Diane of Gotham strikes again.
And again. (Don’t be lazy, click the link to the Jpost, Halkin article, as well).

Israel does not exist on Planet Earth according to the World Bank.

Ynet noticed that Israel doesn’t appear on the World Bank map of the Middle East. You’ve got you’re West Bank and Gaza, but THERE”S NOTHING IN BETWEEN!

The World Bank site must have done a swift disappearing map act (judging by the pages of the other regions, the map should be on the right of "select a country"). But they don’t list Israel in their list of countries, either. Israel is not on the page listing all countries nor on the Middle East and North Africa page. The West Bank and Gaza are a country, though. Scroll down, they’re under “W”. You’ll pass “I” on the way. No Israel. The West Bank and Gaza have a nice informative page.

Is the World Bank trying to avoid problems? Maybe we’re on the Europe page? What’s good for soccer and basketball…Nope, not there either. I notice Europe still has it’s map.

Oh, here we are. To find Israel you have to go to the home page and conduct a special search from there. But where is this strange country Israel? Maybe on Mars? On the moon?

By the way, Ynet was alerted to the non-existence of Israel by the Israeli Institute of Oil and Energy, who apparently received their Israel-less copy of the World Bank's report about the Ecology for 2002. I wonder how they got it? Maybe the World Bank sent it to "The piece of land just North East of Gaza and just West of the West Bank".

Update: Jen comments that if “we come around to the Service Entrance, we appear in the list of the 184 member countries.” Well, waddaya know? She’s right! There we are, right between Ireland and Italy. Just like a normal country. I’m so happy. Not only on a real live LIST, but a member, too. I don’t think I can take the excitement. Now who will find us on a map (maybe tucked safely away in “Terms & Conditions” or “Privacy Policy” (“It’s for your own good”))?

This is definitely a wow blog as far as design is concerned, and I'm on the links. WOW! Thank you, markp.

How did you do the Ha Ha Ha thing?

Look at this thing he linked to: Googlism
Look what they've got about me -

imshin is nervous about the next islamikaze bombing
imshin is
imshin is not amused by the israeli left

WOW!

Look what they've got about Zionism.

To all you nice folk Meryl sent over from the LGF comments: The wisest and deepest thing I have to say about Israeli politics right now is
bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh (this is my food exiting the same place as it came in).

I'm misbehaving this evening. Good thing my daughters' English isn't good enough to read this. Talking about daughters, did I tell you my eldest (11) built a site? She won't let us see it yet, but she says she's had over a thousand hits already (in about a week). I think it's a fan site (in Hebrew) for one of those Argentinian kids soap operas I've told you about. I suppose Hispanic kids in the U.S. watch them as well.

Zeev Schiff about the dangers of Jewish settler olive thieves. I saw one of these guys’ rabbis on TV, last night.

Talk about foaming at the mouth.

Update: That sounds awful, I know, but he really looked out of it (and I should know {insert more hysterical laughter}).

Desert Farms
Cool. I’ve been noticing some vines growing in a little valley on the way to Mitzpe Ramon. It must be one of these farms. It's hard to explain how strange this looks, completely surrounded by desert. The weather is good for vines because the winters are very cold.

Lost in Translation is a fun site that shows what a mess computerized translations can make of things. You can try it yourself.

I tried this line from the first chapter of the book of Exodus:
Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.

And it came out as:
To become fullfilled here emerso alongside advanced of finished Egypt new king, the one that Jose did not know.

Then I tried my blog description:
Just your regular split personality Israeli mother trying to make sense of current insanity.

And look what happened:
Rectum that his Israeli of nut/mother of the normal one divided itself of the state, of that the test to crazyness of include/understand the chain.

Hmmm.

This is one of the UK Guardian’s contributions of the day.

I’ve been discovering all new parts of the Guardian since I’ve started reading the excellent Palm Pilot version. It’s so aggravating that people who wish I were dead bring out such a good newspaper.

Calling all Sweet-Toothed Dieters.
Do not, I repeat, do not read this, or your diet will die an untimely death.

Phew!
I've managed to get the time back on my posts, all the better to link to me with ;-)

Labor Party quits government; budget passes first reading. So now it's a narrow right-wing government or elections.

The case of the Crown versus Zeus.
A British Muslim group is seeking to file a criminal complaint against former Israeli Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, currently visiting Britain, for the “Jenin Massacre”. It is news to me that you can file a criminal complaint against someone for taking part in a myth. How about pressing charges against Oedipus for patricide? Some of Aesop’s foxes for killing poor little sheep? The Wicked Witch for kidnapping little children with the intent to devour them? The Ugly Sisters for enslavement and spitefulness? These are not real people or historical events, you say? I haven’t seen any evidence to refute their authenticity. I have heard these allegations against them spoken of and written about repeatedly all through my childhood and even in recent years. Therefore, they must be true.

And talking about wicked witches, I know this makes me a mean, petty, spiteful, vengeful person, but this British woman's account, in the Guardian, of how her fear of terrorism is affecting her life, fills me with a warped feeling of malicious satisfaction.

In a crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth, way, it is comforting to know that if Israel does end up as the Czechoslovakia of this World War, those well-meaning nitwits, who would so easily sacrifice us with their enduring belief that Palestinian terrorism is different, that it is justified and that those thieving, murdering Israelis have it coming, will pay. Oh, how they will pay!

Now, excuse me while I crawl back into my hovel. My latest batch of kiddie poison needs another stir, or it won't be ready for the next candy transport to Jenin. Hahahahahahaha (that’s meant to be an hysterical cackle).

Mazal Tov to Cousin J.
Who schlepped all the way from Haifa to Cyprus to see his home soccer team, Maccabi Haifa, play “at home” against the mythical Manchester United, and was not disappointed. 3 – 0.

The BBC was actually gushing in it's praise. How refreshing. Maybe they dislike Manchester United and manager Sir Alex Ferguson even more than they dislike us? It’s nice to be the underdog for a change.

United's defence parted like the Red Sea as Katan surged forward and unleashed a searing strike past Ricardo, who was angered that no-one had challenged the Maccabi striker.

If the United goalkeeper could not believe his eyes for the first goal, there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop Maccabi's second after the break.

Last night's barbarism resulted in the murder of two 14 year-old girls and a woman, gunned down near their homes.

Update: I see the Fatah have taken responsibility. Shall we believe them this time?

More barbarism. I'm tired.

Do the writers for the Guardian live in a parallel universe?
Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned yesterday that the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

This writer for the U.K. Guardian doesn't seem to see the difference between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq having chemical weapons and the U.S. having chemical weapons. They quote scientists who think it's a paradox that the U.S. is developing such weapons at a time when it is proposing military action against Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is breaking international treaties.

Oh, now I understand what the planned Iraq offensive is all about. Silly me, I though it was about Iraq supporting and promoting terrorism and threatening the lives and the freedom of millions of people.

The Guardian typically quotes the scientists as saying that it is the U.S.'s fault that the Iraqis are developing chemical weapons in the first place. The U.S. and the British apparently encouraged them and showed them the way. They were just following the U.S. and the British lead. They couldn’t help themselves, the poor dears.

I notice they don't say if it was the U.S.'s fault the Iraqis USED chemical weapons on their own population.

Maybe Ribbity's conspiracy theory is not so far fetched after all.

On second thoughts, his theory gives them too much credit. It seems more likely that they are just, how can I say this without being offensive? Not very bright?

OK, OK, so I’m stalling discussing "The Coalition Crisis” (Can you blame me?)
So this is the thing: Fouad Ben Eliezer sees he’s dropping in party polls a short while before elections for party head. Time to do something. Creates coalition crisis over social issue on budget. Just before vote on budget he demands: Move what sounds like a lot of money but is in fact a tiny fraction of territory settlement budget to the poor. Impressive. Half his party wants to leave the government, anyway, so they can dream about resurrecting Oslo (and encourage Palestinian terrorism even more than they already are). Therefore they are quite happy with the decision to vote against the budget, even going so far to explain that this will actually strengthen Israel’s economic image abroad (?).

The timely terrorist attack on Sunday gave the Likud the opportunity to call the Labor Party irresponsible, blah blah blah, at a time like this, yadah yadah yadah.

So this is what will probably happen: If the Labor doesn’t really want to leave, the sides will compromise. A nominal amount of an even tinier fraction of the settlement budget will be averted somewhere else. The Labor Party can then portray this as a great victory while the Likud belittles it. If they mean business the Labor party will vote against the budget and leave the government (or vice versa). Sharon says that if they vote against the budget he will sack them from the government and will try for a narrow government. If he can’t manage that he’ll go to elections.

