You missed the boat if you wanted to pick up a nice little penthouse in Tel Aviv.

An unidentified Canadian real estate tycoon picked up a seafront penthouse, stull under construction, for a paltry $31 million, Globes reported.

The apartment is on the 20th and 21st floors and the balconies cover an area of 3,000 square feet, and that is not a typo – three thousand and not three hundred.

The “Herbert Samuel” project of 40 apartments is being built by Ofer Investments.

The project includes a swimming pool, spa and fitness room. If you want to buy in before it’s too late, there are four apartments left.

According to the organizers, Women in Green, the eyes of the world will be upon the Pollard demo, this Sunday, February 23, at 6 PM, in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, 81 Herbert Samuel Street (on the promenade).

“This is the first official Pollard demo in front of the US Embassy. Your presence is needed to ensure that, with God’s help, it will also be the last.”

• Stand up for a just cause, the release of Jonathan Pollard, after 29 years of affliction in American prisons for his service to Israel
• Contribute to absolute Jewish unity on this issue and on the many Jewish and Israeli issues that Pollard’s case represents
• Show the kind of solidarity that will ultimately define not only Pollard’s fate, but the fate of Israel

Along with the much needed rain that drenched Israel this past weekend, Tel Aviv experienced a different kind of rain – chocolates galore – at the city’s annual Chocolate Festival.

From chocolate shwarmas and kebabs, to chocolate jewelry, sculptures, and even a chocolate spa, the festival took place at the old train station in Yafo (Jaffa).

The three-day festival that began on Thursday featured top Israeli chocolatiers and chocolate-makers from across the country and an array of chocolate-related activities for visitors of all ages including chocolate sushi-making. Organized by Yael Rose, an Israeli living in London who has facilitated chocolate festivals across the United Kingdom for years, the Israeli festival attracted some 20,000 people this year.

“We took three things into consideration when organizing this year’s festival,” Eran Levy-Zaks, the press consultant for the festival, told Tazpit News Agency. “We had to choose a time when the Middle Eastern climate was conducive to chocolates – the cool weather in February is always great. And with Valentine’s Day and the general fact that Israelis love festivals, we decided that this was the time to do it.”

While the chocolate industry is not a large one in Israel, people traveled both near and far to attend the second annual Chocolate Festival. The chocolate stalls during the festival were packed, and even the rain didn’t keep too many people away.

Meital, a university student, traveled all the way from Haifa to try the chocolates. “It’s a unique experience and worth the trip,” she explained to Tazpir. “And I love chocolates – especially the sweet variety.” Next to her, Samira, an Arab Muslim  who walked from nearby Yafo, explains that she came the previous year and had to see what was in store for this year’s festival. “But bitter chocolate is my favorite,” she added.

At the boutique Holy Cacao Chocolate stand, flavors ranged from spicy Mexican chili-pepper chocolate to more traditional mint and coffee flavored chocolates. Founded by American Jo Zander, Holy Cacao is Israel’s first bean-to-bar chocolate maker. Located in Ma’aleh Hever in the southern Hebron Hills, it is the only Israeli chocolate maker that imports its cocoa beans.

Perhaps the festival’s most unusual attraction was a chocolate spa, run by Marina Kuzmenko, an owner of a spa in Nahariya which provides chocolate peel treatments to clients. Her chocolate concoction, which is 100% cocoa-based, remains a secret recipe and is inedible, explains Marina, who made aliyah from the Ukraine 15 years ago. “The chocolate is good for your skin and leaves it feeling soft and smelling like chocolate for days,” she says.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli negotiator and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni are the only two people who still believe in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said in Tel Aviv Monday night.

“The Israelis are the Palestinians are ambivalent towards their future and towards the chances for peace,” he told a conference with the highfalutin title of “Cross Border Environmental Issues and Water Resources in the Context of the Peace Process.”

On Thursday, Freidman will speak with journalists on the topic “There Goes the Neighborhood.” Seriously, that is what the blurb say, followed by, “How the Arab Awakening, Climate Change and Technology are changing the World around Israel.”

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an official arm of the Fatah party headed by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has posted a video that threatens to turn Tel Aviv into a “ball of fire.”

Incitement is nothing new for the Palestinian Authority, but one would think that Abbas would have a bit of sense to camouflage it a bit in order not to give  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a chance to whisper criticism of Ramallah. Such disproportionate comments by the Obama administration might not be forthcoming because then Abbas could blame the United States for siding with the Zionist lobby.

Abbas has carried out a brilliant diplomatic campaign since taking over from Yasser Arafat a bit less than a decade ago. He donned a suit and tie instead of a kefiah and a pistol on his hip. Abbas globetrotted and picked up support, country by country, while playing the talk game with the Bush and now the Obama administrations.

He managed to squeeze concession after concession from Israel, breaking down almost all of the previous red lines of the Olmert and Netanyahu governments.

But the incitement on official Palestinian Authority media baffles the imagination.

The Al Aqsa Brigades is the “military” arm of Fatah. That spells “terror” in a normal world, but in this age, terrorists are resistance fighters, freedom fighters or, in the worst scenario, militants.

