Yourish.com

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’s a fascinating story about a daring Israeli commando raid 35 years ago in the Jerusalem Post.

The Sabena plane had been hijacked by Black September, a PLO splinter group, after leaving Vienna, where it had stopped on a flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv. Levy was ordered to fly the plane to Tel Aviv, where the gunmen offered to free the passengers in exchange for 100 Arab prisoners held by Israel. At the airport, commandos deflated the aircraft’s tires, and then, posing as maintenance staff, they burst onto the plane and rescued the hostages after a brief gun fight. Two male hijackers were killed and their two female companions were captured.

At the end of the ordeal, the pilot, Levy, placed his cap on the head of one of the commandos who stormed the plane but didn’t remember which one. When he returned without his cap, Sabena made him pay for a new one! Well that commando has finally returned the cap.

On Sunday, it was finally returned to his family by a former commando. A beaming Eliezer Sacks, 55, came to the offices of The Jerusalem Post to hand the cap over to Levy’s daughter, editorial assistant Linda Lipschitz. He also gave Lipschitz a letter for her 85-year-old father, who lives in England. “I want to apologize for the long time – 35 years – that I forgot to give your hat back,” Sacks told Levy in the letter written in English. “I hope the hat will find its way back to your head, and more important, find you in good health.”

And who else was involved in the raid?

Led by Ehud Barak (now defense minister and Labor chairman), they included current Likud Party Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu, Danny Yatom, currently a Labor MK; and Uzi Dayan, now Tafnit party chairman.

(Netanyahu was wounded in the raid.) It would be nice if they could get their acts together in Knesset as well as they did during that daring rescue mission.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, via good services of Ynet, dropped today a huge Valium tablet on the unsuspecting citizens of Israel. The pill is titled Nuclear bomb won’t destroy Israel.

I am not sure whether I understand all motives of that strange performance that, to my taste, has all the attributes of a staged one. One of the motives is clear – to preempt a possible panic toward the time (if and when) when Iran declares itself to be a proud owner of a military quality nuclear device or two. I don’t even attempt to make a guess about the other reasons.

In any case, and with due respect to the professor whose awesome CV is available here, I can safely say that his optimistic outlook is a lot of hooey.

To start with – the predicted number of immediate casualties. Even if we base our outlook on a “10– 20 kiloton bomb, such as the type that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (to be a nitpicker, the bombs used in these two cases were of two different types), a cursory glance at the relevant data shows that (Nagasaki):

The death toll within a distance of one kilometer from the hypocenter was 96.7% among people who suffered burns, 96.9% among people who suffered other external injuries, and 94.1% among people who suffered no apparent injuries.

In simple words, almost everyone within the one kilometer radius will be killed immediately, with descending casualty percentages as the distance grows. Taking 20,00 as an (optimistic) figure for the 500 meter circle Mr Ben-Israel mentioned, we get the predicted death toll of 80,000 with about half of that number again immediately killed outside of this circle. Which brings us to 120,000, still a fairly optimistic estimate, taking into account the 140,000 death toll in Hiroshima: its urban profile is closer to that of Tel-Aviv than Nagasaki, and more than 60% of its 225,000 citizens died (Tel-Aviv population is over 380,000).

Of course, there are too many factors (such as the winds at the time of the bombing) to make a precise estimate of the consequences of the explosion (mainly the fallout), but the horrible numbers are difficult to argue with.

But this is not all.

The explosion victims that will survive the explosion itself to die later of related reasons will create an insoluble burden on a country of Israel’s size. No country of this size is equipped to take care of tens of thousands of injured and dying.

The destruction of Tel-Aviv may not have a crippling effect on the IDF ability, including that of a counterstrike. However, the economic impact of the Tel-Aviv destruction will be too great to ignore and crippling indeed, not to mention the immediate damage to communications and transport infrastructure…

It is impossible to ignore the impact of such a horrible event on the nation’s morale. In a community so tightly knit as the Israeli one, the horrible death of 120,000 will be a devastating shock, and I am not at all sure that, aside of an immediate act of revenge, the nation will ever recover from it.

So, with all due respect, that Valium pill is rejected, professor.

Update:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

It smells to me as a trend now: is somebody trying to lull us?

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

As we mentioned last month, the Waqf is systematically destroying priceless Jewish artifacts on the Temple Mount, with the permission of the Olmert government. The Israeli Antiquities Authority does have some archaeologists on site to watch the destruction being done with heavy machinery and to possibly retrieve bits and pieces of what doesn’t get crushed by the Muslims.

A couple of days ago, in an earthshaking find, some artifacts from the First Temple period were discovered:

The artifacts, which date to the First Jewish Temple period—the eighth to sixth centuries B.C.—were found by employees of the Waqf Muslim religious trust doing maintenance work, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported.

The artifacts may be the first physical evidence of human activity at the Temple Mount—also known as Solomon’s Temple—in that time.

Jerusalem’s district archaeologist Yuval Baruch is supervising the Muslim maintenance project.

Baruch and Sy Gitin, director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, Ronny Reich of Haifa University, and Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, concluded that the finds might help reconstruct the dimensions and boundaries of the Temple Mount during the First Temple Period.