But hey, what do I know? I've got to go do the washing.

Update (11:15 PM): It's looking like the Labor Party means business. Does that mean elections? Hmmm, who shall I vote for?

You can learn about a country’s political behavior from “The Weakest Link” TV show
I haven’t seen the American version, but we get the British and the Israeli versions. The big difference I see is that on the Israeli version (which I admit I haven’t seen a lot of), the contestants seem to be much more candid about their political considerations. They have no qualms about this. The British contestants, on the other hand, “play the game” right to the end. Even after they’ve had their heads chopped off, they seem to dislike talking openly about the unspoken coalitions that develop. Contestants would rather not come right out and say, in so many words, that they voted someone off because he was too good, for instance, or because they were in cahoots with another contestant. They’ll say it in a roundabout way, if at all. The Israelis often unabashedly come right out and say it as it is. The Israelis would call the British behavior hypocrisy, whereas the British would probably see the Israelis as coarse and unsophisticated.

Party politics is always nasty. Politicians everywhere are always conniving, devious foxes. The difference in Israel is that all the nastiness is out in the open. It may nauseate us, but at least we know where we are, and can clearly see the politicians for what they are.

The Frog at his finest
I just love his conspiracy theory.

Alisa says that Shaul Mofaz, recently retired Israeli Chief of Staff, could be defense minister soon, if Ben Eliezer leaves the government. This was on TV channel 1 news. I like Mofaz but I think this is too soon. I would feel much more secure with an experienced veteran in the job, at a time like this. Maybe Moshe Arens?

This I love: "The fall of Hamashbir will affect every household in Israel."
Hamashbir Latzarkhan is a very old Israeli chain of department stores, which is facing collapse. They have the gall to ask for government assistance with their sizeable debt! The amount of times I stormed out of their shops after flinging my carefully selected purchases in the direction of rude shop cashiers! This chain was unrivalled in its abominable customer service (and in Israel this is not an easy accomplishment)! The result was my refusing to even step into one of their stores for at least ten years, probably more. I rediscovered them last winter. A last minute effort to win back the shoppers? Obviously too late.

Damn right the fall of Hamashbir will affect Israeli households! This household, for instance, will be affected with my malicious delight.

Israeli breakthrough in schizophrenia research
What with academic divestment, we’ll probably just have to keep it to ourselves. What a shame.

The real Yitzhak Rabin. Via Haggai's Place.

Laurence Foley, a US diplomat in Jordan, was gunned down outside of his home in an exclusive Amman neighborhood this morning.

The German Embassy in Israel showed great sensitivity in planning a memorial ceremony in Nazereth for fallen German soldiers in the world wars, including fallen Waffen SS soldiers. The Simon Wiesenthal Center wasn’t amused and demanded the ceremony be cancelled. The Germans have delayed the ceremony (until we forget about the Holocaust maybe?).

More and more Kassam "missiles" (they are actually rockets) are flying about in and from Gaza, every day. If this keeps up it will be difficult for the government to stay out. So far, they have mainly done damage to property, in the Gaza Strip and in villages and towns, inside pre-1967 Israel. The latest fell today in the town of Sderot in a construction site of a new school. One of the construction workers was treated for shock.

All eyes on Hebron this weekend.
This Shabbat, the weekly Torah portion is "Chayei Sara" (Life of Sara) which tells the story of Abraham's purchase of the cave of Makhpela, as a burial place for his family. Thousands of Jews spend this weekend in Hebron, every year. There have been advertisements on the radio all week, inviting everyone to come.

This could be a very violent weekend. I'll be sure to keep you updated.

Peace Stuff
A lot of my Buddhist friends will probably be going on this silent peace walk. They are going to walk for six days in Wadi Ara. This is not a very safe place. Many terrorist attacks come from nearby Jenin. I hope nothing happens to them. I don't think they'll be walking with armed guards. They tend to be pacifists. But then again, they walked from Yaffo (Jaffa) to Jerusalem in Pesach (Passover) during the climax of daily terrorist attacks and nothing happened to them. Maybe they're being protected from above.

I never took part in this sort of public activity, even when I was more involved with my Buddhist group.

Trying to promote peace aside, walking meditation is very nice. I recommend trying it. Very soothing (once you get over the first minutes of feeling self-conscious).

Update: I just reread an e-mail I got about the planned Wadi Ara walk. I was right: no guns or security guards.

Williams or Muhammad?
Mark Steyn doesn’t think the sniper story is about an "African-American male from a deprived background driven psycho by military culture."

You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people.

At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.

I've read Chechens are Sufis. I don't think they count, do they?

Oh, and Israel is about the OCCUPATION, stupid.

Enough with the movie
What about #5 BOOK, already??? At this rate, my girls will be mothers themselves before it comes out, and I’ll be in a home for the aged.

A coalition crisis?
Time to switch to the classical music radio station for a day or two. This is even more nauseating than broken chicken legs.

Hey, Blogger
What happened to the time on my posts?

Bish just came home from the supermarket with roast chicken legs for the girls’ lunch tomorrow. It was fresh out of the oven. What a smell! I was thinking maybe this vegetarian business isn’t worth it. Maybe just a little taste? Then I noticed that the ends of the chicken legs were all broken and distorted.

Why is this dead Chechen female terrorist blindfolded?

I've been wondering about this since I saw it on TV last night.

I took my younger daughter and her friend to their dancing class today. When I came out I saw there were two border policemen (Magav) patrolling outside. I asked them what they were doing there, if there was anything specific. They said there wasn't but I didn’t really believe them. It's a rather out of the way place and I've never seen security there before, besides the ordinary security guard (who was looking more alert than usual). I had noticed a couple of police cars in the area, as well.

When I picked my daughter and her friend up, my daughter started to drive me mad about wanting to get something to eat at the exorbitantly priced cafeteria. All I wanted was to get out of there, as quick as possible.

Gas Station at the entrance to the town of Ariel: 3 murdered, about 18 wounded.
A Fatah suicide bomber blew himself up by the snackbar at the gas station in the entrance to Ariel, Jewish West Bank town. It was full of soldiers, they noticed him and while they were trying to overcome him (it’s not clear if one of the soldiers shot him or a security guard) he blew up. 3 murdered, 18 wounded. There is a hotel just nearby, and a commercial area. They say it's a busy waiting place for buses and transportation, for civilians and soldiers. I've never been there myself.

Yes, you remember correctly, the Fatah did say they’d stop suicide attacks, but only inside pre-1967 Israel. Old ladies and three year-olds that dare venture into the territories are fair game.

Reuters knows who’s to blame: “Four Die as Israelis Try to Thwart Suicide Bomber”.

They really do deserve a prize for masterful misinformation.

This morning I was happy to find a much sought after space to park my car near work. I noticed the car next to me had two open doors. Getting out of my car, I saw a young man sitting on the road next to the car with the open doors, dressed in shiny new army fatigues. He was busy polishing a pair of army boots! He looked like a reserve soldier on his way to begin his reserve duty. They said on the radio that reserve soldiers were among the wounded. The chances my boot polisher was one of the wounded are slim, but if he wasn’t wounded, someone else, just like him, was.

Alisa wrote about Friday afternoon in Israel. The best bit is the afternoon shloff (sleep). Fridays aren’t the same if we have to stay awake for some reason. If some inconsiderate parents throw a kiddies birthday party commencing at 4 o’clock in the afternoon (or even before, grrrr), you’re going to get some very grumpy parents bringing their kids to the party!

I find there is much more “real news” on the radio on Shabbat than there used to be. They used to keep the news light and put in “positive” items. There’s just so much more happening, nowadays, and it’s stuff that can’t wait for the end of Shabbat.

Is Ben Eliezer going to leave the government?
Israel channel 2 news says Defense Minister and current head of Labor Party, Ben Eliezer, is going to leave the government, this week. They said he's dropping in Labor Party polls and wants to use the vote on the budget as an excuse to leave the government while being seen to be taking a stand on social matters (blah blah blah) to boost his popularity among party members. They say it’s serious this time.

UN
Fergal Keane, of the UK’s very left-wing Independent, says that the real news right now is what’s going on in the UN:

Here is the scenario put to me by a diplomat friend well informed in the ways of the United Nations. There will be a vote sometime in the next fortnight involving all 15 members of the Security Council. Before that Bush will open a direct line to Putin and persuade him not to use the Russian veto. Abstain if he must, but no veto. The carrot will be billions of dollars in assistance to make up for what Russia stands to lose if Saddam is overthrown. The Americans also believe the Chinese won't use their veto. Ever the pragmatists, the Chinese take a long view in which relations with America on issues like trade and Taiwan are far more important than Saddam.

