This week’s Shire Network News is out. The feature interview is with Barry Rubin of The GLORIA Center. My piece is on Israel’s 60th birthday, and is available on my site as well.

One aspect of Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians that’s constant is that whatever Israel offers will be dismissed as an insult or some other epithet.

Now that negotiations are coming down to nitty-gritty details like borders, the cries start anew. The Jerusalem Post reports:

“Today, it’s clear to us that Israel has no intention of withdrawing from all the territories that were occupied in 1967,” said one official.”If the Israelis and Americans think that they will ever find a Palestinian leader who would accept less than the 1967 borders, they are living under an illusion.”

Another top PA official said that maps presented by the Israeli government to the Palestinians in the past few weeks showed that Israel is planning to retain control over nearly half of the West Bank and large parts of eastern Jerusalem.

The Israeli maps, he said, “turn the Palestinian communities in the West Bank into cantons surrounded by Israeli military bases and large settlement blocs.”

The official added: “We have made it clear to both the Israelis and Americans that they should throw away these maps. No Palestinian will ever agree to the presence of settlements or Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. This is in violation of [US President George W.] Bush’s vision of two states living next to each other in peace.”

First of all, even George W. Bush’s vision of two states doesn’t specify the boundaries. If the boundaries are unacceptable to them and the Palestinians refuse to make peace, then they’re the ones who are are refusing to abide by the president’s vision. Maybe they think they have a good reason for doing so, but they’d still be the ones preventing an agreement.

Then there’s this:

“The Israeli government is not serious about the peace talks,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior PLO official closely associated with Abbas. “We don’t believe that we can reach an agreement [with Israel] before the end of this year.”Abed Rabbo accused Israel of “deceiving” the Palestinians by continuing to build settlements while talking about the need to reach a peace deal.

“Israel does not want to change its policy,” he added. “Israel wants to continue settlement expansion and the construction of the separation wall.”

These statements are clearly designed to elicit Amerian pressure on Israel. By mentioning “the end of the year” - President Bush’s goal - Abed Rabbo is effectively asking the Americans to get Israel to agree to the Palestinian demands rather than attempting to compromise.

The Spine observes that in Belfast, it’s the separation wall that is widely credited with keeping the peace. (He also points out that the “cantons” charge is false.) But in the Middle East the “wall” becomes one more brickbat to toss Israel’s way. Israel Matzav contrasts the (strategic) pessimism of the Palestinians with the expressed optimism of the Israelis.

(via memeorandum)

Of course the real problem might be that Israel wants to hold on to anything.

“The PLO is the sole legitimate representative [of the Palestinian people], and it has not changed its platform even one iota. In light of the weakness of the Arab nation and the lack of values, and in light of the American control over the world, the PLO proceeds through phases, without changing its strategy. Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine.”

(h/t Daled Amos)

But maybe Israel should at least fight for the life of Imad Sa’ad. I don’t know that he really helped Israel, but that’s what he’s been convicted of. For all I know he looked at someone wrong and got denounced.

However, if Palestinians are executed for helping Israel fight terror, while terrorists are lionized the peace process is a sham. (Another deadly activity for Palestinians is selling land to Jews. Getting killed for real estate transactions is hardly conducive to coexistence.)

Still this is a point Israel ought to pursue. After all the PA considers terrorists worthy of release, Israel should, at least, demand freedom for someone who’s been convicted of helping not harming.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In War of the rockets, Jackson Diehl writes:

For months now, Israel has been mired in an unwinnable war against Hamas and allied militias in Gaza, who fire missiles at civilians in Israel and then hide among their own women and children, ensuring that retaliatory fire will produce innocent victims for the Middle East’s innumerable satellite television networks. A growing number of the militiamen have been to Iran for training, and some of the missiles they launch are Iranian-made. Their objective is obvious: to exhaust Israelis with an endless war of attrition while making it impossible for Israel’s government to reach a political settlement with the more moderate Palestinian administration in the West Bank.

First of all, when Diehl writes “unwinnable” he means “unwinnable using current tactics.” There are those who disagree that it’s unwinnable.

Senior IDF officers serving in Gaza are frustrated over what they describe as the army’s lack of resolve and limited action against terror emanating from the Strip.“This week I returned from another standby shift at the combat helicopter base where I do my reserve duty,” lit.-Col. N told Ynet. “Again we did nothing, despite a Qassam and mortar barrage fired by terrorists at the entire sector.”

N says that he feels obligated to warn that the IDF is not doing enough to counter terrorism from Gaza.

“The Gaza Strip is a narrow area, almost entirely closed off, the terrorist forces are relatively small and their weapons – although they are improving every day as a result of our lack of action – still don’t constitute a significant threat to our forces.

(h/t Meryl)

Also Hamas’s objective isn’t to prevent a peace agreement, it’s objective is to kill as many Israelis as it can.

