Mom can come to the bat mitzvah. Her orthopedist told her to take it easy, use her cane, and get a wheelchair to go through the airports. She’s going to stay in a hotel room with my cousins, which leaves the sofabed for my brother.

And I had a great haftarah session with Elisson today. I seem to have turned a corner in the learning process. We were only going to do a few lines, and wound up doing nearly all of the second half. I was reading the last few lines cold, having never practiced them, and doing fairly well at it. Looks like I’m picking up the trope after all.

Shabbat shalom, and thanks for the well-wishes. They’re working.

Another good news story for us all.

A Dutch couple posthumously received the highest honor for non-Jews from Israel’s Holocaust center Thursday for their bravery in sheltering a Jewish family from the Nazis during World War II.

Hendrikus and Martha Snapper were named “Righteous Among the Nations” at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

[...] As a labor official in the town of Naaldwijk, Hendrikus Snapper was confronted early on with the registration of Jews, the appropriation of Jewish property and the expulsion of Jewish children from public schools, Yad Vashem officials said.

In the summer of 1942, he became active in a local underground group and was put in contact with a Jewish couple, Rosa and Levy de Hartog.

The de Hartogs had received a deportation notice and were frantically searching for a hiding place. The Snappers decided to open their home to Rosa de Hartog, whom they presented as their housekeeper. They found hiding places for Levy de Hartog and their five children, according to Yad Vashem officials.

[...] “Most houses (in the Netherlands) were too small for hiding spaces. People had to take in strangers in clear view and concoct a reason for their presence,” said Johan Snapper, the Snappers’ son, now a professor of German and Dutch studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

The penalty for hiding Jews was a concentration camp or death, Snapper said, speaking at the ceremony. “Our parents understood that.”

In May 1943, a massive recruitment of Dutch men for forced labor in Germany began. Snapper used his position at the labor exchange to forge documents and falsify information for the de Hartogs.

[...] The entire de Hartog family survived the war and was reunited afterward. A photograph of the two families together after liberation was on display during the ceremony.

More than 30 members of the extended Snapper family traveled to Israel for the ceremony. Surviving children of the de Hartogs - Truus de Hartog of the Netherlands, and Salomon de Hartog of Israel - were also present.

“Nothing has ever made a bigger impact on me, as young as I was,” Johan Snapper said of witnessing his parents’ heroism.

Shabbat Shalom.

In other nations, when the elected government of a nation takes responsibility for an armed attack on another nation’s soldiers, it’s called a war. But this is Israel, where none of the regular rules apply.

Hamas took responsibility on Friday for a shooting attack near a West Bank settlement in which an IDF soldier was seriously wounded.

Wednesday’s attack began at the Ariel junction, where terrorists sprayed a hitchhiking post with bullets from 100 to 150 meters away before speeding down a busy road while firing at passing cars.

A previously unknown offshoot of Fatah had taken responsibility for the shooting, which also lightly wounded a civilian.

But Hamas said Friday in a statement on its Web site that it was responsible. The claim, which appeared to be more reliable than that of the Fatah group, was delayed in order to give the attackers time to evade Israeli security, the group said.

Hamas operatives “continue their heroic and high-quality operations to teach the enemy a lesson,” the statement said.

So the democratically-elected government of the Palestinian terrortories[sic] is taking responsibility for armed terrorist attacks on civilians, and is bragging about nearly killing a soldier. These are the people that Jimmy Carter and others think Israel should include in the upcoming conference with the Palestinians.

I think they should talk to them, too. With the business end of an Uzi. Or a Hellfire missile.

A modern Orthodox rabbi from Los Angeles has published an essay in the Jewish Journal saying his reasons why Jerusalem should be negotiated. In order not to take any of his comments out of context I will print the entire article here:

The question of whether we could bear a redivision of Jerusalem is a searing and painful one. The Orthodox Union, National Council of Young Israel and a variety of other organizations, including Christian Evangelical ones, are calling upon their constituencies to join them in urging the Israeli government to refrain from any negotiation concerning the status of Jerusalem at all, when and if the Annapolis conference occurs. And last week, as I read one e-mail dispatch after another from these organizations, I became more and more convinced that I could not join their call.