The French are now also regarded as less of a problem. President Chirac has already extracted maximum image benefit from the six weeks of negotiations at the UN, and in any case his position has always been contingent on being able to stand alongside bigger and mightier Russia. If the Russians were out of the picture, Mr Chirac would be most unlikely to stand alone. Again abstention would offer an honourable alternative.

I’m deeply sorry about the hostages that were killed, but I salute the Russians. They did the right thing.

Fed up.
I admire Gil for having the energy to be writing about solutions. I don't feel I even have the energy to read other people’s suggestions, let alone suggest any of my own. I'm so tired of it all.

Update: This said, Gil's readers' suggestions are very interesting.

Imshin’s gossip column. (Now I’m well on the way to getting my own TV game show).
I must be getting desperate if I’m getting my stories from Tzipora, mythical gossip of Tel Aviv local weekly rag “Ha’ir”. I just couldn’t pass up this item about Israel’s self-anointed royal family. Tzipora says that the IDF radio station, Galei Tzahal, organized a show called “Singing with Rabin”. The Rabin family demanded quite a few first row seats for family members and friends and then no one showed up except the late Yitzhak Rabin’s sister. Well, noblesse oblige. Son Yuval Rabin couldn’t have come anyway, he was busy buying a house in Washington D.C. with his wife, Tali (Bish asks what’s wrong with Mitzpe Ramon?). Daughter Dalia quite rightly refused to comment. None of our damn business.

Out and about
Today we went on a trip organized by the parents of my eldest daughter’s class. You never saw such a badly organized event. We spent half of the day lost, driving around, looking for where we were supposed to be going.

In the morning we got lost on the way to the breakfast stop. I was starving and getting very grumpy. The place we were meant to have turned off, according to the guide’s explanation, did not exist, and we’d typically left our roadmap at home. (the guide was one of the mothers).

After breakfast, we went to see some caves, which used to be inhabited by prehistoric people. We found that alright, because we’ve been there before.

Then we got lost again on the way to the lunch stop. This time we were lost with about five other cars full of hungry families. Getting lost together is so much more fun. We found the group eventually. Thank goodness for cell phones. How did we ever manage without them?

By the way, everywhere we went was packed with picnicking and day tripping Israeli families. And the traffic was very heavy on the way home. So much for the terrified-Israelis-huddling-at-home theory. So there, terrorists, you lose again!

As Farid says “people who live through violence become increasingly numb to it in degrees. its a survival mechanism that otherwise would prevent people from showing up for life. but that's all we can do, isn't it? just continue showing up for life. as they do in israel, in bali, in russia, in maryland and washington, d.c.”
(I’m not sure how to link directly to this post of his. It ‘s from 10/26. The one before it – 10/25 is worth reading, too. Very moving).

Shabbat Shalom!

Ehud Yaari in the Jerusalem Report:

The Israeli-Palestinian arena is now dominated by Iraq. All calculations are subordinated to the expectation of war. The timetable of our ongoing conflict is based on the assumption that sometime between the end of Ramadan (the first week of December) and the return to work after the Christmas holidays (the first week of January), the Americans will strike their blow.

With regard to the heating up between Palestinian factions in Gaza we witnessed following the October 7 murder of the commander of the Gaza anti-riot police he says the murder

could have provided the PA with an excuse for such a crackdown. That would have allowed the PA to demonstrate that there is a real partner for dialogue on the Palestinian side, and to go into the war on Iraq with the Gaza Strip producing significantly less volume of terrorism and rocket attacks than at present.

But they did little and he says the Fatah recognizes that

if the PA does not rein in Hamas, Israel, at the end of the day, will have no choice but to carry out a thorough clean-up in the Gaza Strip, similar to the one under way in the West Bank. It is just as clear that the moment the Palestinian lathes manage to produce rockets with ranges long enough to threaten, say, Ashkelon, the IDF will in any case have no choice.

A tabloid for snobby English intellectuals (if they wouldn’t put me on their blog list before, I’ve really had it now).
The Guardian has sent a correspondent to Los Angeles. He has checked things out and has come up with his verdict. This will probably bowl you over with surprise. Apparently ”In the US, not everyone is an overweight gun fanatic - and not everyone wants a war with Iraq”.

…since September 11, America has ceased to be a "status quo" power in the Middle East and has become, or anyway is becoming, a revolutionary one.
David Frum, former speech writer for President Bush, writes in the UK Telegraph about American involvement in the Middle East.

How do you think the Israeli – Palestinian conflict should/could be solved? Take a stand on the comments on Gil’s blog.
He is thinking of removing his comments but before he does he is offering an open stage to anyone who wants to propose his opinion on how to solve the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. Please go and give your input. He has since said he won’t be removing comments just yet, so your comment won’t disappear.

Have you been following the developments on Gil’s blog? Reacting to a particularly offensive comment he wrote a post which he begins: “One thing I really can’t stand is when Israel sympathizers (Jews or Gentiles) who do not live in Israel call for radical acts/solutions. Every supporter of Israel is important that’s for sure, and each can hold his own thoughts left or right”. This led to a lively debate on his comments.

The theatre is probably as symbolic in Russia as the WTC is in the US.
The Russians will not let the Chechens get away with this terrorism. Unlike many Western European countries, and even the US, before 9/11, they understand terrorism for what it is, and wouldn’t dream of surrendering to it. I disagree with Joseph Norland’s assertion that their being victims of terrorism is ironic in face of their policy with regard to Israel and Iraq. Russia’s loyalties lie with Russia. Period. Their stand on Iraq is not a matter of namby pamby peace stuff, appeasement and public opinion. It’s about negotiation and diplomacy.

Distorting things
In the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, some right wing friends of mine were offended by the way the media, politicians and a lot of people in the street were generalizing about right-wing people’s blame. “He was our Prime Minister, too.” They said. “We may not have voted for him and we may not have liked what he was doing, but we are also shocked and horrified. We are also in mourning.”

In the years to come, Rabin’s family has seen fit to claim the way he is commemorated for their own. I suppose this can be seen as justifiable. Their loss is personal. But Rabin was the Prime Minister of all Israelis and his murder affected all of us.

Both Rabin’s children have used his reputation to build political careers for themselves. His late widow, Leah, managed to get on everyone’s nerves regularly. When Netanyahu was Prime Minister she banned him from taking part in the annual memorial rally (I know you shouldn’t say bad things about the dead, but she was a royal pain, what can I do?). Rabin’s daughter, Dalia Rabin-Philosoph, made an embarrassing speech at his grave during this year’s memorial service. She strongly attacked government policy, although she belongs to the coalition member, Labor Party. This was in the presence of Prime Minister Sharon, Defense Minister Ben Eliezer (until recently she was his deputy, but is now openly supporting his inner party opponent Haim Ramon) and other government members.

Now I read on Ariga’s mailing list that ”The annual Tel Aviv City Hall Plaza (Kikar Rabin) rally to commemorate Rabin and to stand up for a peace process will be held this year on the evening of November 2.”

Arafat likes to talk about Rabin as his friend. I doubt Rabin ever saw Arafat as his friend. The man is dead, and who knows? But he wasn’t known as “Mr. Security” for nothing. In his autobiography, written after he resigned from his first Premiership, in 1977, he has nothing nice to say about Arafat, quite the reverse.

No one knows how things would have turned out had he not been murdered, but I tend to think it could very well have come round to the same place in the end, regardless. Rabin was committed to the Oslo Accords, which he had signed, but I believe he would have changed his tune, if he had been alive when they were breached so violently by the other side.

I doubt very much if Rabin would be going to any peace rallies, singing “The Song For Peace” off tune, if he were alive today.

Yitzhak Rabin’s memory and legacy continues to be usurped from the Israeli public by his family and, with their blessing, by the Israeli far left. Thus the lessons of the murder are not being learnt.

Bish and my youngest daughter, who was four at the time, where at the moving peace rally on the 4th November 1995, following which he was murdered. They came home with shining eyes, just before the murder. We were among those wandering in shock around the square in the aftermath. It seems absurd to me that, seven years on, I should not be able to feel comfortable go to a rally in his memory, because I know views I oppose will be upheld there?

Update: Another thing I don't get is all this personality worship. Rabin himself would probably have hated it.

Fred Lapides quotes Oriana Fallaci on Israpundit. Remind me to order her book, the pile of unread books by my bed isn't tall enough, yet.

