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* The Jerusalem Municipality is refuting statistics published yesterday by the Palestinian Statistics Bureau that put the eastern Jerusalem Arab population figure at 210,000, calling them inflated. "According to our official numbers, it is not more than 170,000," said Jerusalem spokesman Haggai Elias.

* Preliminary Palestinian census results showed there were 210,209 Palestinians in east Jerusalem, about 30,000 more than previously estimated, according to Hassan Abu Libdeh, head of the Palestinian Statistics Bureau, at a news conference yesterday in Ramallah. He said that the figure for eastern Jerusalem was concluded from "previous censuses and our own assumptions about the likely course of growth of the Palestinian population of east Jerusalem." Elias said the figures were hard to believe "especially when we know, and the police know, that they didn't do the survey in Jerusalem. We think they just inflated the numbers, and we think they took numbers that included villages that are not part of Jerusalem."

* The Jerusalem census figures were part of the overall first-ever census that was conducted by the Palestinians in December. According to the census, 2.89 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.

* The most recent Israeli figures on the Palestinian population are from the fall of 1995, at which time 1.12 million Palestinians lived in the West Bank, 748,000 in the Gaza Strip and 180,000 in eastern Jerusalem, for a total of just over 2 million.

(By Elli Wohlgelernter - The Jerusalem Post - 27 Feb. 1998)

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* The present right-wing Israeli coalition government has placed a long list of conditions for fulfilling their commitments to the Oslo Accords. The most absurd of these conditions is the revision of the Palestinian Charter. In 1996, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) met and took a decision to cancel all the clauses that are in contradiction to the Oslo Accords. Despite this and the letter of assurance presented by President Arafat to US President Clinton confirming this fact, the Israeli government still uses the issue of the Charter as an excuse for not complying with its commitment to further redeployment from the Palestinian Territories. In the face of this Israeli intransigence, and in the same spirit of reciprocity and mutuality, the Palestinians should request Israel to annul all Israeli charters which have been transformed into law and affect Palestinians, and contradict their commitments to peace and to a historic reconciliation with the Palestinian people.

(By Ibrahim Mattar - The Jerusalem Times - 27 Feb. 1998)

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* Gennady Schpack in Secret reports on the recent demographic investigations at the Hebrew University. The scientists state that the number of Jews in the world will never reach its pre-war 17 million. For two decades it has been stabilized at 13 million. The number of Jews in Israel is growing, while that in the Diaspora is decreasing, due to assimilation and low birth rate. Commenting on this data, Schpack recalls Yasser Arafat's words: "The Arab woman's womb is our chief weapon," and warns: "High fertility in Arab families will one day help Palestinians outnumber Jews in their homeland."

(The Jerusalem Post - 4 March 1998)

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* Like Gaza airport, the construction of a port in Gaza to facilitate the Palestinians' trade with Europe and the United States remains blocked. "The Israelis are with-holding authorisation for the construction of the port," Santer noted, adding that once again he had been unable to convince Netanyahu to lift his objections."

* A recent report by the European Commission admitted for the first time that, despite EU assistance, living conditions in the Palestinian areas were deteriorating rapidly.

* Despite their growing impatience with Israel's policies, EU governments remain reluctant to apply any economic pressure on it. Santer said the EU was "powerless" - just like the US - when it came to influencing Israeli attitudes. He added that any talk of EU trade sanctions against Israel was unacceptable either for political reasons or because "we in the EU don't believe in economic boycotts".

(By Shada Islam - MEI - 27 Feb. 1998)

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* L'autre puissance régionale viole aussi les résolutions du Conseil de sécurité.

(Le Monde - Sélection Hebdomadaire - 7 Mars 1998)

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* There is general agreement among academic scholars that the Bible was compiled between the seventh century BCE and sometime shortly after the return from Babylonian exile at the end of the sixth century BCE. The Bible's editors had at their disposal, it is believed, some written records. These, however, did not go back as far as the Israelite incursion half a millennium before. In reconstructing early Israel, say some modern scholars, the editors used wisps of folk memory to weave a largely romanticized tale of a nomadic past, a purifying sojourn in the desert, and a golden age of the united kingdom under David and Solomon.

Beginning in the ninth century BCE, there is confirmation of some of the biblical story from external sources, principally the royal Assyrian archives which mention many of the kings of Israel and Judah whose names we know from the Bible. However, scholars have become increasingly dubious about accepting the biblical story prior to this period as holy writ. They cite as anachronisms the placing of Abraham in the land of the Philistines generations before the Philistines settled in the country and the inclusion of cities like Ai and Arad in the list of Joshua's conquests when archeology shows that they had been destroyed some 3000 years before the Israelites arrived. The compilers of the Bible, say some scholars, had noted the ruins at these sites and associated them with the conquest myth.

