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A number of years ago, we had a bit of a motley crew over for Shabbat lunch. I remember that my brother was in town, visiting from New York. Another friend, a significant player in the Federation world was also there, as was a high school friend of one of our kids. And we were joined by one more friend, an Israeli Arab woman whom we’d initially met through my work. It was an interesting, though hardly relaxed, Shabbat afternoon. (The conversation took place in English ironically, since even though the Arab woman spoke a mellifluous Hebrew, our American Jewish...

Palestinians residing in Europe gather for mass event in Denmark; Islamic Movement leader Sheikh Salah tells participants their homes in Israel await them Sharon Roffe-Ofir Published: 05.04.08, 16:08 / Israel News Thousands of Palestinians residing in Europe attended a rally in the Danish capital of Copenhagen Saturday marking 60 years since a large part of the Palestinian population was expelled from, or left the newly-founded Israel during the war between Israel and the Arabs in 1948. The event, which was held in Europe for the sixth consecutive year, was organized by the Palestinian Committee in Europe and al-Awda, The Palestine...

SlantRight: Neuwirth on the ‘Arab Right of Return’ The only real racial supremacism practiced in the Middle East is associated with Islam. In Israel there are Arab and non-Jewish voters with equal rights, ...

During his recent trip to Israel, President Bush visited several places that re-affirmed his faith, including Bethlehem and the Sea of Galilee. Then exhibiting far greater faith than believing Jesus could walk on water, he asserted that "peace" could be had between Israel, the Palestinians and her Arab neighbors. One exhibition of faith has some historic roots and witnesses; the other is rooted in fantasy. As the president's visit neared, one might have expected the Palestinians, were they interested in peace, to at least tone down anti-Israel_rants. According to Palestinian Media Watch, the government-controlled_television station instead "intensified its rhetoric calling...

(IsraelNN.com) The issue of "Arab refugees" has long been a matter of widespread consensus in Israel, with even left-wing parties declaring that allowing them into Israel would endanger its very existence as a Jewish state. Nevertheless, the subject does not appear to be going away. Reports are that Prime Minister Olmert has now agreed to allow 50,000 Arabs who left Israel in 1948 - or are descendants of those who did - to enter and live in Israel. Channel Ten reported Thursday night that in a private meeting between Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen, the two agreed that...

The Phony "Right of Return" Under international law, there is no such thing as a right of return. If your ancestors left France, or Russia, or anywhere else (regardless of whether they were forced out, or they just wanted to live somewhere else), then you have no right of return to France or Russia. Nor do your grandchildren. Nevertheless, UNRWA tells the "refugees" that they have a "right of return"” to Israel—that the grandchild of someone who moved to Tel Aviv to work as a janitor from 1946 to 1948 has a right to live in Israel, and to take...

http://houseoflabor.tpmcafe.com/blog/lel66/2007/jan/21/the_right_of_return_myth http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/where-the-iraq- study-group-had-it-all-wrong/...Thus, the accusations that the creation of the State of Israel led to the eradication and dispossession of a Palestinian ‘nation,’ and that Israel continues to obstruct and deny the Palestinian’s right of self-determination, are spurious at best, since, as Robert Spencer, scholar of Islamic history, notes, before the 1967 war when Israel took control of Gaza and the West Bank, no one — including the Palestinians themselves — thought of themselves as a nation, that this “supposed national identity was invented in the 1960s in what turned about to be an extraordinarily successful ploy to adjust the...

What Right of Return, Mr. Baker? http://hnn.us/articles/33928.html By Richard L. Cravatts Mr. Cravatts, PhD, director of Boston University’s Program in Book & Magazine Publishing at the Center for Professional Education, writes frequently on law, politics, religion, housing, and culture. President Bush’s January 10th speech about a strategy for the Iraqi war going forward did ignore two key suggestions found last month in Jim Baker and company’s meretricious Iraqi Study Group report: that, first, the U.S. should initiate diplomatic conversations with Syria and Iran, and, second, that it should withdraw its troops in 2008. Thankfully, another specious suggestion from the report...

Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group -- has released its 79-point plan. How unprecedented is it? Well, it seems Iraq is to come under something called the "Iraq International Support Group." If only Neville Chamberlain had thought to propose a "support group" for Czechoslovakia, he might still be in office. Or guest-hosting for Oprah. But, alas, such flashes of originality are few and far between in what's otherwise a testament to conventional wisdom. How conventional is the ISG's conventional wisdom? Try page 49: "RECOMMENDATION 5: The Support Group should consist of Iraq and all the states bordering Iraq,...

If you look closely at the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, you can see remnants of the last time James Baker traded the long term demise of Israel for favors from Arab countries. I have great respect for James Baker and his wisdom and experience. His handling of the President’s defense when the Gore team tried to steal the Florida vote in 2000 was masterful, but he has always been an Arabist first in his Middle East dealings and diplomacy.

A reference to Palestinians' "right of return" in the report issued by the high-level Iraq Study Group broke a diplomatic taboo which sparked immediate concern in Israel and surprise among Middle East policy experts. The reference was buried deep inside a 160-page report that urged US President George W. Bush to renew efforts to revive Israel-Palestinian peace talks as part of a region-wide bid to end the chaos in Iraq. "This report is worrisome for Israel particularly because, for the first time, it mentions the question of the 'right of return' for the Palestinian refugees of 1948," said a senior...

CAIRO (AFP) - The Arab League has called on the United Nations Security Council to find a new mechanism to relaunch the Middle East peace process, at the opening of a meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo. Bahraini Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa said the League would call on the Security Council "to review the peace process... and to find a new and effective mechanism to activate it, based on Security Council decisions and the Arab peace initiative." The 2002 Arab initiative proposed a full normalization of relations with Israel in the exchange for the return of all...

This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows. To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50385 Friday, May 26, 2006 3rd intifada coming – thanks to Bush Posted: May 26, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern By Patrick J. Buchanan © 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc. When there is no solution, there is no problem, observed James Burnham, the former Trotskyite turned Cold War geostrategist. Burnham's insight came again to mind as President Bush ended his meeting with Ehud Olmert by announcing that the Israeli prime minister had brought with him some "bold ideas" for peace. And what bold ideas might that be?...

A killer earthquake struck Pakistan killing almost 40,000 people but could not jolt the Islamic republic out of its historical anti-Semitism since Pakistan snubbed Israel's offer of humanitarian aid. The snub endorsed the view that Pakistan's recent overtures toward Israel should not be taken as either a "historic breakthrough" or a "revolutionary breakthrough", but rather, as meaningless political rhetoric. ZOA President Morton A. Klein said, "We are deeply disappointed by President Musharraf's snub of Israel's generous offer of aid. It seems to indicate that Pakistan's hatred of Jews is greater than their desire to save Pakistani lives. By this appalling action, Pakistan seems to refuse to acknowledge Israel's very existence...

Thursday, July 28, 2005 Palestinian Terms for Peace The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. -- PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977 Let us, for the sake...

In Arabic, the term “Al-Awda” means “the return,” and it symbolizes the dreams and hopes of millions of Christian and Muslim Palestinians forced into exile as refugees by Israel in 1948. It’s the essence of the Palestine-Israel conflict. In order to create a Jewish state, Jews had to increase their population through immigration. When the notion of a Jewish homeland was embraced in 1917, there were about 85,000 Jews and 650,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians. That changed 30 years later to 614,000 Jews and 1.4 million Palestinians. They were still short of what they needed. The United Nations proposed a...

Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar decided on Wednesday to recognize the members of India's Bnei Menashe community as descendants of the ancient Israelites. Amar also decided to dispatch a team of rabbinical judges to India to convert the community members to Orthodox Jews. Such a conversion will enable their immigration to Israel under the Law of Return, without requiring the Interior Ministry's authorization. The International Fellowship of Christians & Jews (IFCJ), a group that raises money among evangelical Christians for Jewish causes, has undertaken to finance the process of converting the Bnei Menashe community and bringing them to Israel. The Bnei...