At last lazy bones has moved! (new comments)
I've been frustrated with enetation comments for a while, so I've moved at last to Haloscan. Sadly, some lovely comments have gone, but now you won't have to wait for hours to read them. Time for a fresh start.

I’m very relieved that he’s been caught.

How does this sound?
Just like treatments for head-lice that soon become ineffective, because the lice grow immune, we Israelis have become so accustomed to terrorist attacks we have become immune to fearing them on a daily basis. The more attacks there are, the less effective they become in terrorizing us.

Terrorist attacks have become just another of those things that can kill you in less than pleasant ways, like traffic accidents, cancer, Alzheimer’s, (missiles from Iraq…) to name but a few. The danger is very real, but normal, well-adjusted people don’t spend their lives fearing them.

No? Well, just a suggestion.

A Jew, a Conservative and a crook - definitely not a gentleman or Why do journalists never have anything nice to say about anything?
David McKie of the Guardian tells the intriguing story of a shady British character of the 19th century. He makes a point of mentioning the shady character’s Jewish background (the son of a Jewish peddler from Dublin) and his “real” (Jewish sounding) name. I am surprised that this gossipy detail is seen to be relevant, in such a sanctimonious, PC publication.

I know a lot of people who have changed their names for various reasons. Bish’s last name, which I adopted when I married him, is the name of his choice, and not the name he was born with. I see nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t say this is not our “real” name.

I also know quite a few British Jews whose parents or grandparents felt it necessary to shed the burden of a “Jewish sounding” name. This seems to be much less prevalent among American Jews.

Mr. Mckie’s commentary has to do with some busts of famous Brits, that the aforementioned crook had erected in Leicester Square, which, it seems, he had bought and renovated, and that have recently been ruined by the misapplication of chemicals. Mr. Mckie seems to think that if the original donor of the busts wasn’t a very nice person, it is some sort of poetic justice that they have been damaged. The fact that the guy died destitute and discredited was not punishment enough, apparently, even over a hundred years later.

Something on the line of “fruit of the poisoned tree”?

Remind me to throw out my copy of “Crime and Punishment”. Never mind that it is one of the books that left the greatest impression on me. Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semite, after all. That’ll show him.

John Casey of the Guardian doesn’t think those primitive Iraqis can handle democracy. They’ll have to make do with another tyrant. It’s just the way they are.

Haggai saw Elliot Chodoff speaking about the "Sociology of Terrorism", and has summarised it here.

I wonder.
Terrorism strikes again. Is the world as forgiving, understanding and accepting of the Chechens' terrorism as it is of the Palestinians' terrorism? After all, the Russians have been much less willing to accommodate the Chechens over the years than Israel has been with regard to the Palestinians. Israel's "atrocities" are nothing near those said to have been perpetrated by Russia in Chechnya. I think that if the Chechens expect to gain the worldwide public support our pals over here have, as a result of horrific terrorist attacks, they're going to be sadly disappointed.

Cynicism aside, this is horrible. If the many Russian born Israelis are anything to go by, Russians are very culturally minded people. They love the theatre. Those Chechens really knew where to strike to make it hurt worst.

Update: Another thought that comes to mind: There has been a lot of Chechen terrorism in Russia and no one even noticed. They had to do something really really momentous for the world to sit up and take note.

Interesting stuff happening in Iraq following this amnesty thing.

Answer to Cyrus
My indignation at the behavior of the settlers in Gilad Farm has nothing to do with the Oslo Accords, and my views about them. Wherever you think the border should be, in Israel the law is such that private citizens cannot decide for themselves where inhabited areas should be newly built. Agricultural and open areas cannot be built on, even if they are privately owned, without the necessary state authorization. This holds inside the Green Line, as well.

We are fortunate enough to be living in a democracy. The laws of the jungle are not the accepted laws of the land in Israel. There is an elected government; there is an elected legislative body; there is a judicial system; there is a police force; there is an army. Private citizens who attack policemen, policewomen and soldiers are breaking the law. Therefore they are subject to arrest, trial and, if convicted and if deemed necessary by the court, prison sentences. I see no reason why Israeli law should not apply to Israelis living in Judaea, Samaria and Gaza, unless they prefer to be citizens of the Palestinian Authority, in which case they would be subject to Palestinian law (which they are welcome to). There are plenty of legal ways to express opposition to government policy, as I have pointed out in the past, with regard to left-wing protest activities, if I am not mistaken.

Protesting against government policy is one thing. Breaking the law by, not only building without authorization in a dangerous area necessitating state protection, but actually violently attacking those very representatives of the state who protect you, is another. At a time of war, and in the very center of the war zone, no less, such behavior could be construed as treason.

I won’t even mention violently harassing villagers busy with the olive harvest, which in my mind is wicked.

All of the right-wing friends I have discussed this with agree with me on this issue, by the way.

(Gil seems to have been served a dose of venom, too. I sympathize).

A high-ranking Israeli army officer and others have been arrested for spying for the Hizbullah.

I am opposed to the death penalty as a rule, but right now I am so angry about this, I'm feeling people like this should not be allowed to live.

In a viciously sarcastic book review (of “Le Conflict Israelo-Palestinien:
Les Medias Francais sont-ils objectifs?” Observatoire du Monde Juif, 173pp)
in this week’s Haaretz book supplement, Daniel Ben Simon (Hebrew link) ridicules French Jews strong support and love of Israel. He thoughtlessly (I hope it’s just thoughtless and not malicious) generalizes in portraying them as disloyal to France.

His incredulousness at the French Jews' love of Israel raises questions about his own feelings towards his home. I could suggest that if he dislikes Israel so much, maybe he should go and live somewhere else.

The review hasn’t been translated yet. Usually they translate parts of the book supplement towards Friday, so I’ll post the translation when available.

Yesterday there was a cleanup project in Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater). When standing on the balcony on the cliff, looking down into the crater, the girls and I always looked down to see a distant bathtub someone had thrown over, and a mattress. I wonder if they'll be gone next time we're down there. Bish doesn't look down. He's not very happy about heights, and has only recently began venturing onto the balcony, which is suspended over the cliff.

Jack Kemp has visited Israel and he’s hopeful. Bish is optimistic as well. I wish I was.

A brave group of Palestinian women are putting on a feminist play in Gaza.

Zeev Schiff, Haaretz:
If the aim is to destroy this mediation attempt as well, then Palestinian extremists have no doubt planned other suicide bombings inside Israel in the near future. They are not primarily motivated by a desire to retaliate against this or that Israeli act; rather, they are a deliberate and recurring strategy on the part of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups. Their objective is not merely to kill the maximum number of Israeli citizens, but also to wipe out any mediation attempts that would lead to a renewed dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.

Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against the truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.
--- Pascal, Pensees

As quoted in “The True Believer”, by Eric Hoffer.

Little Noam Chen, 28 months old.

She was traveling home in the car with her father and her older brother (4) and sister (10). At first her father thought all the children were OK and got out of the car to help the people on the bus. But when Noam didn’t stop crying he picked her up out of her baby chair and her older sister said “Daddy, she’s got a hole in her back.”

She’s been operated on. Her situation is critical but stable. Her father hopes she will be OK.

Her brother was wounded in his legs.

14 die as Israel faces new bomb threat
What does the UK Guardian’s headline mean? They’ll write any jibberish as long as they don’t have to write what happened: 14 innocent people were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

The BBC also has a strange way of reporting the event: Annan 'appalled' by Israel bus bomb. Like anyone could care less what he thinks.

When my eldest daughter was a teeny weeny thing in the WIZO day care center, she had a little boyfriend. He used to sing her the love song from Don Bluth’s “Thumbelina” (Barry Manilow, what can I say?); they both dressed up as Power Rangers in Purim (she was the red one and he was the blue one). They were inseparable, quite oblivious to the rest of the world. They were the cutest couple you ever saw. The romance ended abruptly when they reached the ripe old age of nearly four and his family moved to Karkur.

She doesn’t remember him.

Anyway, I hope he and his family were nowhere near the blast.

14 dead (Israel channel1).

Gil has said some things about the settlers which I agree with. I can't link to his post. Go read - 10/21 00:00.

11 dead. (Israel TV).

This number doesn't include the two perpetrators.

At least 10 dead. Over 50 wounded. 100 kilograms of explosives.

The way it is.
I was in the post office. A guy dressed like a lawyer (white shirt, black pants), was busy talking on his cell phone. I could make out parts of his conversation. You could understand he was talking about a “pigua”. He finished his conversation and loudly updated the postal worker. We could all hear. Then he started calling other people and updating them.