The united monarchy - founded about 1000 BCE, according to most reckonings - which was ruled by the pair before its rancorous split into the kingdoms, of Judah and Israel - was a largely imagined golden age wished into existence centuries later by the compilers of the Bible, these scholars suggest. Outlandish as that may sound, scholarship has not found it easy to prove this school wrong on the basis of hard evidence. A single stone inscription found at Tel Dan mentioning "the house of David" is the only extra-biblical written reference to either David or Solomon ever found and it was discovered only five years ago. Some of the new school of "biblical minimalists," as they are called, refuse to accept that as convincing confirmation of David's existence as a royal figure.

(By Abraham Rabinovich - The Jerusalem Post Magazine - 13 March 1998)

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* The Vatican yesterday expressed deep regret for the "errors and failures" of Roman Catholics during the Holocaust, but strongly defended wartime Pope Pius XII in a statement promised a decade ago to Jewish groups.

* The document includes a statement on Pius XII. "During and after the war, Jewish communities and Jewish leaders expressed their thanks for all that had been done for them, including what Pope Pius XII did personally or through his representatives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives."

(By Lisa Palmieri-Billig and news agencies - The Jerusalem Post - 17 March 1998)

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* Nazism is depicted as a neo-pagan regime and its anti-Semitism "had its roots outside of Christianity." The Church, it is stated, "condemns all forms of genocide," like the massacre of the Armenians, the victims in Ukraine, the genocide of the Gypsies. So in a document totally dedicated to the Shoah, its uniqueness is questioned.

(By Sergio Itzhak Minerbi - The Jerusalem Post - 17 March 1998)

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* Des stéréotypes qui ont "assoupi les consciences"

A l'issue du symposium qui avait réuni, les 30 et 31 octobre 1997 au Vatican, soixante historiens, exégètes et théologiens, le pape avait prononcé un discours où se trouvaient déjà en filigrane les idées développées, lundi 16 mars, dans le document sur la Shoah. Ainsi Jean Paul II condamnait-il "les interprétations erronées et injsutes du Nouveau Testament, relatives au peuple juif et à sa culpabilité. Ces erreurs ont engendré des sentiments d'hostililté à l'égard des juifs et contribué à assoupir des consciences, de sorte que, quand a déferlé sur l'Europe la vague des persécutions (...), à côté de chrétiens qui ont tout fait pour sauver les persécutés jusqu'au péril de leur vie, la résistance spirituelle de beaucoup n'a pas été celle que l'humanité était en droit d'attendre de la part de disciples du Christ". Le pape avait souliginé la spécificité de la Shoah, en ajoutant: A la malice morale de tout génocide, s'ajoute, avec la Shoah, la malice d'une haine qui s'en prend (...) au salut de Dieu sur l'Histoire."

(Le Monde/Sélection Hebdomadaire - 21 Mars 1998)

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* The Sephardi chief rabbi was speaking to reporters following the unprecedented visit of Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah to Bakshi-Doron and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau.

"It is an error to think that the dispute [between Arabs and Jews] is religious. The dispute is political and historical," Bakshi-Doron said.

At the close of the meeting, the two chief rabbis and the patriarch issued a joint call against violence and the use of religion as a pretext for violence. However, Sabbah stressed that he opposes all violence and the use of religion as a pretext for violence. However, Sabbah stressed that he opposes all violence, whether carried out by the IDF or by Palestinians. Sabbah also refused to apologize for the position of the Church during the Holocaust, claiming that the churches of the Middle East had not been a party to the mistakes made by Christians in Europe.

"The churches here in the east were not part of the mistakes of the church. We did not do it and we condemn it. If I apologize it is as if I did it," Sabbah said.

* Before the meeting, Lau asked Sabbah about the various communities of the Catholic Church. The chief rabbi appeared startled to hear that in addition to masses in Arabic and other languages, the Church also has masses in Hebrew "for Jews who are Christians."

(By Haim Shapiro - The Jerusalem Post - 24 March 1998)

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The authors of the Bible were obsessed with the story of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt. Throughout history, the western world has been too. We think it still is.

Excerpts:

* The Exodus has generated hundreds of erudite (and whacko) commentaries from a wildly diverse group people.

* Except the Bible, not a single shred of evidence exists that an Exodus of any kind ever occurred.

* If you doubt the Bible is a compilation of disparate sources, the variations of the Exodus story should give you pause.

* You could search this desert until your camel dehydrates, and you still would not come up with a mountain called Sinai.

(By Yadin Roman - Eretz Magazine - March-April 1998)

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