Free Republic

The latest threat to Middle East peace is not a rocket from Gaza or a terrorist bombing. It is a Jerusalem apartment project -- at least that's the view in Foggy Bottom.

...The U.N. took on the Mideast as one of its first big projects after World War II and, unfortunately, has never left. After granting Israel statehood in 1948, the U.N. turned to the Arabs the Israelis had defeated in battle. Under Resolution 302, the General Assembly in 1949 created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Today, it is the largest U.N. bureaucracy, with 25,000 employees providing health care, schooling and social services to some 4 million Palestinians in 59 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. The...

Palestinian gunmen killed a Jewish settler and wounded several more in a West Bank drive-by shooting on Friday in a new blow to a faltering Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire. The attack, the second killing of a settler in four days, followed Israel's detention of 63 suspected Islamic Jihad militants in the West Bank and resumption of a policy of assassinating the group's leaders. The ceasefire agreed in February has been fraying for weeks in Gaza, posing the spectre of disruption to Israel's planned pullout from the territory later this year. Several other settlers were wounded when militants fired from a passing car...

"Israel is finished! Long live America!" Set to be evacuated from the tiny Jewish outpost of Kadim in the northern West Bank, Motti Elgarissi has only one dream: to emigrate. "I can't go on any longer. (Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon wants to uproot us? Very well then, I can't stand this country any longer," said Elgarissi. The postage-stamp sized, putrid-smelling Kadim with its overgrown grass and decrepit alleys is perched above the Palestinian city of Jenin, itself a veritable bastion of resistance to the Israeli occupation. Now in his 50s, Elgarissi earns a living by operating a mobile restaurant out...