No one else said a word. No one else made any phone calls. I finished my business there and went to pick up my youngest from her chess class. While there I spoke to another mother and the organizer. No one mentioned the attack. When we got home I put on the TV. Then the piano teacher arrived and I turned it off. The piano teacher had already heard.

My mother-in-law called to cancel her weekly visit this afternoon. She was afraid of getting stuck in traffic because of the attack.

A terrorist attack has become as mundane an event as a minor traffic accident. No big surprise, there had been lots of warnings. It was even in the area anticipated. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing more to say.

Sick.

Update: Gil offers an explanation for this.

Karkur Junction, near Hadera: At least 8 dead; 39 injured. A car blew up next to a bus.


Ehud Yaari on Channel 2 news: Watching Al-Jazeera he saw a change of tone – The interviewers interview Hamas leaders immediately after such an attack. The Hamas leaders’ are usually festive as a result of their success. This time the interviewers asked what this attack is good for, what they think to achieve. Yaari said the Hamas leaders seemed to be on the defensive.

If you are a Jew who appreciates Christian support for Israel, you might like to sign the Jews Thanking Christians For Supporting Israel Petition.

Remember this, R.T.?
Especially for Wolf Men everywhere, here’s a monstrous addition to the “Yellow Belly Custard” collection.

Some Jewish West Bank Settlers have been gradually becoming wilder and wilder. They returned to an already evacuated outpost. They are giving the police and the soldiers a hard time. Some spent their Shabbat shooting at unarmed people. I think they are dead wrong to think they have popular support. You’d think the police and the soldiers have nothing better to do. Shame on them.

We’re back.
Well actually we were back last night but blogger was not letting me post.

Mitzpe Ramon was peaceful, as usual. The weather is much cooler, now. The days are pleasant, the evenings cool. Sweater cool.

Yesterday morning we visited a place inside Makhtesh Ramon called Ein Saharonim. This is a spring, which is a main source of fresh water for the local wild life. There was a Nabatean way station there about nineteen hundred to seventeen hundred years ago. It was on the Spice Route and the camel caravans used to rest there. The ancient Khan has been excavated. Very interesting. The spring was dry, but it should fill up in coming months and it will be interesting to see the difference.

We didn’t see any wild life this time, besides lots of migrating birds and a lizard.

The traffic was very heavy on the way home. We crawled alongside two OXFAM and EU humanitarian aid vehicles for a while. They must have been on their way back from Hebron. Bish pointed out that the vehicle drivers hardly looked like humanitarian workers. They didn’t. They looked more like big tough soldiers. I suggested that these organizations probably don’t send the little old ladies that collect the donations to actually give out the aid.

In Mitzpe Ramon people’s stories seem more interesting. Maybe because they’re different from the stories I usually hear. This couple we met had been conned when they reached the town, and bought an apartment for twice its worth. Seven years on, he’s unemployed and they want to leave but they can’t sell or rent out their home, even at a considerable loss. He’s got a good trade but he’s no spring chicken and won’t find it easy even if they do manage to leave. It looks like he finds solace in drink and in the Torah. And he dreams of living by the sea, although he obviously loves the desert.

I was reminded of my great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant, who left a wife and five children he couldn’t feed, in the North of England, and went to try to find a better life for them in the Goldene Medine - America. He didn’t find it there, but at least he tried.

Our new acquaintances are not hungry, they manage to make a very basic living, without frills, on her salary, but they feel trapped. They are not able to cut their losses and change their fate. He says there is work at his old workplace, but he’s tired of breaking his back for a pittance. I got the feeling he’d left as a result of a row. He seemed understanding of his former employers for not being able to pay higher wages.

They are nice, warm people. He has used his energy, creativity and skill to make a lovely garden, using materials he’s come across, and he is full of plans of how to improve it. He is spirited and engaging, what they call here: full of pepper. She is quiet, assured and sensible.

They said they’d been to Tel Aviv recently, with their children, for an “event” (probably a wedding) at one of the good hotels on the beachfront. They had been so intimidated by the heavy traffic that they hadn’t dared venture out of the hotel.

My great-grandfather returned to England to his family, in case you were wondering.

Judith Weiss' obituary for her Uncle Al is worth reading.

Breaking News:
We're going to Mitzpe Ramon tomorrow morning for a short weekend break. We haven't been for two months and we're very excited to be going back, at last.

We'll be back Saturday.

Oh, look! According to this the Ramon Crater isn't a crater at all. The five (non)craters in the Negev are apparently such a unique geological phenomenon that the Hebrew name Makhtesh has actually entered the geological lexicon. So from now on - Makhtesh Ramon and not the Ramon Crater!

Today we remember our Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered seven years ago (According to the Jewish calendar).

Simpson’s “world”
I saw this program on the BBC. I confess I can’t stand to watch much BBC these days, and I didn’t see it from the beginning. John Simpson, world affairs editor for the BBC could be seen strolling along wide, impressive streets in London, round the houses of Parliament, over a bridge crossing the River Thames, while giving what appeared to be a speech, full of anti-Bush sarcasm and ridicule at the American administration’s lack of understanding of how the world really works. It was also full of subtle anti-Israel sentiment, of the spluttering “well Israel’s next, of course” sort.

I found it difficult to follow the rambling substance of what he was saying as he strolled along. The camera kept swinging about. The cameraman was probably trying to be fashionably artistic, and that didn’t help my limited concentration capacity. All I could focus on was the old-world opulence and wealth of the city he was nonchalantly sauntering through, quite oblivious of how ridiculous what he was saying sounded, with this background.

While watching this self-satisfied looking gentleman walking along, sharing his educated world-view, I couldn’t help but feel how detached from reality these well-fed British intellectuals are. They take their sedate, orderly and formidable roads and buildings and bridges and rivers completely for granted. The imaginary dangers to the Western way of life, naively perceived by those ignorant Americans, have nothing to do with them.

And what was the message Simpson was trying to convey with the setting of his speech? Was he aiming at intimidating his non-British, non-Western viewers? Or maybe he felt his words would be more credible if presented in the shadow of the monumental symbols of the great British Empire? I’m sorry I missed the beginning. Maybe he embarked on his speech by apologizing that he was forced to roam the streets, aimlessly, because the studio was being renovated, or because his doctor told him to get more exercise and fresh air.

Update: My Dad says that this perambulating is a regular feature of Simpson's show. He's been seen roaming around Afghanistan, a kibbutz and quite a number of other places while explicating his various theories and hypotheses about the world. My Dad says they don't make any more sense, wherever he roams. It's always a load of rubbish, but it's amusing to watch.

The style of his presentation reminds me of David Attenborough, except that Attenborough is usually leading somewhere with his stream of verbalizations.

Nikita (Life by) has some interesting facts about Palestine and the Palestinians in her 10/16 post. For some reason I can’t link to the precise post. Must be archive problems.

Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.

In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."

[…] The Report of the Palestine Royal Commission quotes an account of the Maritime Plain in 1913:
The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts...no orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna [Yavne]....Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen....The ploughs used were of wood....The yields were very poor....The sanitary conditions in the village were horrible. Schools did not exist....The western part, towards the sea, was almost a desert....The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.

Lewis French, the British Director of Development wrote of Palestine:
We found it inhabited by fellahin [Arab peasants] who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria....Large areas...were uncultivated....The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots...changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin's lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin.

Surprisingly, many people who were not sympathetic to the Zionist cause believed the Jews would improve the condition of Palestinian Arabs. For example, Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, wrote: "It is absolutely necessary that an entente be made between the Zionists and Arabs, because the war of words can only do evil. The Zionists are necessary for the country: The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country."

Moe Friedman noticed that the Bali bombing caused a sharp rise in British support for war with Iraq. Among British men, supporters of war are actually the majority.

16 unbearable years.

Ron Arad. My heart goes out to him and his family.

Never a dull moment
My eldest daughter (11), and three of her friends (also 11) just spent the last hour stuck in the elevator. They were on their way down to the building's garden to make a movie for a Bible assignment. By the time the technician arrived to free them, it was too dark to do it outside, so they are now prancing around the living room, dressed in what they perceive to be biblical attire, shouting things like: "Take that, Son of Saul", again and again and again (or should I say take after take after take?).

On the Wazzani River crisis
by Eyal Zisser, of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.

Linkage
Judith Weiss links to this article in The Economist, which surprisingly attempts to explain to its esteemed readers the difference between Israel and Iraq with regard to UN resolutions. Not a Fish esteemed readers are requested to bear in mind that The Economist is hardly known to be a pro-Israel publication.