The findings include animal bones; ceramic bowl rims, bases, and body sherds; the base of a juglet used to pour oil; the handle of a small juglet; and the rim of a storage jar, according to the IAA.

The bowl sherds were decorated with wheel burnishing lines characteristic of the First Temple Period.

In addition, a piece of a whitewashed, handmade object was found. It may have been used to decorate a larger object or may have been the leg of an animal figurine.
“This is the first time we have shards from the Temple Mount with a [uniform] date,” Haifa University’s Reich told National Geographic News.

The find “most certainly” indicates the presence of people in the temple during the late eighth century and seventh century B.C., he said.

“From an archaeological standpoint, this is the first time this has happened,” Reich said.

“You can say that this was written in the Bible—but the Bible is a text and texts can be played around with. This is physical evidence.”

As one would expect, the Muslims who completely deny that Jews ever lived in ancient Jerusalem – the same ones who deliberately destroy all evidence of Judaism on the Temple Mount – are strongly denying that these finds mean anything. Here’s an autotranslation of an Arabic article from Al-Hayat al-Jadida:

Astonished Sheikh Mohammad Hussein General Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian imam and the Al-Aqsa mosque, yesterday, allegations of Israeli occupation authorities and the so-called alleged Temple Mount during excavations carried out by the Waqf Islamic before the close of the extension the electricity cables in the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The Mufti statements issued several months ago on the effects of Israel and which claimed to have found remnants of dust effects in which the Waqf Islamic factions in 1999 outside the Al-Aqsa mosque.

He said: that these allegations are lies and fabrications denying the existence of any implications for the structure of the alleged yards in the Al-Aqsa mosque or the mosque or close to, adding that this earth that the Waqf Islamic factions are superficial and external back to the Ottoman era and not from the Old Testament as they claim.

The Sheikh Hussein that the city of Jerusalem had been many times for demolition and landfill because of earthquakes in Palestine throughout history, so the soil is excavated in recent times have been of the effects they are talking about nothing.

He added that the occupation authorities claimed each time she found the alleged effects of the structure and mean it behind interference in the affairs of Al-Aqsa mosque and the withdrawal of Endowments and the transfer of powers to the conflict and is impeding the restoration.

The discourse and spending excavations carried out by the occupation authorities since 1967 on the Al-Aqsa mosque and the bottom of walls, occupation authorities warned of the consequences of interference in its affairs.

He appealed to all international bodies and organizations to intervene to stop these practices against the Palestinian holy sites, especially the Al-Aqsa Mosque, also called the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Conference to move soon to stop the campaign Althudi of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa mosque.

If chutzpah wasn’t a Yiddish word, it would have to be invented in Arabic. In the same breath where he claims that there are no problems with excavating directly on the Temple Mount, he calls on the world to condemn Israeli excavations far away from the Al Aqsa Mosque – excavations that are being done with utmost care.

The Mufti’s casual dismissal of any finds as being from the Ottoman period – and any sixth-rate archaeologist can easily tell the difference between pottery from the 7th century BCE and pottery from 2400 years later – shows how he is, in the most simple terms, a liar. But his embrace of the destruction of Jewish artifacts while calling on Israel to stop their own work is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Of course, when his purpose is to establish Islamic supremacy and deny any Jewish history in Jerusalem, then his statements are quite consistent, if still as dishonest as can be. Making up fairy tales about Mohammed’s flying horse being tied for a couple of hours to the Kotel, which is a story made up entirely by the Grand Mufti in the 1920s in order to get the Jews away from the Western Wall, proves to anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty that the Muslim claim to Jerusalem is exaggerated specifically in order to de-legitimize Judaism itself.

It is a scandal that the West places equal weight on the liars.

Another Palestinian Arab terrorist momentarily forgets the fiction that he is only supposed to hate Zionists, not Jews:

Prominent leader of the Popular Resistance Committees Abu Al-Sa’id on Wednesday called on the de facto Palestinian government to hasten disbanding the Palestinian Authority and establish a ‘Resistance Authority’ instead in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Speaking during a press conference, Abu Al-Sa’id urged Palestinian resistance factions, particularly the Salah Addin Brigades of the PRC, to “kill Jews everywhere without waiting for permission”, in retaliation for the murder of Muhammad Al-Ashqar and the violent treatment of Palestinian detainees at Ktziot prison.

The PRC and Hamas are linked together, there have been numerous cases where they worked together for terror attacks.

Yesterday’ s airstrike against a Qassam cell is a case in point:

An Israeli aircraft attacked a car in central Gaza on Tuesday, destroying the vehicle and killing a senior security official in the Hamas government, Palestinian officials said. Hamas radio identified the dead man as Mubarak al-Hassanat, a senior official in the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry. The ministry oversees all Hamas security forces in the Gaza Strip.

Al-Hassanat, 37, also was a top member of the Popular Resistance Committees, a Hamas-linked group that frequently fires rockets into Israel.

So Hamas has effectively just declared open season on Jews worldwide. And since the vast majority of Arabs have no problem with Jews, only Zionists, we can expect to see a torrent of Arab and Muslim condemnations against this anti-semitic statement any minute now.

Any….minute….now…..

Meanwhile, I will also wait for any other media outlet to publish this story. At the moment the phrase “kill Jews everywhere” comes up empty on Google News. I guess it is not newsworthy.