline advocacy of Ben Gurion on how to establish a firm Zionist foothold in Palestine where the majority of the population consisted then of Arabs.
A recently revealed 1937 letter from the Zionist leader to his son Amos, which was never published in full in English, underlined Ben Gurion’s blatant intentions that involved the expulsion of the Arab population from Palestine in 1948 and thereafter (www.palestine-studies.org).
A row was started when CAMERA, the Jewish Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, belatedly protested an “erroneous citation” in a 2006 article that was carried in the Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS), a quarterly published by the University of California for the Lebanon-based Institute for Palestine Studies. The institute, which seeks to protect the historical records on Palestine, is highly respected for its authoritative academic research and publishing of all matters relating to the Palestine problem and the Arab-Israeli conflict. JPS has had an office in Washington, DC, since 1971.
The article, written by Dr Ilan Pappe, an Israeli professor who teaches at Exeter University, the UK, was titled “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”. Pappe, who was exonerated by his own university after a lengthy investigation, was accused by CAMERA of lifting an erroneous line attributed to Ben Gurion which said: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” (from the 2004 book by Charles D. Smith, “Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict”).
The editors of the Journal of Palestine Studies apologised for the inadvertence, but the incident prompted the journal to seek the original letter by Ben Gurion in Hebrew and to translate it into English. It revealed the Israeli leader’s intentions in several paragraphs.
In the just-released 2012 winter edition of JPS, it wrote: “In our view, far more important that an inadvertently misplaced or missing citation or a punctuation lapse — which, while misleading, can be corrected — is the accuracy of Pappe’s presentation. This is because of its absolute centrality to the historical record of Ben Gurion’s stance on partition and transfer.”
The allegedly “fake” quote, they argued, “must be seen in the context in which it occurs”.
In his letter to his son, Ben Gurion clearly stated that in the “proposed partition [of Palestine] we will get more than what we already have, though of course much less than we merit and desire”. He went on: “What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish. A unified Eretz Israel would be no source of satisfaction for me — if it were Arab.
“From our standpoint, the status quo is deadly poison. We want to change the status quo. But how can this change come about? How can this land become ours? The decisive question is: Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country? My assumption ... is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning.”
There are several statements by Ben Gurion that Israelis “must expel Arabs and take their place”, such as when he suggested that Jews could settle in the Negev, nowadays under Israeli control.
He elaborated: “... if we are compelled to use force — not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan, but in order to guarantee our right to settle there — our force will enable us to do so.”
Israeli officials and their friends in Israel or overseas never seem willing to practise some self-examination, a point highlighted by the highly publicised case of German poet Gunter Grass who said that Israel is a threat to world peace and called for international oversight of both Israeli and Iranian nuclear facilities.
The Nobel laureate’s logical question was, as the Associated Press reported, “how Israel could call for ending Iran’s nuclear programme while holding what is widely believed to be its own atomic arsenal”.
Similarly, how can Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times columnist, suggest on April 3 that Palestinians should “accompany any boycotts, sit-ins or hunger strikes with a detailed map of the final two-state settlement they are seeking”?
Hasn’t he heard the Palestinian Authority repeatedly expressing willingness to establish a state on all land occupied since 1967, which amounts to less than half of what Palestinians were offered under the Partition Plan? Hasn’t he heard of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which expressed willingness of all Arab states to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel?
It would be more appropriate for Friedman to call on Israel, specifically on Benjamin Netanyahu, to submit a peace plan to the Palestinians and all the Arab governments so that negotiations could start immediately.
It is time for all to call Israel’s bluff. (http://jordantimes.com/that-other-ben-gurion)

Günter the Terrible
By: Uri Avnery 

STOP ME if I have told you this joke before:
Somewhere in the US, a demonstration takes place. The police arrive and beat the protesters mercilessly.
“Don’t hit me,” someone shouts, “I am an anti-communist!”
“I couldn't give a damn what kind of a communist you are!” a policeman answers as he raises his baton.
THE FIRST time I told this joke was when a German group visited the Knesset and met with German-born members, including me.
They went out of their way to praise Israel, lauding everything we had been doing, condemning every bit of criticism, however harmless it might be. It became downright embarrassing, since some of us in the Knesset were very critical of our government’s policy in the occupied territories.