It’s not that I would want to see Jerusalem divided. It’s rather that the time has come for honesty. Their call to handcuff the government of Israel in this way, their call to deprive it of this negotiating option, reveals that these organizations are not being honest about the situation that we are in, and how it came about. And I cannot support them in this.

These are extremely difficult thoughts for me to share, both because they concern an issue that is emotionally charged, and because people whose friendship I treasure will disagree strongly with me. And also because I am breaking a taboo within my community, the Orthodox Zionist community. “Jerusalem: Israel’s Eternally Undivided Capital” is a 40-year old slogan that my community treats with biblical reverence. It is an article of faith, a corollary of the belief in the coming of the Messiah. It is not questioned. But this final reason why it is difficult for me to share these thoughts is also the very reason that I have decided to do so. This is a conversation that desperately needs to begin.

No peace conference between Israel and the Palestinians will ever produce anything positive until both sides have decided to read the story of the last 40 years honestly. On our side, this means being honest about the story of how Israel came to settle civilians in the territories it conquered in 1967, and about the outcomes that this story has generated.

An honest reading of this story reveals that there were voices in the inner circle of the Israeli government in 1967-1968 who warned that settling civilians in conquered territories was probably illegal under international law. But for very understandable reasons — among them security needs, Zionist ideologies of both the both secular and religious varieties, memories that were 20 years old, and memories that were 3,000 years old — these voices were overruled. We can identify with many of the ideas that carried the settlement project forward. But the fact remains that it is simply not honest on our part to pretend that the government of Israel didn’t know that there was likely a legal problem, or that the government was confident that international conventions did not apply to this situation. That just wouldn’t be an honest telling.

An honest reading of the story reveals that the heroes of Israel’s wars who became the ministers in its government, who were most responsible for the initial decision to settle, were quite aware that by doing so they were risking conflict with the Arab population that was living there. They were aware that these Arabs would never be invited to become citizens of Israel, and would never have the rights of citizens. Nonetheless, they decided to go forward. Some believed that the economic benefit that would accrue to these Arabs as a result of their interactions with Israelis and Israel would be so great that they wouldn’t mind our military and civilian presence among them. Others projected that some sort of diplomatic arrangement would soon be reached with Jordan that would soften the face of what would otherwise be full-blown military occupation. These may have been reasonable projections at the time. But as it turned out, both of them were wrong. And it’s not honest to tell the story without acknowledging that we made these mistakes.

The Religious Zionist leadership (similar to today’s Evangelical supporters of Israel) made a different judgment, namely that settling the Biblical heartland would further hasten the unfolding of the messianic age. Thus, the Arab population already there was not our problem. God would deal with it. This belief too — reasonable though it may have seemed at the time — has also turned out to be wrong. To tell the story honestly, this mistake too must be acknowledged.

And the difference that honest storytelling makes is enormous. When we tell our story honestly, our position at the negotiating table is one that is informed not only by our own needs and desires, but also by our obligations and responsibilities. The latter include the responsibility to — in some way, in some measure — fix that which we have done. Also included is the need to recognize that we have some kind of obligation toward the people who have been harmed by our decisions. Honesty in our telling of the story reveals the stark and candid reality that we also need to speak the language of compromise and conciliation. Not only the language of entitlement and demands.

To be sure, I would be horrified and sick if the worst-case division-of-Jerusalem scenario were to materialize. The possibility that the Kotel, the Jewish Quarter or the Temple Mount would return to their former states of Arab sovereignty is unfathomable to me, and I suspect to nearly everyone inside the Israeli government. At the same time though, to insist that the government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story — a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule the people we conquered, a story in which we don’t owe anything to anyone. Cries of protest, in particular from organizations that oppose Israel’s relinquishing anything at all between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and which have never offered any alternative solutions to the ones they are protesting against, are rooted in the refusal to read history honestly. And I — for one — cannot lend my support to that.