A bit of local history
Diane of Gotham has found a 1935 newspaper article reporting the inauguration, that year, of the pipeline the British “Iraq Petroleum Company” built, running from Iraq to Haifa (another pipeline led (leads?) to Tripoli in Lebanon). "You may recall during Gulf War I reference made to the H1, H2 and H3 oilfields. Did you ever wonder what the H stands for? Answer: Haifa. The pipelines used to run from Western Iraq to Haifa".

Having grown up in Haifa, I’ve heard this before. There are also an H4 and an H5 in Jordan. These were (are?) pumping stations. There’s a map on this site (just scroll down a bit) which shows H3 and H4, and also the part of the pipeline that goes up to Tripoli in Lebanon, which was built to serve the French and is the T pipeline (T3 and so on).

Trying to find more information I was sidetracked by this very interesting account of the British Mandate in Palestine 1917-1948, from the point of view of the British Police Force in British Mandate Palestine. It initially annoyed me because I found it impartial and biased towards the Arabs. But having read it all, I think it’s wrong to judge it in that way. The British had no intention of being impartial arbitrators between Arabs and Jews when they arrived in Palestine. They intended to do what they did in all their colonies – use it to further their own interests. Palestine was, as it always has been, a convenient passage area for the transport of goods. In this case it was oil, from the Gulf area, via Haifa, back to Britain. Those pesky Jews were a bother for them. If it hadn’t been for the national aspirations of the Jews the British wouldn’t have had any problem with the local Arabs, who were accustomed to being ruled over by an external power, from afar. The British were an interested party in British Mandate Palestine and this should be remembered, when reading this account.

Some important points: This account is a description of local events, with little effort to put the events into their international historical context. The uninitiated would fail to understand that: A. Small numbers of, mainly Sephardi, Jews had resided in Palestine for centuries. Religious Jewish centers existed in Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem (Hebron too, I think), long before the arrival of the Zionists. For centuries, some rich Jews, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, from all over the Jewish world, would risk the hazardous roads to spend their last years in these centers, and be buried in Eretz Hakodesh (the Holy Land) ready for the arrival of the Messiah. B. The large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews were driven here in the early nineteen hundreds by atrocities in Russia and Russian dominated areas, and later, in the nineteen thirties, by the Nazis.

The account also considerably downplays the outright support of the Arabs in Palestine (and elsewhere) for the Nazis in WWII.

There is a lot to be said for the British Mandate. The Turks had neglected this land and the British did a lot to build its infrastructure. We continue to reap the benefits of it to this day. I have mentioned Tegart fortresses, before (Now I know why I couldn’t find any English links at the time. It seems I was misspelling the name). They are mentioned in this account, too. When the British arrived, the great British colony building machine moved into action and started to do its thing here, using the experience of hundreds of years.

The Jewish state continued to build up the country, but some mistakes were made. One major mistake we was canceling the train station the British wisely built in the fledgling Tel Aviv’s business area. The road is still called Rakevet (train) road, although there are no train tracks or station in sight. The customs building is still there, though, looking very strange with its raised platform, high above street level. The train is sorely needed in these days of heavy inner city traffic. Plans for an inner city light train system are finding it hard to get off the ground. I suppose the planners of Tel Aviv in the early years of the state never dreamt Tel Aviv would grow and prosper as it has done. The British didn’t need such dreams to justify the expenditure. They just did things according to long used and tested blueprints.

But I digress. I’m good at that. One of the more informative parts of this British Police account is the chapter that describes the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 (which they call “The Arab Troubles”). Few people in the West realize that the Intifada of the late nineteen eighties was not actually the first Arab uprising here.

The various gangs attacked Jewish settlements and blocked roadways and caused police to abandon small police posts which were then burned down.

In some evacuated areas so-called provisional Arab Governments were set up, imposed their own taxes and even issued their own stamps. On 8th. October, 1938 Jenin police station was attacked but the tiny police garrison managed to hold out until relieved by the Army. Jericho was evacuated and the police station was burned to the ground and while Ramallah was held, the surrounding countryside was dominated and ruled by its local gang. Jerusalem, Beersheba and Gaza came under gang rule but Nablus, Acre and Nazereth were held.

From the autumn of 1937 and through 1938 terrorist bombings increased and every day Arabs and Jews were killed and maimed indiscriminately. Railways were attacked as were Jewish settlements and the Iraq Petroleum Company's pipeline to Haifa was blown up every week. The Jewish settlements managed to defend themselves by the use of illegally obtained rifles although they were officially only allowed the use of Greener guns, a weapon useless for long distance fire. At this time there were two Divisions of the British Army in Palestine and slowly the security forces regained the initiative.

The guys who wrote the account haven’t neglected to supply that very English literary thingamabob (I know you sent me a lovely thesaurus Dad, but even with a thesaurus I need something to start with and it doesn’t list thingamabob) - the comic relief: It was decided in Damascus that for political reasons the Fez or Tarbush should not be worn as headgear and in rural areas the traditional Arab head dress of headcloth and cords or Hatta wa Aqal was worn. Anyone wearing a Fez was likely to be assaulted and this practice became known to Police as "Fez bashing."

[Thank you, Gil, for the tip on the fonts. I know it wasn't intended for me, but I have benefited, nonetheless.]

American Christian supporters of Israel.
In the months running up to December 1999, Israeli police had to deport a few quirky Christian sect members, apparently having received information that these people had plans to hurry things along with regard to certain New Testament prophecies due to fulfill themselves at the turn of the century (and not realizing that the turn of the century was actually due exactly one year later). Much less such groups arrived than anticipated and I suppose most of them just wanted to be on the spot when it happened and didn’t really mean to take part.

Recently we’ve been hearing that we shouldn’t really be putting our trust in Christian supporters of Israel in America, because their motives are suspect. I’ve been reading blogs written by American Christian supporters of Israel for a few months now and they have served to strengthen my conviction that those millenium sect members are not representative and are no more than a fringe phenomenon.

Nikita Demosthenes answers the charge that Christian supporters of Israel are hoping Armageddon is just around the corner and their support of Israel is to further this end. Here’s another post of his on the subject.

It is a “he”, I know this because he e-mailed me. It’s OK. Nikita Khrushchev was also a “he”. I’m digressing again.

Nikita complains that liberal-minded Jews are making these claims, but I think that some religious Jews have been saying this too, mainly because they are worried about Christian missionaries. This is actually quite amusing, considering the extreme and aggressive tactics implemented by some ultra-religious Jews in Israel to persuade secular Jews to become religious.

I don’t think they’d be at all amused by the comparison.

My workplace is a ten-minute leisurely saunter from the beach. In the thirteen years I have been working there, I have never once contemplated forfeiting the inedible, but free, lunch offered by my employers, for a stroll there, toes in the warm sand, wind in my hair, blah blah.

Well, yesterday I did it. I confess I didn’t actually give up my lunch. I went afterwards. (Sssssh, don’t tell on me). I reckoned it wouldn’t be too hot because it was cloudy and rain was expected.

There is something magical about the beach. Even though this strip of beach is right near a busy main road, descending towards the beach a lull fell. All was quiet. You couldn’t hear the traffic, just the wind and the sea. There weren’t a lot of people: A few stay-at-home moms with babies. Lucky them. Imagine coming to the beach with kids on weekdays when it’s empty, instead of going to work. They all seemed to know each other so this must be a regular thing; a few youngsters, maybe students, or people who worked at night; some pensioners. The pensioners were the only ones who ventured into the water, for some reason.

There were a lot of pigeons. Every so often they all flew up in the air together, like pigeons do, and I felt I was being swept up with them. I sat on the sand, wondering if I’d be able to brush it off later, so no one would see, when I went back to work. It gradually became very overcast and windy.

I sat there for nearly an hour. I just couldn’t tear myself away. Watching the water, the pigeons, and the approaching clouds. Feeling the wind on my face and body, making my hair a tangled mess (OK, Mum, a more tangled mess than usual).

When I finally left, the quiet seemed to come with me. Maybe it was the wind that gave that feeling, or the quiet before the rain. It did rain in the end, but not very much.

When I got back to work, no one had even noticed I had been gone. Things get a bit sleepy just after lunch.

Next time I’ll take something to put on the sand, to sit or lie down on. That is, if the next time isn’t in another thirteen years time.

NYC Indymedia: Mossad Bombs Kill Almost 200 in Bali Tourist Nightspot
Told you.

Among the many (less than complimentary) comments:
You are destroying the hopes of Palestinians
by A. Assad

History is littered with all those who have villified the Jewish people. Your ignorant hatred is betraying the legitimate grievances and aspirations of me and my fellow Palestinians. Shame on you.