For me, this extreme kind of pro-Semitism is just disguised anti-Semitism. Both have a basic belief in common: that Jews – and therefore Israel – are something apart, not to be measured by the standards applied to everybody else.
What is an anti-Semite? Somebody who hates a Jew because he is a Jew. He does not hate him for what he is as a human being, but for his origin. A Hebrew or a Shebrew (to quote a joke from Ambrose Bierce) may be good or bad, nice or nasty, rich or poor – for being Jewish, they must be hated.
This is of course true for any kind of prejudice, including sexism, Islamophobia, chauvinism and whatever.
Germans, as is their wont, are a bit more thorough here than others. The term “Antisemitismus” was invented by a German (a few years before the terms Zionism and Feminism), and anti-Semitism was the official ideology of Germany during the Nazi years. Now the official German ideology is pro-Semitism, again going to extremes.
Another Nazi word was “Sonderbehandlung”, meaning ‘”special treatment”. It was an euphemism for something abhorrent: the killing of prisoners. But special treatment can also mean the opposite: according people and countries especially nice treatment, not because of what they do, but because of what they are - Jewish, say.
Well, I don’t like it, even when I am on the receiving end. I like to be praised when I have done something good, I am ready to be blamed when I have done something bad. I don’t like to be praised (or blamed, for that matter) because I happen to have been born a Jew.
THIS BRINGS us, of course, to Günter Grass.
Disclosure: I met him only once, when we were both invited to a conference of the German PEN Club in Berlin. During an interval I met him in a very good restaurant. I told him, quite truthfully, that I like his books very much, especial the anti-Nazi novel “The Tin Drum”, and that I like his later political activity. That was all.
I did not meet him during his many visits to Israel. On at least one of them he acquired a girl-friend, a well-known writer.
Now Grass has done the unthinkable: he has openly criticized the State of Israel! And he a German!!!
The reaction was automatic. He was at once branded as an anti-Semite. Not just a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, but as a crypto-Nazi, who could easily have served as a henchman of Adolf Eichmann! This was shown by the fact that at age 17, near the end of World War II, he was recruited to the Waffen-SS like tens of thousands of others and then – oddly enough – kept the fact hidden for many years. So there you are.
Israeli and German politicians and commentators vied with each other in cursing the writer, with the Germans easily trumping the Israelis. Though our Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, may have garnered the individual championship by declaring Grass persona non grata and banning him from entering Israel for all eternity (at least).
Yishai is a political hack, who has never written a line worth remembering. He is the leader of the Orthodox Shas party, not by virtue of being elected, but as a sidekick of the party’s strongman, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The powerful State Comptroller is accusing him of gross incompetence in connection with a giant fire on Mount Carmel and so his career is in danger. Grass came just at the right time to save his skin.  
SO WHAT did Grass actually say? In a poem of 69 lines – actually a polemic in the guise of a poem – under the headline “What Has To Be Said”, Grass attacks Israeli policy concerning the atom bomb.
The ferocious counter-attack was focused almost completely on the axiom that a German has no right to criticize Israel, under any circumstances.
Let’s ignore this “argument” and look at the poem itself, not necessarily as a literary masterpiece.
Grass’ basic theme is that Israel already has a “nuclear potential”, and that it is therefore hypocrisy to blame Iran for perhaps wanting to acquire one, too. In particular he denounced the German government for supplying another submarine to Israel.
Looked at rationally, do his arguments make sense?
Grass assumes that Israel is planning a “first strike” preventive war against Iran, in which the Iranian people could be “wiped out”. This possibility only makes sense if Grass assumes that the Israeli “first strike” would be an attack with nuclear bombs. Indeed, the term “first strike” belongs solely to the lexicon of nuclear war.
It is in this context that he condemns the German government for giving Israel another (sixth) submarine with the capability of launching nuclear bombs. Such submarines are designed for delivering a “second strike” by a nation hit in the “first strike”. It is basically a weapon of deterrence.
He deplores the fact that nobody in Germany (and in the Western world) dares even to mention Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, and that it is practically forbidden to “call that particular country by name” in this context.
He then asserts that “the Atomic Power Israel endangers the fragile peace of the world”.
