On Saturday, Palestinians tried to set up another illegal outpost. This latest attempt was in the Jordan Valley, near the town of Maskiot.

Border Police took down the 19 tents. No Arabs were arrested, and injuries were reported on either side.

Last week, Arabs set up an illegal outpost in E1, near Maaleh Adumim, which was eventually taken down.

On Friday, the Arabs built an illegal tent outpost next to Ramot in Jerusalem.

Police are preparing for Arab riots, as Otzma L’Yisrael political leader Michael Ben-Ari and his party’s supporters are planning a march inside the Arab town of Musmus in the Wadi Ara region on Tuesday.

They will be marching under the slogan of, “Without duties, there are no rights.”

Ben-Ari claims that many Israeli Arabs, and even entire villages are not not paying taxes, building illegally, and generally ignoring the laws of the state.

Police are expecting a large, and potentially violent counter-protest in the village. Residents of the village have called for a general strike today, and hundreds have been reported as protesting at the junction at the entrance to the village.

Musmus is located just north of Um El Fahm, and 13 miles east of Zichron Yaacov.

On Sunday afternoon, IDF forces arrested three suspicious Arabs at the Gush Etzion junction, averting a terror attack.

All three were carrying knives, and during their interrogation admitted that they were planning on committing a terror attack when the IDF caught them.

Speaking in a closed forum to his soldiers, Etzion brigade commander, Colonel Yani Elaluf said that,  ”We aren’t at the threshold of a third Initifada, based on the number of attacks in Judea and Samaria, we’re already in the third Initifada.”

He expressed optimism, that unlike the previous Initifada, this time the IDF is prepared to fight it properly.

Since the outbreak a few weeks ago within the Palestinian Authority, 190 arabs have been infected with swine flu also known as H1N1, and 9 have died so far.

In 2009, a 34 year Palestinian man contracted the H1N1 virus during his pilgrimage to Mecca and became the PA’s first swine flu fatality.

In what the Israeli police are now calling a nationalistic (terror) attack, an Arab taxi driver drove into a border policeman at the Oz police station near Jaabel Mukaber in Jerusalem (the Armon HaNatziv neighborhood).

The taxi driver (39) from Jaabel Mukaber drove up to the police station gate and hit a delivery truck that was parked nearby. The border policeman at the gate then approached the taxi driver who quickly reversed and then drove forward right into the border policeman.

Three other policemen at the station then pulled their guns and shot the driver, lightly wounding him in the leg.

MDA treated both the policeman and the driver.

Police closed all the roads near Armon Hanatziv.

Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President George H. W. Bush, former assistant to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, a member of the State Department for the last thirty years and a renowned critic of Israel, told Russia Today TV in an interview that Israel’s recent Operation Pillar of Defense was a preemptive attack against civilians, which was baseless and uncalled for.

“The fact that one side commits occasional acts of terrorism does not justify state terrorism,” Freeman said about Israel’s strikes against Hamas in Gaza.

“In this case, there was not rocket fire of any consequence from the Gaza Strip prior to Israel’s inauguration of the military raid that killed the military leader of Hamas… You can’t bomb people into peaceful coexistence.”

Freeman suggested the timing of the operation was not a coincidence: “It’s popular in Israel to kill many Palestinians in Gaza…a war against Hamas wins votes.”

According to Freeman, the rabbis and settlers are to blame for Israel’s belligerent military actions. Explaining the significance of the name Pillar of Cloud by its biblical meaning, Freeman expounded: “The religious element in the Israeli armed forces, largely settler driven … religion is very much bounded up with its operations. The language of some of the rabbis during [operation] Cast Lead was simply hair-raising in terms of evoking Old Testament images of genocide against non-Jews…evoking memories of Old Testament violence raises questions… This is a typical example of what the Israelis call Hasbara, which is the control of the narrative and propaganda (it actually means simply PR – JP), and they do it very well.”

It should be noted that the names of IDF operations are generated by computer, chosen from a bank of random words, and not picked by rabbis for their religious implications. Freeman would have to explain the biblical significance of Operation Summer Rains (28 June – 26 November 2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (31 October–7 November 2006), Operation Orchard (6 September 2007), and Operation Sea Breeze (31 May 2010).

Freeman had much to say about the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. He claimed that Israel can influence staffing in the American security establishment, as a means of extending its own defense. He denied there was a similar Arab lobby, suggesting it’s a fiction of the Israel lobby’s imagination.

“The Arabs have plenty of money, but they also have no understanding of importance of institutions,” Freeman said, adding: “They don’t have a habit of sustained effort on anything…probably many of them consider it improper to buy votes, and I happen to agree with them. They are behind the times, unfortunately, every one else is doing it.”

We consulted Wikipedia on Freeman’s previous remarks regarding the Jewish state:

In a 2005 speech to a conference of the The National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Freeman stated, “As long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected. Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent.”

In a 2006 speech to the annual U.S.-Arab Policymakers Conference, Freeman said that Americans allowing Israel to “call the shots in the Middle East” had “revealed how frightened Israelis now are of their Arab neighbors” and that the results of the “experiment” were that “left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them, and enrage those who are not.”

In a 2007 speech to the Pacific Council on International Policy Freeman said that “Al Qaeda has played us with the finesse of a matador exhausting a great bull by guiding it into unproductive lunges.” He cited the 2003 invasion of Iraq which “transformed an intervention in Afghanistan most Muslims had supported into what looks to them like a wider war against Islam.” He held that the U.S. had “embraced Israel’s enemies as our own” and that Arabs had “responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies.” He chared that the U.S. now backed Israel’s “efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations” and to “seize ever more Arab land for its colonists.”

One person was injured, and a few cars and buses were damaged by Arab rock throwing near Karmei Tzur on Highway 60.

The victim was treated by an IDF medical crew for a head injury at Karmei Tzur.

King Abdullah II of Jordan arrived in Ramallah on Thursday, in the first visit by an Arab leader since “Palestine’s admission to the United Nations as a state,” Maan reports.

The new state’s president Mahmoud Abbas and the new state’s prime minister Salam Fayyad welcomed the king along with PLO and Fatah members as well as ministers and members of clergy.

Only 42 years ago, King Abdullah’s father, His Majesty King Hussein, slaughtered  at least 10 thousand Palestinians, in what became known as Black September, 1970.

The Palestinians’ capacity for forgiveness and acceptance of their neighbors is truly admirable.

Jordan’s premier Abdullah al-Nusoor was to accompany Abdullah along with foreign minister Nasser Judah and other officials.