Without a doubt, the Palestinians aren’t telling an honest story either. They are not being honest about their record of violence against Jews in the pre-State era, or about the obscene immorality with which they attacked Israeli civilians during the second intifada. They are not being honest about the ways in which their fellow Arabs are responsible for so much of the misery that they — the Palestinians — have endured, and they certainly are not being honest about the deep and real historical connection that the Jewish people has to this land and to this holy city. And there will not be peace (and perhaps there should be no peace conference) until they tell an honest story as well. But for us to take the approach that in order to defend and protect ourselves from their dishonest story, we must continue telling our own dishonest story, is to travel a road of unending and unendable conflict. Peace will come only when and if everyone at the table has the courage, the strength, and enough fear of God to tell the story as it really is.

For many decades we have sighed and asked, “When will peace come?” The answer is starkly simple. There will be peace the day after there is truth.

Rabbi Kanefsky says many right things, and he makes a few mistakes, to reach a very wrong conclusion.

He is entirely correct that there cannot be peace until there is truth. Unfortunately, he is not being entirely honest himself as he conflates the history of Jerusalem after 1967 with that of Judea and Samaria - the Israeli government annexed Jerusalem and did offer citizenship to all its Arab residents, so his arguments would be more powerful if he would only be referring to the rest of the West Bank and not Jerusalem.

His major mistakes, though, are not historical but tactical. His yearning for truth in negotiations may be admirable, but when one is in a situation where only one side is willing to tell the truth, it puts that side at an enormous disadvantage in a neutral forum.

I touched upon this point recently when I discussed the British commission of inquiry after the 1929 riots, where they listened to the Arab claims of ownership of the Western Wall and the Jewish claims that only God owns the wall - and they sided with the Arabs. The Jews could have made a compelling legal case for historic ownership of the entire Temple Mount but instead they told the truth. And in that forum, they lost.

Whenever third parties look at competing claims, they make the assumption that both claimants are fundamentally honest and that the truth is somewhere in between. When one side has no compunctions about lying, that side has a tremendous advantage over the side that is willing to admit mistakes. Honesty will be used against the truth-tellers.

Simply put, the Arab/Israeli conflict is a land dispute. If one side claims all the land and the other side equivocates about that question, naturally the side that claims it all is in a position of power.

This is not to say that Israel should lie. Its true claims are powerful enough, if they are not often stated as well as they should be. But this means that Israel should not negotiate by showing its hand as to what it is willing to give up - because these are essentially one-way negotiations, the question is how much land Israel will end up losing, and not what she will get in return because that is intangible (and almost certainly fantasy.) An “honest” negotiator will always lose because you will never find both sides putting on the table their final position.

Israel’s legal, moral and historic claims to Jerusalem - and the entire West Bank as well - are very strong, but they have been given up by successive Israeli governments, in some part because of this desire for “honesty.” Is Israel in better shape now than before Oslo? Is real peace any closer? Has Israel reaped rewards for its honest negotiations, which translates directly into capitulations?

It is unfortunate but becoming increasingly clear that “peace” is literally impossible with the current generation of Arabs. “Honesty,” goodwill gestures, pleading, and the intense interest of most of the world has led to nothing. Israel’s relative safety vis a vis its neighbors (as opposed to terror groups) is a result not of peaceful negotiations but because of Israel’s success at war.

Sure Israel has made mistakes. No one should cover up errors or change history. But honesty has little to do with negotiations.

Kanefsky’s major error is the assumption that both sides want peace and have the capability to deliver, and his advice (glowingly quoted in The Forward) is very, very wrong.

See also “The Case for a Larger Israel” for a completely different way of looking at things.