Dec. 19, 2004 Abbas vows no concessions on Palestinian 'right of return.' Thousands wave Islamic flags as they surround a burning model of an IDF tank during a rally in Nablus yesterday to mark the 17th anniversary of Hamas's founding. The main rally in Gaza, scheduled for Friday, was canceled for fear of an IDF attack. Photo: AP

The Palestinian Authority will never give up the right of return for all refugees to their original homes inside Israel, Zakariya al-Agha, head of the PLO's Refugees Department, said on Saturday. Meanwhile, a prominent Palestinian commentator called on the PA not to abandon the armed struggle in light of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's remarks at the Herzliya Conference last Thursday. PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), who arrived in Oman Saturday as part of a Gulf tour to ask for financial aid, said Sharon's statements were "disastrous" to the peace process and insisted that the Palestinians would make no concessions...

Dec. 15, 2004 21:38 Abbas: No to resettling refugees By KHALED ABU TOAMEH PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) on Wednesday rejected a new Israeli initiative to resettle Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and neighboring Arab countries. "Any proposal regarding the resettlement of the refugees is completely rejected," Abbas told reporters in Saudi Arabia. Abbas was referring to the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic initiative aimed at finding a permanent solution to the Palestinian refugees in the PA-controlled areas and in neighboring Arab countries. The initiative calls for asking countries that support the PA financially to invest capital in...

BEIRUT Yasser Arafat promised Palestinians he would return them to the homes they lost when Israel was founded in 1948. He never delivered, and now many refugees wonder whether anyone can. Arafat, whose name became synonymous with the Palestinian cause in the four decades he led the PLO, "was the only one with the stature to wrest that right," said Ashraf Majzoub, a refugee from Acre. "We fear that whoever succeeds him will strike a deal with Israel for a Palestinian state to which we won't even be allowed to go," he added. "Then the whole world will forget about...

What should we really call the flooding of Israel with 4.25 million Palestinian Arabs? Middle East specialists in U.S. universities often call for a Palestinian “right of return.” It sounds good, but it has deeply ominous implications. Here’s what those scholars have to say.·        Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor, Columbia University New York: “a fair, negotiated settlement … must lead to the establishment of a sovereign, independent state for the Palestinians with Jerusalem as its capital; that the right of return must be guaranteed.”[i] ·        Hisham Sharabi, Omar al-Mukhtar Professor of Arab Culture at Georgetown University: “The need today is to...

Back when George Shultz was US secretary of state, he made a practice of asking every newly appointed ambassador to locate his country on a globe. When the unsuspecting emissary put his finger on, say, Thailand, Shultz would correct him: "Your country is here," his finger on the United States. The story comes to mind on news that some 50 former American diplomats, taking their cue from their British counterparts, have put their names to a letter denouncing President George W. Bush's policies vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians. -snip- Suffusing WRMEA's pages is the conceit that they represent truly "American"...

Arafat's $Billions in Assets and Investments (Mideast Newswire Archive) Arafat's Wife's Spends Millions While Palestinian Children Starve (Irish Blog Via FR Forum) (02/11/04) ------------------------------------------------------------- On the eve of the famous "hand shake" on the White House lawn which rewarded Rabin and Arafat with the Nobel Prize for Peace, the PLO made Britain's most dangerous terrorist/criminal organizations list. The British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) also reported that the PLO had world-wide assets approaching $10 billion and an additional annual income of about $1.5 to 2 billion, generated from illegal activities. Surprisingly, the report was not picked up by the media....

