The separation wall
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Austen Ivereigh - (Opinion) December 22, 2009 - 1:00am

Within spitting distance of the very spot Jesus Christ was born is one of the world's great monstrosities, "a symbol of everything wrong with the human heart" as the Archbishop of Canterbury described it when he saw it for himself.

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Israel jails anti-wall campaign leader
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
December 20, 2009 - 1:00am

The Stop the Wall Campaign announced on Sunday that its coordinator, Jamal Juma, has been imprisoned by Israel since 16 December. Juma’s arrest follows what activists say is a military-legal crackdown on popular expressions of rejection of Israeli occupation. Dozens of protest leaders, boycott campaigners, and other civil society advocates have been arrested in recent weeks.

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Palestinian tunnel tycoons feeding demand for banned goods
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Harriet Sherwood - December 15, 2009 - 1:00am

Mahmoud is proud of the motorbike he bought two months ago for $700, now parked in the sand at the entrance of one of the tunnels used to smuggle the machines into Gaza. It is all the more precious these days. After an influx of bikes through the deep underground passages between Gaza and Egypt resulted in carnage on the roads by young, untrained riders, the Hamas government ordered the imports to stop.

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Gaza border: Why Egypt is building a steel underground wall
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Christian Science Monitor
by Sarah A. Topol - December 14, 2009 - 1:00am

Reports that Egypt is building a steel underground wall along its border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip have fueled speculation about what exactly Cairo intends to accomplish with the project, which British newspapers claim is being carried out with the help of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

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Israel seizes Bil'in anti-wall protest leader
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
December 10, 2009 - 1:00am

Israeli forces seized Abdullah Abu Rahmah, a member of the Popular Committee against the Wall ofthe village of Bil’in early on Thursday, according to Palestinian Authority police. PA police said Abu Rahmah was seized from a house in the At-Tira neighborhood in Ramallah. Iyad Burnat, the head of Bil'in's Popular Committee confirmed that the arrest took place at around 2:30am. He said Abu Rahmah was likely taken to the military prison in the settlement of Ofer, on the outskirts of Ramallah. Abu Rahmah is a high school teacher in the Latin Patriarchate school in Birzeit near Ramallah.

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Report: Netanyahu okays Israel-Egypt border wall
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved the construction of a wall along the border between Israel and Egypt, Israeli media reported on Tuesday. The decision came, according to Israeli daily Ma’ariv, after consultations involving security, political, and financial officials in Israel. Netanyahu believes construction of a barrier will stop smuggling and the migration of Africans seeking work or asylum in Israel. The decision, according to Ma’ariv, was made as a result of an increase in the number of African immigrants crossing into Israel.

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A Portrait of Nonviolent Resistance in One Palestinian Village
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Huffington Post
by Ellen Cantarow - (Opinion) December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel’s seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of “the wall,” begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.

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Bethlehem traders still waiting for Christmas cheer
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Washington Post
by Erika Soloman - December 1, 2009 - 1:00am

The lights are going up and carols are ringing from Manger Square, but Christmas cheer hasn't spread to all of Bethlehem's residents. While calm has returned to the Biblical birthplace of Jesus, scene of heavy fighting during the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, in the early years of this decade, big-spending foreign tourists have mostly not, say the shopkeepers and restaurant owners who depend on them for their livelihood.

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Prospects for peace against the wall
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The National
(Editorial) November 10, 2009 - 1:00am

It was moving to see a group of Palestinians tear down a section of the separation wall on Monday. They were sending a message to the Israelis: the Palestinians will not disappear just because you can no longer see them. Unfortunately, Israel doesn’t appear to be in the listening mood.

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Twenty years after Berlin, Palestinians crack Israel's wall
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
November 9, 2009 - 1:00am

Marking the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians tore down a section of Israel's wall in the West Bank village of Ni'lin on Friday. During a weekly protest against the barrier, which cuts through the Ramallah-area village's center and isolates residents from 60 percent of their farmland, some 300 demonstrators methodically dismantled a concrete section before Israeli forces opened fire.

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