I don’t think that Hamas opposes a peace agreement with Israel as it will undoubtedly give it more power than it already has. Hamas knows that Israel is anxious to conclude a deal with Abbas, regardless of the rockets. It persists because it knows that Israeli responses generally mean that Israel must defend itself usually to the scorn of the world. So Hamas not only get to kill Israelis, destroy their homes but gets a bonus too.

Given that the explosion in Gaza has now been shown to be the result of a secondary explosion not an Israeli missile, Diehl should have acknowledged as much at the start of his article.

In both these assertions, Diehl is imposing his own views onto events.

Elder of Ziyon outlined the evidence. Yaacov Lozowick wrote about why it’s important. (The NYT deserves credit for reporting this result too.)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In Honoring Survival, and Gifts to a Nation Isabel Kershner writes about a new exhibit at Yad Vashem devoted to the Holocaust survivors who escaped to Israel.

The gray walls of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial here, have long documented the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis against Europe’s Jews. Now, an oddly vibrant exhibition at the memorial is telling a less known story of the renaissance of the survivors in Israel and the extraordinary role they played in shaping the character of the new state.“My Homeland: Holocaust Survivors in Israel” opened in late April, in time for the 60th anniversary this week of Israel’s founding. Instead of gas chambers and ghettoes, it showcases designer beachwear and boldly colored posters that promoted potent Israeli symbols like the airline El Al.

Though she reports (without documentation)

Of 250,000 survivors in Israel today, 80,000 or more are said to be living on or near the poverty line.

Overall

… experts say the suffering of those left behind in their old age does not negate their immigration success story.“The story of the Holocaust can be told from many different angles,” said Hanna Yablonka, a historical consultant to the exhibition. “To me, one of the most important aspects is the question of where you take such a huge disaster. You can turn to revenge, or to building.”

This was a particularly apt story:

“We came with nothing, without money, with nowhere to live,” Mrs. Gottlieb recalled, after viewing a movie about herself in a corner of the exhibition an hour before the official opening. “The first two or three years were very, very hard,” she said.Petite and manicured, in a black pantsuit and sensible leather shoes, Mrs. Gottlieb recounted in still-halting Hebrew how she and her husband opened a raincoat factory like the one they had left behind in Europe. But for months “we saw no rain, only sunshine,” she said. So they founded Gottex, a swimwear company that quickly grew to become a leading Israeli brand abroad.

Mrs. Gottlieb, the company’s chief designer, would sometimes tell of an ugly memory from the past, said a grandson, Danny Shir, 37, like when she hid herself and her children in a pit behind the house of their gentile host after seeing a Nazi with a pistol outside.

Another remarkable aspect of the story is that of the estimated 500,000 survivors who made it to Israel, half are still alive.

I guess it would be snide to observe that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are not also called Holocaust survivors.

In related news, Smooth Stone observes that Yad Vashem has put many of its photographic library online.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Israel has released some audio of the Entebbe raid. Ynet provides the audio and a transcript.

The missing passenger was Dora Bloch who had been taken to the hospital. After the rescue she was killed.

(h/t Jack’s Shack)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Update by Meryl: Dora Bloch was murdered on the orders of Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda, after the successful raid that rescued most of the other the hostages.

Now confidential cabinet papers released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the British High Commission in Kampala received a report from a Ugandan civilian that Mrs Bloch had been shot and her body dumped in the boot of a car which had Ugandan intelligence services number plates.

The same informant said that the body of a white woman had been found in a sugar plantation 19 miles from the capital. A further intelligence report says the face had been badly burnt, making identification difficult, but that the legs looked “bad” and that could have been the leg ulcers from which doctors confirmed she was suffering. The policeman guarding Mrs Bloch was also murdered, said the report.

[...] A confidential Foreign Office memo written by James Hennessy, the British High Commissioner to Uganda, says: “She had been seen by a consultant at Mulago Hospital last Sunday long after the Israeli commandos had come and gone. Since then she had been not seen anywhere. Our information was that she had been dragged from her bed at hospital screaming. Though she had been living in Israel, she was a British national and our responsibility. The Prime Minister has decided that I should come out and inquire into her disappearance and then report to him. The parliament, the whole British people, were concerned about her fate. She appeared to be an innocent victim of the Israeli raid.”

A second confidential Foreign Office briefing report sent to No 10 says the most likely scenario was that Mrs Bloch was killed by Ugandan soldiers “bitter and dangerous following their disgrace at Israeli hands”. About 50 Ugandan soldiers were killed by the Israelis during the raid. The report adds: “They may have seized on the only available Jew on whom to extract their revenge.”

Dora Bloch was a 74-year-old grandmother, whose only “crime” was being Jewish. Idi Amin lived peacefully in exile in Saudi Arabia, protected by the Wahabbi oil ticks from the justice he so richly deserved, for the next 24 years.