Abbas has not noticed that the world is getting a bit fed up with him and cannot forever ignore the constant incitement, which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said last year really does not exist because Abbas has done such a great job in gagging it.

Even Kerry cannot be deaf and blind forever. On second thought, let’s not go there.

If anyone has his email, please send him the video below. The audio was translated and published by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

The enemy must understand that the Martyr Commander Nidal Al-Amoudi left behind an army of well-trained fighters. We swear to you that we will turn the beloved [Gaza] Strip into a graveyard for your soldiers, and we will turn Tel Aviv into a ball of fire,” say the brave masked resistance fighters, holding their peace-loving rifles.

To make the video more entertaining, they even provided a cheerful song that “we are going on the way. We are the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ [Brigades]

“Oh usurper, don’t forget it.”

The full video is eight minutes long and shows footage of masked men in military training, arsenals of weapons, missiles being launched, as well as footage of Israelis running for shelter during missile attacks.

PMW recently reported on another terror promotion video that Fatah publicized, which included threats to kidnap, kill, and bomb Israelis. That video was also produced by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

WARNING: This video will be found offensive by anyone associated with the U.S. State Dept., the European Union and the United Nations.

You have been warned.

Thousands of illegal Sudanese and Eritrean illegal infiltrators took their campaign to remain in Israel to 12 embassies in Tel Aviv Wednesday in a protest march.

They accused Israel of not properly examining their claims they fled their native countries as refugees and not as people seeking a higher standard of living.

Simultaneous protests are taking place at Israeli embassies in the United States, Canada and 11 other countries

The past few days in Israel have seen a well organized protest campaign of thousands of illegal African migrants, mostly from Eritrea and the Sudan, on the roads, in front of the Knesset, and in a park in central Tel Aviv. The demonstrations, on behalf of an estimated 50,000 illegal migrants, is coordinated with the hunger strike of some 130 prisoners in Saharonim prison, who are slated for deportation to their home countries.

Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative in Israel Walpurga Englbrecht blasted Israel’s new semi-open Holot facility in the south, saying it is a detention center for all intents and purposes.

She’s right, of course. Israel is facing a major social and demographic crisis, begun in the 1990s, as local wars in the Horn of Africa began to result in poverty and hunger, driving out hundreds of thousands of people in search of work. This influx of cheap, illegal labor happened just in time to fill in for the missing Arab workers from the newly created Palestinian Authority, whose entry into Israel was being curbed because of rampant terrorism.

In a manner reminiscent of the illegal Mexican migrant workers situation in the American South West until about the market crash of 2008, Israeli business, especially agriculture, but industry as well, cultivated the illegal African migration.

She’s also selective in her view of the migrant worker crisis in the region. While Israel to date has deported some 13,000 Africans out of an estimated 60,000, all them leaving willingly, according to the authorities—Saudi Arabia has been forcibly deporting more than half a million legal migrants, against their will, back to their home countries across the region.

One of the reasons may be that while the Sudanese and Eritreans in the Israeli democracy enjoy the right to assemble and the right to demonstrate – similar behavior would land them in prison, if not worse, in The Kingdom.

Englbrecht was also correct in pointing out that Israel acted in a most unprofessional and irresponsible manner in its treatment of the influx of migrants. “The Israeli government awarded temporary shelter to many Eritreans and Sudanese, but for many of them their status is being changed drastically,” she told the Army Radio. “One of the problems was that these people have never been processed properly, to discover if they were refugees or employment seekers.”

Englbrecht said Israel had made a big mistake by not discovering early on why these Africans had left their countries, and why had they crossed three different borders on the way.

What she didn’t mention was the fact that, on top of mishandling the illegal migrants, as supply began to outweigh the demand for labor in Israel, Israel was also neglecting and mistreating Israel’s poorest citizens, whose neighborhoods were eventually invaded by a myriad unemployed, uneducated, downtrodden foreigners.

At that point, under the poor management of a succession of governments run by Labor, Likud, Kadima and Likud again, the true magnitude of Israeli suffering under the lawless rule of these supposed “refugees” was being swept under the rug.

An African illegal sleeping on the ground in a south Tel Aviv playground. Photo credit: Abir Sultan/Flash 90

An NGO named Eitan-Center for Israeli Immigration Policy, documented an astonishing history of official lies about illegal acts committed by Africans against Israel’s most defenseless population: the working poor and the elderly, by and large of Sephardi descent, were stuck, economically immobilized, in perpetual purgatory.

Dozens of illegal African infiltrators have voluntarily left Israel for Sweden with a $3,500 government grant, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday. The move was coordinated with the Swedish government and the United Nations Commission on Refugees, which has criticized Israel for not allowing the infiltrators to remain.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu emphasized on Monday that Israel is taking care of all refugees as required by international law but that every African looking for work in Israel is not a refugee.

Meanwhile, African infiltrators continued their protests in Tel Aviv for the third consecutive day and thousands of them staged a protest march on Tuesday from Levinsky Park to Rabin Square.

Approximately 150 protesters are on their second day of a hunger strike at the Sahaornim detention center in the Negev.