The Washington Post about the sanctions against the Revolutionary guards:

“The president does not want to be stuck — and doesn’t want his successor to be stuck — between two bad choices: living with an Iranian nuclear weapon or using military force to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons,” said Peter D. Feaver, who recently left a staff position on the National Security Council. “He is looking for a viable third way, negotiations backed up by carrots and sticks, that could resolve the Iranian nuclear file on his watch or, failing that, offer a reasonable prospect of doing so on his successor’s watch.” Even so, the administration’s actions yesterday immediately rekindled fears among Democrats and other countries that the administration is on a path toward war. Bush’s charged rhetoric in recent months, including a warning that Iran could trigger a “nuclear holocaust,” and his close consultations with hard-liners — such as former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz — have led many outside the White House to conclude that the president will order airstrikes to eliminate any Iranian nuclear capability. “The choice of words has given rise to concerns about just how serious the president is about stopping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold on his watch,” said Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran.

For those who oppose the action why? If President Bush saw war as a first option he’d be laying the groundwork for that now. But he’s trying to restrain Iran through diplomatic means. Why the objection? Is it a general objection to everything the administration does or is it because an Iranian nuclear capability isn’t something that worries his critics? As Allahpundit writes:

I wrote about this once before in the context of the Palestinians but it bears noting anew that sanctions are, theoretically, an option favored by the left precisely because they don’t involve military force. “We have other levers of power besides the Army,” they’re forever reminding us. Which is true; Bush is using one of those levers now. Are they happy? Of course not.

To Sen Clinton’s rivals this diplomatic maneuver is “saber rattling!” And Sen. Clinton sensitive to the criticism is already looking for a way out. more from memeorandum.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

There was a typically arrogant column in Ha’aretz earlier this week, Nimrodi’s Test by one Ehud Asheri. It’s about the change in leadership at the helm of the competing daily, Ma’ariv.

Ofer Nimrodi, owner of the mass-circulation daily newspaper Ma’ariv, has been experiencing something unfamiliar these days: rare esteem and praise is greeting the appointment of the editors-in-chief Doron Galezer and Ruthie Yuval, the likes of which the battered publisher has never enjoyed.Fifteen years after he bought the newspaper, there appears at long last the possibility that he will be extricated from his outsider position in print journalism and will earn equal status in the exclusive club of the veteran publishers who, unlike him, were born into the industry.

The change in the way the wind is blowing can be attributed first of all to what Galezer and Yuval represent: traditional, independent, investigative journalism that is not linked by umbilical cord to wealth, does not habitually hobnob socially with politicians in the places they frequent, and is not tainted by obsequious populism.

Both of them grew up in the solid school of the Haaretz group, and both have proven that it is possible to maintain the values of classical journalism even in the commercial environment of the mass circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth, and television’s Channel 2.

Gee that’s subtle. Ha’aretz doesn’t stand for anything high minded. It is New York Times of Israel. For those who like Ha’aretz, that’s meant as a compliment, for those who don’t, well, I don’t need to spell it out.

The author then goes to dismiss outgoing Ma’ariv editor Amnon Dankner.

The departing editor, Amnon Dankner, was Nimrodi’s energetic defender in the criminal affairs in which the latter was embroiled, and Dankner’s appointment gave the signal for two main trends in the editorial line: the popular bordering on sensationalism, and a battle against “the rule of law and order gangs” (and the old elites in general).

One of Dankner’s sins was that he didn’t automatically assume that everyone involved in Israel’s legal system was above criticism as most folks at Ha’aretz assume. That’s why it’s implied that he was against the rule of law.

Until now, you could dismiss Yedioth Ahronot - too commercial and Ma’ariv - too sensational, but you could always rely on Ha’aretz. Yes, siree. As good as money in the bank.

Of course, maybe Mr. Asheri ought to be careful and not hurt his arm while he pats himself on his back. Michael Totten reports

The Syrian state-run propaganda organ Cham Press published a fake story about Lebanese Member of Parliament Walid Jumblatt’s supposed plan to meet Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in the United States last weekend to coordinate a regime-change in Syria. No Western media organization I know of took this non-story seriously. Israeli media, though, scooped it right up. Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Infolive TV published their own articles about the imaginary meeting between Jumblatt and Barak. None had a source for their story other than the Syrian government’s website.