To avert this danger, he proposes that “Israel’s atomic potential and Iran’s atomic installations” be put under an unfettered and permanent international inspection regime with the agreement of both governments.
At the end, he also mentions the Palestinians. Only this way, he says, can the Israelis and the Palestinians, and all the other inhabitants of this “region occupied by madness”, be helped.
WELL, I did not fall off my chair when I read this. The text can and must be criticized, but there is nothing there that demands stern condemnation.
As I said before, I see no reason for Germans to abstain from criticizing Israel. There is nothing in this text that de-legitimizes the State of Israel, On the contrary, he declares his solidarity with Israel. He explicitly mentions the Holocaust as an indelible crime. He also calls the Iranians “a people enslaved by a “bigmouth”.
That said, Grass’ idea that Israel might “wipe out” the Iranian people in a preventive “first strike” is wildly exaggerated.
I have already stated several times that all the Israeli and American blabbering about an Israeli attack on Iran is a part of the US-led psychological warfare to press the Iranian leaders to give up their (presumed) nuclear ambitions. It is totally impossible for Israel to attack Iran without express prior American agreement, and it is totally impossible for America to attack - or let Israel attack - because of the catastrophic consequences – a collapse of the world economy and a long and costly war.
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the Israeli government indeed decides to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. This would not “wipe out” the Iranian people, or even a part of it. Only madmen would use nuclear bombs for this purpose. Israeli leaders, whatever one may think of them, are not mad.
Even if Israel had (or obtained from the US) tactical nuclear bombs with limited power and radius, the world reaction to their use would be catastrophic.
By the way, it is not by their own choice that Israeli governments have a policy of nuclear non-transparency. If they could, our leaders would brag about our nuclear might from the rooftops. It’s the US that insists on opaqueness, so as not to be obliged to do something about it.
Grass’ contention that Israel endangers “world peace” is, therefore, a bit of an overstatement.
As for Glass’ practical proposal to subject both Israeli and Iranian nuclear installations to international inspection – I think this merits serious consideration. If both our countries freeze the nuclear status quo, it may not be a bad idea at all.
In the end, though, we need a nuclear-free region as part of a general regional peace that will include Israel, Palestine, the Arab League, Turkey and Iran.
AS FOR Günter Grass, I shall be happy to meet him again, this time for a good meal in Tel Aviv.(http://www.amin.org/articles.php?t=ENews&id=3867)

Negative attitudes towards the reconciliation
Al Quds Editorial

These polemics between the two major factions – Hamas and Fatah – over national reconciliation points to a dangerous belittling of the higher interests of the Palestinian cause and the aspirations of the Palestinian people in building national unity on strong foundations. If nothing else, it points to a lack of awareness of how dangerous the current situation actually is. The worst possible analysis is that the issue is about preferences of fraction interests and political gains under occupation over the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, whether in the West Bank or Gaza.
There are a number of difficulties, problems and obstacles in the way of national unity, including elections, the restructuring of security forces and unifying their points of reference after they split according to the different ideologies and contrasting regional and international affiliations. Then there is the distribution of the ministry portfolios, some of which are considered an overstepping of sovereign portfolios (and what Palestinian sovereignty is there really? All of our people, no matter how high their positions, do not enter or exit except with permits stamped by occupation authorities). Then there are so many others…
Why is there an argument between the two factions over naming a prime minister for the new government? Here we must point to Hamas’ rejection of naming President Abbas for this position on a temporary basis and for specified purposes, which is to oversee elections. Before this, Hamas rejected Salam Fayyad for this position as well with the knowledge that he is the prime minister in reality anyway; his government makes the arrangements and sends allocations for development and services to the Gaza Strip.
This does not mean we are exonerating either faction from responsibility for the status quo because the real test for the popularity of either group is their success in closing the book on this dark split and opening a new chapter of tolerance, brotherhood and mutual affiliation to the homeland first and not to their own factions except to the extent to which this faction serves the higher interests of the people and the cause.
It is time to end these polemics and to work seriously and effectively to reunite the homeland. We need to free ourselves to jumpstart the cause, which has found itself in the intensive care unit because of our leader’s grip on empty positions which mean nothing. Because of this, they have totally disregarded higher national interests and the requirements needed to make meet the dangerous challenges facing our people, our cause and our fate on our land. (Al Quds)