ISRAEL

ISRAEL
The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 25: This is a sad Christmas in the Holy Land. Bethlehem, the city that represents peace and hope for Christians around the world, is today a measure of how far the world remains from redemption. The threat of terrorism emanating from Bethlehem has forced Israel to defend the lives of its people and send its soldiers back into the city of Jesus' birth. And so instead of finding its streets aglow with joy, those pilgrims able to reach the city are confronted with symbols of war and destruction.
Israel desperately wanted to avert this crisis. In August, Israel gambled with the lives of its people and restored rule in Bethlehem to the Palestinian Authority, which promised to prevent terror attacks from the area. It was supposed to be a test case of the restoration of PA rule in other West Bank cities.
Suicide bomber
In November came the results: A suicide bomber from Bethlehem detonated himself on a No. 20 bus in a Jerusalem neighborhood, killing 11 people, ages 67 to 13.
Caught in the crossfire of a seemingly endless conflict, the Palestinian Christian community is facing arguably the worst crisis in its long history in this land. No group embraced the Oslo process with as much hope as did the Palestinian Christians, who saw peace as their only chance for the survival of their community. Now, though, emigration has accelerated and an ancient community faces a tragic diminishment.
DENMARK
Politiken, Copenhagen, Dec. 23: In a few weeks, president Kim (Dae-jung) will leave the presidential palace and pass it on to another detente politician, Roh Moo-hyun, who won the recent presidential elections.
Kim bids farewell after a 40-year political career that has seen his glory fade of late. What's needed now is extensive reforms of the country's business life and its dominating influence on local and central government.
But when said, it is important to remember that South Korea is still a nation divided and operates under extremely difficult geopolitical conditions.
Desperate North Korea
The dialogue with the unpredictable and undoubtedly desperate North Korea must be kept going, and the alliance with the United States must be reconsidered in a way that will maintain the indisputable results that South Korea has achieved, first under authoritarian and later democratic presidents.
We wish them good luck with a certain assurance that the days of the good results are certainly not over.
SWEDEN
Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Dec. 23: Two-thirds of Iran's population is under the age of 30 and that generation is not satisfied with the state of things. They are not satisfied with the reforms of the current system. They want democracy. They want freedom of speech and openness.
The real optimists even draw a parallel with Poland, where national protests began to drive the first nails into what later became the coffin of the Soviet Union.
Naive? Yes, probably. The bitter truth is that the conservative forces in Iran still can crush nearly any expression of discontent whenever they want. But -- you could point out -- so could the Warsaw Pact's security services.
'Great Satan'
There is definitely something new in what we see in Iran. They (the students) believe that the problem can be found with the country's own regime, not with the "Great Satan."
The name of the solution is democracy at home, not aggression against the rest of the world. This is a mental change that will be hard to withstand in the long run. That was proven during the liberating of Eastern Europe.
JORDAN
The Jordan Times, Dec. 22: As Washington determined that there was a material breach in the Iraq declaration about its weapons of mass destruction, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, had a more equivocal point of view. Blix found the declaration incomplete. He was cautious in choosing his words and at no time did he claim that there was a material breach with regard to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441. Great Britain was also circumspect in evaluating the 12,000-page Iraqi document. London as well made no claim that whatever is wrong or missing in the Iraqi submissions warrant going to war.
Military action
As for the rest of the Security Council members, including Russia, France and China, it was clear to them that Iraq has not yet committed the kind of breach that would justify military action. Against this backdrop, the outcome of the ongoing debate and confusion about the next steps to be taken by the international community will depend on how Baghdad cooperates in having its scientists questioned outside the country. This very point could end up being the straw that breaks the camel's back.