ALSO SEE: Arafat's Wife on a Luxury Trip NY DAILY NEWS (11/06/03)---------------------------------------------Last week we were told that "Malnutrition in the Gaza Strip and West Bank is as bad as in sub-Saharan Africa because the Palestinian economy has all but collapsed under Israeli restrictions." (Irish Times February 6, 2004) A report by the cross-party International Development Select Committee also called on Britain to press the European Union to impose trade sanctions on Israel until it lifts its restrictions on Palestinian trade. The World Bank said last year that the Palestinian economy was in steep decline after the Israeli army blockaded and...

CommentsTHE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a "neutral arbiter" in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer until they change their ways, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Read this to see how they feel about America. And read this piece by Amir Taheri on the Iraqi "resistance," which notes Palestinian terror connections by the Iraqi insurgents, and features a Palestinian "journalist" egging them on. These folks are our enemies, and deserve to be treated as such. They don't deserve a state of their own. It's...

The author is a professor of law and director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. With the simple press of a button, the pilot of an Israeli helicopter gunship unleashed three missiles, instantly killing Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, as he was being driven home from prayers at his local mosque in the Gaza Strip. Yassin had not been sentenced to death by any court, nor was he on a battlefield in any conventional sense. Seven others died in the attack. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made no apologies,...

JERUSALEM — Israel's response to Palestinian violence after a pullout from the Gaza Strip would be even harsher than it is now, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Tuesday. Interviewed on Israel's Channel 10 television for Israel's independence day, Sharon defended his "unilateral disengagement" plan, including a pullout from the Gaza Strip. Members of his Likud Party vote on the plan in a referendum Sunday. After a pullout, Palestinians could no longer explain violence by saying that Israel was occupying their land, Sharon said, "and Israel's responses (to violence) would be much harsher." He refused to give specifics beyond noting...

The top figures in the militant group Hamas after the assassination Sunday of its leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi. _Mahmoud Zahar: A Hamas spokesman, the 53-year-old Zahar is considered a hard-liner. Zahar was the personal physician of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was killed by the Israelis on March 22. Zahar served as Hamas' liaison with the PLO in the mid-1990s but now opposes compromise with the Palestinian Authority. Zahar has been imprisoned by Israel and has been jailed repeatedly by the Palestinian Authority. _Ismail Hanieh: A top aide to Yassin and like Zahar he is a member of Hamas'...

WASHINGTON -- The blurring of lines between active-duty U.S. soldiers and contracted security personnel is causing unease in Congress, as violence continues to rise in Iraq. Some lawmakers worry that private security forces operate too far outside U.S. military control -- and laws. And experts wonder what would happen if a contractor did something tragically wrong, like shoot an Iraqi child. Thirteen Democrats wrote Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this month to argue that providing security in a hostile area is a classic mission for the military. "It would be a dangerous precedent if the United States allowed the presence...

The current president of Iraq's U.S.-picked Governing Council, Massoud Barzani, said Monday that American mistakes helped lead to the military deadlock outside of Najaf and Fallujah because Washington allowed "an army of liberation" to become "an army of occupation." In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Barzani warned the United States that civilians must not be harmed during any assault on the cities, but also cautioned that the United States cannot act softly and give insurgents "the impression that they have the upper hand." Barzani, who holds the monthly rotating presidency of the council, spoke in one of the...

LONDON -- Britain will begin a pilot identification-card program tomorrow as part of the government's plan to introduce compulsory ID cards for the first time since the 1950s. Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that ID cards would help Britain combat terrorism and illegal immigration, pointing out that identity fraud costs the country more than $2.37 billion annually. But civil liberties groups have already expressed concern over privacy infringement. Some 10,000 volunteers will be involved in the program to be run from the Passport Office in London and three other sites around Britain, the Home Office said. The new...

