Word: jaffa
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...first thing to be said about Jerusalem, even if it has been said before, is that the ancient city is eternally new. In this magical place, sacred to three religions, the slopes outside the Jaffa Gate are ablaze with orange tulips, and rows of golden hyacinths sprout beneath the outstretching arms of the Moses Montefiore windmill. An unusual sight among the orange trees of the Mediterranean? "Ah, yes," a handsome Israeli woman sighs, "the Dutch sent us 100,000 bulbs when they moved away their embassy. So we planted them...
...precisely 11 a.m. one day last week, air raid sirens across Israel sounded a single, high-pitched "all clear" blast for two minutes, and the country came to a standstill. On Jaffa Road in the heart of Jerusalem, pedestrians froze in their tracks. Lounging border troops sprang to attention. Vehicles braked to a halt in the middle of intersections. Bus passengers rose to their feet-as did people all across the nation. In stores, restaurants and offices, conversations stopped, forks were put down, typewriters and business machines hushed. It was Israel's Memorial Day. In the silent vigil, Israelis...
Estimates today of the world's population of permanently unsettled refugees range between 10 million and 13 million. Every continent and virtually every nation has been affected. In the Middle East, there are 2.5 million Palestinians who still mourn for the vanished orange groves of Jaffa, which many have never seen. Throughout Africa there are perhaps 3 million refugees. They include victims of the civil war in Rhodesia, nomads in Algeria displaced by fighting in the western Sahara and countless thousands uprooted by Ethiopia's struggle against insurrection in Eritrea and the Ogaden desert. No war anywhere...
...millions of Palestinian exiles living in Lebanon, Jordan and other Arab states, they ask: Why should Jewish emigrants from Russia and the U.S. have the right to settle on land that Arabs have lived on for at least 1,000 years, while refugees born in Haifa and Jaffa cannot go home again...
What unifies the Palestinians most of all, however, is the endless battle against Israel. By now the fight has become almost a mockery of itself: the typical Palestinian longing for the orange groves of Jaffa has become ludicrous in a time when Jaffa itself has disappeared before the encroachments of Jewish Tel Aviv, and whatever orange groves remain are almost blotted out by industrial development. But the Palestinian dream has been kept alive, thanks to sophisticated political work by Arafat and other Palestinian leaders and the willingness of Arab governments to support (however grudgingly) a nearly lost cause...