And that led to

Cham Press now says Israel’s Omedia reported that Jumblatt met with Barak and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in Washington. Cham Press no longer quotes only itself; it quotes Israeli websites as backup. But the only reason Israeli media reported any of this in the first place is the initial false story appearing in Cham Press. Syrian media is still just quoting itself—only now it does so through Israel.

Credibility is an important asset for any news organization. I suspect that this wasn’t the first time Ha’aretz has been fooled. What that saying I’ve heard about pride?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

via memeorandum

The New York Times reports that - commercially available - satellite photographs confirm what the Washington Post reported a few days ago: Syria has cleaned up the target of Israel’s September raid.

“It’s a magic act — here today, gone tomorrow,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t lower suspicions, it raises them. This was not a long-term decommissioning of a building, which can take a year. It was speedy. It’s incredible that they could have gone to that effort to make something go away.”Any attempt by Syrian authorities to clean up the site would make it difficult, if not impossible, for international weapons inspectors to determine that exact nature of the activity there. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna have said they hoped to analyze the satellite images and ultimately inspect the site in person. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that released a report on the Syrian site earlier this week, said the expurgation of the building was inherently suspicious.

“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”

(Question: The photographs were available commercially. So why didn’t the IAEA obtain them instead of waiting for someone to give them photographs? Just what we need a passive-aggressive watchdog agency!)

Q & O notes

Seems to me if it was an empty building the Israelis took out, the Syrians would milk it for every bit of propaganda value possible (hopefully more skillfully that Saddam’s “Baby Milk Factory”). Instead we have what looks like a scrubbed site.

Bits Blog adds some observations about the terrain.

The building that you see in one picture and don’t see in the other, is in a bit of a valley. That valley, gravity drains into the river. It’s also apparently deep enough, to make it a serious problem for anyone trying to do an air strike unless you’re coming at it from the west. The topo of the neighborhood suggests a drop off of about 150ft. below average terrain. This would be consistent, to my mind with a nuclear installation, not as I say an aspirin factory. I’m not sure how tall the building was, but it seems reasonable to assume that the site was picked and possibly re-landscaped slightly… so as to hide the roof below the average terrain.

The Washington Post reports:

Under IAEA guidelines, construction of any part of a nuclear reactor without formal, advance notice would violate the nation’s obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.Officials of the watchdog agency have declined comment on the new photos. The IAEA has acquired its own commercial satellite photographs of the Syrian site but has not completed its analysis, an IAEA official said.

On Friday, the IAEA had gotten pictures from the U.S. government but hadn’t finished analyzing them. Now, nearly a week later they have commercial pictures and haven’t finished analyzing them. Damn, they’re efficient.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Israel’s main cable provider may drop CNN from their menu.

With negotiations over a new contract at a stalemate, Israel’s largest cable provider is set to bump CNN from its program roster at the end of the month.

The news that the Atlanta-based network might soon disappear from a majority of Israeli living rooms will probably not come as a disappointment to a vocal segment of the Israeli viewing public that views the cable network’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East as biased against the Jewish state.

But don’t start cheering quite yet. Look what they’re thinking of replacing it with:

Yet the same crowd is unlikely to be very happy with this week’s announcement about the channel that the cable and telecommunications company HOT is poised to sign to a contact instead: Al-Jazeera English.

Yossi Lubaton, a spokesman for HOT, says a deal with the controversial Qatar-based news network is imminent. It “should be finalized within a few days,” the Israeli English-language daily Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying.

You have got to be kidding me. Israel is not only fighting an uphill battle in the world media, but their major cable provider is ready to put money in the pockets of the most virulently anti-Israel network this side of Hezbollah and Hamas-TV?

It was unclear whether HOT’s disclosure this week of its talks with Al-Jazeera - dubbed “Terror TV” by some for its broadcast of videotapes by Osama bin Laden on its main Arabic-language channel - is simply a way to force CNN to back down in the current contract talks.

Earlier this year, the cable company successfully renegotiated new and more lucrative contracts with BBC Prime, National Geographic and Fox Sports after it announced its intention to drop them from programming.

Here’s hoping. Because I don’t want to believe that Israelis are truly that dumb.