WASHINGTON - The U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees said Friday it is nothing more than a humanitarian organization, with no responsibility for camps security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some members of Congress and the World Jewish Congress allege that the camps have become launching pads for terrorist activity against Israeli civilians. President Bush has hinted that the United States, the major donor to the U.N. Relief Works Agency, might cut the agency off. Peter Hansen, UNRWA´S commissioner general, said that under the Oslo peace accords Israel and the Palestinian Authority have clearly defined security responsibilities...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European Union lawmakers voted Wednesday to release $17.7 million in aid to the Palestinians that had been held up over accusations some of the money was going to fund terrorism. The vote included a demand for disclosure about how the money is spent. It came after EU external affairs commissioner Chris Patten defended efforts to track the more than $1.3 billion spent in the past decade on projects in the occupied territories.   "We have found no evidence of EU funds being used for any purposes other than that for which they were intended," Patten told the...

Any deal between Saddam Hussein and the United Nations carried a grave element of risk. On the one hand, you had an amoral dictator concerned only with saving his skin; on the other, an international body notorious for its lack of public accountability. The decision to ease economic sanctions against Iraq, allowing the sale of oil in order to generate funds for humanitarian relief, was taken soon after the Gulf war. For years, Saddam simply ignored it. It was only at the end of 1996 that the oil-for-food programme was finally implemented. As might be expected, the dictator exploited the...

TEL AVIV - Even though he had been targeted for death since last fall, Israeli defense officials say the assassination of Abdel Aziz Rantisi became an urgent priority only in the last month, after he became the head of Hamas and began upgrading Iranian involvement in the organization. Rantisi, 54, was killed April 17 by an Israeli helicopter gunship near his Gaza home, just 26 days after he took over Hamas following the assassination of his predecessor, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. During the few weeks that he headed the organization, defense officials say Rantisi invited the Iranians and their Lebanese...

SEOUL, South Korea - A self-proclaimed "anti-American" group is threatening new terrorist attacks against eight U.S. allies in Iraq by the end of the month, including South Korea, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, a South Korean official said Thursday. (Image-South Korean officials were wearing gas masks as they came out of their office at the government building in Seoul during a civil defence drill against terrorist attacks.-) The group, called the "Yello-Red Overseas Organization," warned in a one-page letter sent to the South Korean embassy in Thailand that it will launch the attacks through April 30, embassy spokesman Ryoo Jung-young...

--In addition to all of our other problems - terror, international delegitimization, disagreement over disengagement, Iranian nuclear weapons, socio-economic gaps, religious-secular tensions, etc. - Israel is also in the midst of a leadership crisis. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may be indicted for allegedly using his influence, while serving as foreign minister in 1999, to advance shady business deals, including a crony’s attempt to buy a Greek island for development. The evidence is not entirely clear, and even if he stands trial, he might not be found guilty, but if the attorney general issues an indictment, Sharon may be forced to...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, April 21 Three car bombs exploded in front of Iraqi police stations in the southern city of Basra on Wednesday morning, killing more than three dozen people and wounding more than 70, according to initial reports from the police and witnesses. A fourth explosion hit a police station in the nearby town of Zubeir, according to a witness in one of Basras main hospitals, who was speaking to medics as they brought in people wounded in the blast. One of the blasts in Basra hit a school bus during the morning rush hour, when school buses are...

CAIRO - An Israeli attempt to assassinate Yasser Arafat is "only a matter of time", the Palestinian leader's national security adviser Jibril Rajoub said in an interview published here yesterday. "An attack on Arafat's life is only a matter of time because Arafat symbolises the freedom" of the Palestinian people, General Rajoub told the Egyptian weekly magazine Nahdat Mir. On March 22, the leader of the Palestinian radical Islamic movement Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed in an Israeli helicopter raid in Gaza City. And Israel assassinated his successor, Abdelaziz Rantissi, less than a month later. Israeli Prime Minister...

It was never much of a secret that Saddam Hussein was a crooked dictator. But there are allegations that the former leader of Iraq wasn't the only one who was corrupt. The United Nations has agreed to an independent probe of the program it set up to let Saddam sell oil-- to feed his hungry people. The investigation could uncover the dirty truth about a humanitarian program-- polluted by greed. For years there have been allegations of corruption in the U.N.'s Iraqi oil-for-food program. Now it's bubbling over into a full-fledged scandal. The corruption charges first surfaced last January--...