Noticed by Bish. Oh, look, Taranto noticed it, too.

Update: The comments continue to amuse. Quite a few familiar commenters, as well (Lawrence Simon, for one). There's even one good one attributed to the author of the article. I assume it's a prankster. :-)
Just kidding
by Dean Bates

You people are so sensitive. Lighten up. I thought Jews had a sense of humor.

Diane L. came clean about that one on LGF. The comments there are hilarious too.

Here's another good one.

Where is the frog?
He should be back by now.

"Hell is heaven with people". Bish.

How many more innocent people are going to die before the bozos get it into their thick skulls that Israel is just A TRIAL RUN?
Has anyone noticed yet that there were no ISRAELIS killed in Bali?

Haggai went to the University of Michigan Divestment Conference. Here is his account of the event. I admire his courage.

By The Limey Brit.

Alone among the crowd an evil lurks
Behind a beard, a veil, a ballcap, a smile, even.
Can you pick out today's attempt?
Do you see the one who hates enough to die
Early, to invoke, for an instant, earthly Hell?
Fiery fury, detonated in a bus, exploded in the marketplace,
Grabs eight and a half lives to an all-too-soon conclusion.
He goes to Hell, his seventy two virgins unmet.
In whose plan do the murdered innocents follow him?
Justice may not equal the victim with her killer.
Keep her near your mercy, not your wrath.
Let your rage fall not upon those upon whom death has fallen.
Men cry aloud in the streets of Jerusalem;
No one will hear the pleas of the aggrieved for peace.
Once again we hear the old refrain:
"Palestine will not be occupied!"
Quote not the suppressed voice of reason,
Regarded here as treasonous collaboration and
Shot accordingly.
To the "victors" go the spoils;
Ululating former mothers praise their sacrifice, rewarded with status, cash, prestige.
Vene vidi vici has always been the dream,
Where one day the last Jew will be pushed into the sea.
Xenophobic hate is swelling, heaving, boiling, exploding.
You turn your face away?
Zion burns again.

Andrew Duncalfe, the Limey Brit himself. Is that a brilliant name or what?

Sent to me by Dan Lovelady. First thing I read today. Strong stuff for 5:30 in the morning. We don't usually have any suicide attacks before 7:45.

Haaretz thinks nature is a tragedy
Haaretz translated this NYT story about that lioness in Kenya that adopted the oryxes. But they changed the header to: “The lioness tourist attraction in Kenya ended in tragedy: The lioness that adopted oryxes killed and ate one of them”. This is not what happened at all, but the editors obviously didn’t read the story to the end (if at all). And anyway, since when is a lioness doing what lionesses do a tragedy?

More strike stuff.
This is what I wrote about the subject in August, when it was only a warning strike. I had no doubt at the time that there would be a full blown strike after the "Hagim" (which is now). These guys have to show they're doing something if they want to be reelected. And they do, more than anything. The country can go to h&#l, for all they care.

This is just what I was telling you about: Haaretz is hardly a left-wing publication with regard to the economy, while at the same time being fanatically dovish. I happen to agree with every word of this editorial about the strike that began today, which frankly disgusts me, although I stand to gain from it. They can take any gains of this strike and stuff them, for all I’m concerned. Money has no smell, they say, but any money ill gotten as a result of this strike, stinks to high heaven.

If you are interested in Jewish heritage in Central and Eastern Europe, you might like to visit Centropa, which is a new online archive of photos and oral histories.

I read about it in Haaretz's print edition, but I'm too tired to look for the Haaretz link right now, if there is one. G'night.

Who gassed Gaza?
Chemical weapons have been used before in the Middle East.

Guess who Saddam’s predecessors were. I’ll give you a hint. It was in Gaza. And it wasn’t Israel.

It was the British, against the Turks in 1917. It seems they didn't manage to do much harm with it, though.

The Culpepper Log managed to bait me with this story of how Arafat tried to assassinate Colin Powell this April. The source is Yossef Bodansky’s new book. I’m not sure how reliable he is as a source, but it requires a lot of gall for someone described here as “director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare” to publish such a claim in a book if it is a complete fabrication.

The story of the attempted assassination is interesting, although, if true, doomed to fail because the Shabak (Shin Bet) routinely “cleans” areas that such possible targets as Powell are going to pass through. I was witness to such a “cleaning” operation myself around the same period, which was a very tense one, if you remember, when I found myself at a location soon to be visited by Defense Minister Ben Eliezer.

The Palestinian Authority has the ability to fight Hamas when it kills one of their own. When asked to curb Hamas’ terrorist activity against Israel they claim they can’t because Israel has destroyed the infrastructure. It seems they can but won’t. Why is this being ignored by the world? (Rhetorical question).

Farid Lancheros left me a comment suggesting I linked to him, as a Palestinian blog. I visited his blog and I really enjoyed reading it. He seems to be a lovely person. His blog is a far cry from pro-Palestinian blogs I have visited in the past, most of which have managed to deeply offend me personally after about thirty seconds. Farid’s blog is nothing like that. It is a pleasant and gentle place to visit, very peaceful.

I understand that Farid suggested I link to him to show that Palestinians are not only the conflict, which is something I wrote yesterday. But the thing is, reading his blog, I initially thought he’d given the wrong URL. I could find nothing to suggest that a Palestinian wrote this, apart from the fact that he had attended an anti-war rally and made some pro-Palestinian comments. Delving further, while enjoying Farid’s description of his life as a New Yorker, I found that Farid is of mixed Palestinian and Colombian descent. I found his poignant and frank descriptions of his life as an openly gay man and a rehabilitated alcoholic moving. But Farid is first and foremost an American. This is quite evident from his writing. Describing his blog as a Palestinian blog is misleading. A few pro-Israeli bloggers are Israeli-born or have lived in Israel, some grew up in Israel, but they don’t describe their blogs as Israeli blogs.

I was elated with the Oslo Accords. I fantasized about Peres’ “New Middle East”. I could envision Israelis and Palestinians evolving together as a confederacy, two independent states working together to create an economic and cultural heaven. I read excitedly about development projects in the Palestinian Authority. I hoped I would soon be able to spend my holidays in the lovely new Palestinian hotels. I once went shopping in Kalkilya and was excited to see Palestinian policemen directing the traffic and Palestinian taxi drivers waiting for fares. It reminded me of the stories of the early days of the state of Israel when every little thing was a great achievement. I thought the Palestinians should surely succeed economically. The merchants were growing rich. Israelis queued for hours (literally), every Shabbat, to get to a West Bank town called Bidya, known mainly for its cheap furniture. Israelis flocked to the casino in Jericho. I know of the universities, the schools and the hospitals. I’ve seen the high-rise apartment buildings in Gaza (sadly only on TV) and the Gazan families sitting at cafes on the beach. I had been to Gaza City before Oslo, so I could appreciate the difference. I know that Palestinians are not just the conflict, Farid.

But why, oh, why are the Palestinians so wrapped up in their anger and vengefulness that they would rather side with the hate-filled fanatics and bring this whole delicate pack of cards down? As anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to be part of that rare institute, a happy marriage, even for a short while, knows, building a life together requires endless patience and compromise, giving each other time and space to grow, side by side. I accept that Israel also has a lot to learn in this respect. But the Palestinians seem set on murdering the spouse.

Farid, all this has very little to do with your life. You live somewhere else, in a peaceful place, where you are free to pursue your personal goals, and even your sexual preference. I very much doubt you will be coming to live in the Palestinian State when it is established (and may we all see it established in peace in our lifetime). Yours is not a Palestinian blog.

I will link to your blog, Farid, not as a Palestinian blog, but as an interesting blog I would like to visit again, written by an American Palestinian.

Five dead in Helsinki explosion. They’re not sure yet if it was a bomb or a gas leak.


Another suicide bombing prevented. This time in Tel Aviv.

Did Sharon visit Moscow disguised as
Abu Mazen????
Maariv reports that Palestinian Authority no. 2 Abu Mazen attacked Arafat with harsh words, using phrases usually used by US government heads and Prime Minister Sharon. The source – “a confidential report sent by top Russian government officials to their Washington colleagues following Abu Mazen’s visit to Moscow last week.

The report adds that Abu Mazen and other Palestinian top officials are very close in their views to the standpoint of the Israeli government and that there is a nearly complete correlation between the views presented by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the viewpoint presented by Abu-Mazen a few days later.

