Palestine

DAMASCUS - Syria's president used a welcoming ceremony for Pope John Paul II yesterday to deliver one of his harshest spoken attacks against Israel, equating what he called the murder and torture of Palestinians with the persecution of Jesus Christ. Arriving on a pilgrimage of peace and reconciliation, the pope found himself thrust into the region's explosive mix of religion and politics, which is aggravated daily by conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. President Bashar el Assad never mentioned the State of Israel or the Jewish people in his speech, but the target of his rage was unmistakable.

As you've no doubt read, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard telling President Obama that he "cannot stand" Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he believes the Israeli leader is a "liar. " While national leaders do not always get along, these are unusually strong words. And they are deeply disturbing. Furthermore, these words raise the troubling possibility that President Sarkozy's personal animus has influenced French policy. Remember back in September, Prime Minister Netanyahu made a powerful defense of his nation and direct negotiations before the United Nations.

ISTANBUL -- A recent visitor to the Jewish neighborhoods of Istanbul, home to the majority of Turkey's 24,000 Jews and 16 Sephardi and Ashkenazi synagogues, is reminded of a tragic but little-known event that occurred near here 58 years ago. It has become a focus of attention again. On the night of Feb. 23, 1942, 768 Jewish refugees from Romania died as their ship -- the Struma -- was sunk by a Soviet torpedo just outside Istanbul harbor after Britain denied visas to those aboard and Turkey refused to allow the ship to continue to Palestine.

When I heard that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was coming to promote peace in the Middle East, I was reminded of that American senator who, in his frustration, exclaimed: "Why can't those Arabs and Jews just sit down and like good Christians settle their differences?" In the case of Mr. Blair, however, this might not be a joke, because the popular, outgoing prime minister recently fathered a historic peace between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland. If he managed to bring hard-headed Irish to the table and have them agree to a difficult compromise, couldn't he accomplish something of the sort between Arabs and Jews?

WHEN Yasser Arafat clasped hands with Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn last September, the handshake was treated as a turning point, like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Peace was finally breaking out in the Middle East, said a thousand commentators.They were wrong. We are not witnessing a change of heart by the Arabs -- a willingness to share the land of Palestine with Jews -- but rather a change of heart on the part of Israelis.First, some terminology. This is not a "peace process"; this is a unilateral withdrawal by Israel.

When Jacob Bauman's wife, Judy, died last December, she left her husband and daughters a rich legacy of Israeli history.The niece of Golda Meir, former Israeli prime minister, Judy immigrated to Palestine in 1921 on a ship known as Israel's Mayflower."

ONE OF THE special ironies of the crisis in the Middle East is that news reporters and commentators continue to refer to the West Bank as territory "occupied" by Israel. Even now, at a moment pregnant with apocalyptic possibilities triggered by Iraqi aggression, few informed observers acknowledge the obvious: Israel's continued administrative control of "the territories" (what Jerusalem refers to as Judea and Samaria) is indispensable to its national survival.Had this land been transformed into an Arab state of Palestine sometime during the past 23 years, it would already have been taken over by Saddam Hussein and used to destroy Israel.

Taiwan is not just China's internal affairThank you very much for your continuing coverage of China's ''reckless and provocative'' missile tests against Taiwan when the island is having the first democratic presidential election in the history of any Chinese society.Whether President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan should be re-elected is debatable, but could only be decided by the voters in Taiwan, judging his ability to run the nation. It should not be decided by some dictators and warlords in Beijing whose hands are still full of the blood from the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

JERUSALEM - After four wars, a generation of terrorism and a bitter military occupation, the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is breathtakingly close. But overcoming the last differences may require a leap of faith. Considering their positions of a decade ago, each side has made huge strides toward the other: A majority of Israelis now acknowledge the Palestinians as a people with roots in land west of the Jordan River and not just as part of an Arab whole. Contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a group previously outlawed, is a normal government activity.

Remembering an old friend; Roommate: In Palestine in the 0) '30s, Herbert Froehlich shared a room with a Swede named Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg.Herbert Froehlich's roommate moved out in 1936, yet all these years later, the man is never far from Froehlich's thoughts. "I think about him day and night," Froehlich said on a recent afternoon in his Pikesville apartment.In the Palestine town of Haifa in 1935, Froehlich was just one of thousands of Jewish refugees desperately searching for lodging.