In 1996, after brutal sanctions had wreaked enormous hardship on the Iraqi people, the international community found a better way. Under the watchful eye of the United Nations, it launched the oil-for-food program, which would allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil, as long as the proceeds were used to buy food and medicine for the Iraqi people. The oil money would flow through the UN, which would monitor the spending. It was to be the largest humanitarian-aid effort ever undertaken. So much for theory.  In reality, the oil-for-food program was one of the larger rip-offs of all...

<p>In a remarkable shift for formal American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and morass, an American president has actually recognized reality. Out loud.</p> <p>George W. Bush has acknowledged the Israelis can't be expected to retreat to the vulnerable armistice lines of 1949, the old borders that invited one war after another in the years since. All the invaders had to do was cut a wasp-waisted Israel in two, then roll up each half. Not for nothing did the late Abba Eban refer to the old borders as "the Auschwitz lines."</p>

When Mordechai Vanunu ends his 18 years of mostly solitary confinement Wednesday morning, he will likely be greeted with complete silence from all four of his parents. Mr. Vanunu, 50, became an international cause célèbre in 1986, when he was kidnapped by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and imprisoned for treason after telling the world about Israel's secret nuclear-weapons program. Israeli officials believe Mr. Vanunu is one of the most dangerous men in the country, and have ordered him not to leave his town in Israel, to speak to foreigners, to use a cellphone or the Internet, or to come within...

<p>How is it, sir, that you still have your job?</p> <p>As if presiding over the deadliest domestic intelligence failure in the history of the nation wasn't enough to relieve the top spook of his duties, Tenet's appearance before the commission on Thursday provided more reason.</p>

<p>April 19, 2004 -- JERUSALEM -  Defiant Hamas leaders yesterday said they've already picked a new chief to replace assassinated Gaza Strip head Abdel Aziz Rantisi - but refused to publicly identify him.</p> <p>The move came as hundreds of thousands of frenzied Palestinians rampaged through Gaza, vowing to start a bloody "earthquake" against Israel for killing Rantisi less than a month after assassinating his predecessor, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.</p>

The Decline of Islamic Science, the Rise of Extremism The United Nations Development Program, in a report published last year, described in often painful detail some of the factors that have contributed to the decline of science and the rise of extremism in Arab societies. Among them are: Increases in average income have been lower in the Arab world than anywhere else for 20 years, except for the poorest African countries. "If such trends continue...it will take the average Arab citizen 140 years to double his or her income, whole other regions are set to achieve that level in a...

JERUSALEM; Israel's proposed evacuation of Jewish settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip would allow the military to continue to enter Gaza and permit Israel to maintain control over its airspace, seaports and border crossings, according to the first official text of the plan made public. All 7,500 Jewish settlers and the Israeli troops that protect them would be evacuated by the end of 2005, according to the document. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan, evacuated settlements would not be destroyed — as they were when Israel evacuated the Sinai Peninsula in the 1980s — but Palestinian leaders and militants...

<p>THE United States is a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which this month will address the growing problem of how governments should respond to anti-Semitism.</p> <p>I have been designated by Secretary of State Colin Powell to serve as chairman of the U.S. delegation - which includes members of Congress as well as private citizens who had been leaders in the battle against anti-Semitism - to the OSCE's Berlin conference, beginning on April 25.</p>

UNITED NATIONS - With strong U.S. backing, Israel launched a campaign at the United Nations to win international support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral plan to withdraw from Gaza and part of the West Bank.Israel's U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman said he briefed U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday about the plan and Sharon's trip to Washington this week."You could describe this meeting as the beginning of a diplomatic onslaught by Israel to try to elicit international support for the disengagement plan," Gillerman told The Associated Press.He said Israel also wanted to point out the "absurdity" of Palestinian objections to...