Following Abu Mazen’s visit to Moscow, which took place immediately following Sharon’s visit, the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov phoned his American counterpart Colin Powell and reported the developments, called by some diplomatic sources “dramatic”. A wider and more detailed written report was later transmitted from Moscow to Washington, and part of it reached the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem

The reports pointed out, among other things, that Abu Mazen convened the Arab ambassadors and conducted a discussion with them described as “sharp and genuine”. Abu Mazen said, among other things, that Arafat made a grave mistake when he didn’t prevent the outbreak of the Intifada and headed it. He said that he and other top Palestinian officials warned Arafat, time and time again, but he didn’t heed them. According to Abu Mazen, the Intifada has brought the Palestinians very harsh results, to a severe failure in all fields, to a loss of purpose and to a dead end.

Abu Mazen pointed out that he and other Palestinian leaders have come to the understanding that they must accept Israel’s demand: A complete cessation of the violence, of all kinds, as a first stage. Only after complete quiet returns can the political process be rehabilitated, he said.

According to the Russian report, the secret negotiations between PM Sharon and top Palestinian officials led to a complete acceptance of the layout offered by Sharon: First a cessation of violence, then a renewal of the political negotiation towards the establishment of a Palestinian state within temporary borders. Abu Mazen said that in the current situation it would be very difficult to calm the field and to impose its authority over the rejectionist organizations."

HALLELUYA!

Sorry there’s more, but I’ve got to go over and see my Mum, now.

(My translation, by the way).

Shabbat Shalom!

Not a Fish
is just me being me. Everyone who reads this and knows me personally can see that.
It has evolved quite a bit since I began in June. I go where my fancy takes me. I have something to say I say it. Stories I write about often have continuations but I’ve lost interest. I’ve said what I had to say. I am not a journalist.

Israel is much more than the conflict with the Palestinians, as Our Sis pointed out back when I was writing about that alone. (I wish I could say the same about the Palestinians, but that’s besides the point). Most Israelis take this country, and all the amazing accomplishments of the last hundred years, for granted. This war, threatening our very existence, has given us a rare opportunity to be aware and appreciate. With all its faults, this is a really amazing place to live.

For Dad.
A new addition to the "Yellow Belly Custard" collection. And another one.

Guess what Imshin is. I bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t either. Imshin J, however is a completely different. Not a Fish is smelly, but not in a fishy way. Yuck.

This is fun. Let’s try some more. They must of heard about Bish’s diet. (Oops! I promised myself I wouldn’t mention Bish’s diet).

This is interesting. And this. Freddie, this is for you.

Now you try it.

I’ve been waiting for the English translation of this – The monthly “Peace Index”.
Some highlights:

The findings of the Peace Index survey for this month point to a disparity between the poor condition of Israel's economy and the ongoing clash with the Palestinians, on the one hand, and the general sentiments of the Israeli-Jewish public, on the other hand. This is despite the fact that the issues are extensively, and for the most part pessimistically, covered in the media. Therefore, the overall mood, assessments of the economic and personal situation, and feelings of personal security are not as negative as might be expected. The majority of the public characterizes these issues at a medium level. In fact, despite the difficult economic and security situation and prospective future developments, an overwhelming majority is not realistically considering emigration.

[…] The general picture that emerges is that taking into account the difficult objective conditions, the "national morale" is by no means at a nadir. This is consistent with findings we have presented several times over the past two years - the public believes in Israeli society's resiliency even should the present situation continue for the foreseeable future.

With regard to infant mortality, it seems Israeli is one of the less unequal countries.
Amnon Rubinstein invites us to take a look at infant mortality rates between Jews and Arabs in Israel and compare them with those who call us racist.

In rich and developed France, the infant mortality rates among Arabs (most of whom speak the language of the country, and some of whom are already second, third and fourth generation natives of France) are not only much higher than in Israel - the gap between the minority and the majority there is considerably larger than in "racist Israel."

More info on the subject.

So it's looking like it's a sociopath, not an "ordinary terrorist"?
I am sorry Americans are being terrorized like this. I hope whoever is doing this is caught soon.

Oh, thank you, Diane for this fun. Bish explained to our youngest that this is why he is so unhappy :-)

Tenderness
I am driving along in my car. The car in front of me stops in the middle of the road. I can’t see why he has stopped and I lift my hand to give the horn a little toot. Then I notice a lizard crossing the road, between the tyres of the car in front of me. It’s too late to stop my hand. It’s already pressing the horn. I toot and feel bad.

The social worker comes to visit the bedridden cancer patient at home. She asks the patient to tell her who all the people in the photos are.

I’m late returning library books again. I ask the nice librarian what the fine is, hoping she will let me pay this time. No fine. ‘You can ring and extend, you know.’ She explains patiently, for the umpteenth time.

A street cat sniffs at the plastic cheese containers someone has left out with cat food inside. Another cat has been there before him.

I don't think I'll be buying those sandals, after all. I'm sorry for the salespeople and the shop owners with their empty shops. I just don't have the heart for shopping, cheap or not.

Letter from Gotham: If I were a British Jew, I would emigrate. Not sure where I would emigrate to, though....

Is there any question? I don’t think the answer to that has been so apparent since the nineteen forties.

Yes, Meryl, morons.
All that brain power, Zero common sense.

See also OCCAM'S TOOTHBRUSH and The Harvard Crimson Online.

A bus stop under the pedestrian bridge leading to Bar Ilan University, near Bnei Brak. A busy road.
A man tried to enter the back door of a crowded bus this morning just as the driver was closing it. The man fell and started bleeding. The bus driver stopped the bus and went to tend to the wounded man along with another. Someone said a woman gave the man mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When they opened his shirt they saw wires and a device. They realized he was a terrorist. They got hold of his hands and pinned him down to prevent his detonating the device. At the same time they yelled at everyone to run away. Then they noticed he was starting to move his legs, and were afraid he would blow himself up on them. They made sure all the people that had crowded round were well away and then they made a dash for it. The terrorist got up and started running towards the people. Then he blew up. 71 year-old Saada Aharon was killed. Thirty others were wounded.

Attorney Shamai Leibowitz lives very near to where this happened. Is this terrorist also Moses?

In reaction to a comment by Alis, I have added an update to my somewhat loose rambling about welfare (it's right at the end of the post). I seem to be in one of my more fuzzy brain days.

This is brave, but is it wise?
…classroom time devoted to the events of October 2000 will soon be incorporated in secondary school curricula for students in Arab language schools in Haifa and northern regions.

[…] Tirosh asked teachers and principals to encourage students to "express their anger, pain, frustration, disappointment and anxiety about the situation." The new initiative would provide room for "an array descriptions of reality provided by teachers, pupils and parents, all based on different standpoints."

Although this intiative could easily serve as a boomerang, having the opposite result of that hoped for, the Ministry of Education is going ahead with it. I think this says something about the fairness and openness with which the Ministry regards the Arab students.

Left and right in Israel
I liked the comment on Southpark Republicans that Nancy B. King posted.

Israelis tend to confuse the right-left economy continuum, with the hawk-dove continuum. Israel is unique in such abnormalities as the Israeli financial elite being identified with the left, even as they advocate free economics. This is because they made their money under the wings of the socialist founding fathers and maybe also because they were drawn to Shimon Peres’ tempting vision of the “New Middle East” and its economic possibilities. Haaretz newspaper is a good example of a radically dovish publication that caters to the Israeli heads of finance and industry.

Another uniquely Israeli paradoxical phenomenon is “Shas”, an ultra-orthodox political party that aligns itself with the political right, while representing a way of life that is ideologically non-productive and is financed by handouts.

The recession and the media
In view of the deepening recession, the press is discussing hunger incessantly. Statistics show that unemployment and poverty are highest in Arab towns and villages (That’s a “laugh” isn’t it? The Palestinians rejoice in Israel’s economic hardship and it is their brothers who are hardest hit). But times are tough in Jewish areas, as well, especially in the already impoverished “development” towns in the South. There have been reports of government ministers lavishly spending taxpayers’ money (mainly Shas ministers – this is ironic because Shas represents the poorest of the poor), while some schoolchildren go hungry.

Welfare
Someone I know voluntarily activates a food project in her town. She feeds those who would be hungry without her help, according to a list she receives from the municipal welfare department. She says the list has been getting longer lately.

On the other hand, I have quite a few friends and acquaintances that live in blue-collar neighborhoods. They tell me that many of the so-called welfare cases drive flashy cars and wear an offensive amount of gold and diamonds. My fiends complain that these people get all the subsidies and refuse to pay any dues at the school or kindergarten, but don’t even bother to look for work. They say that the real poor are sometimes too embarrassed to ask for help and are busy scraping by and keeping up appearances.

I have no doubt that my friend, with the food project, feeds people who really need this help. She and her helpers bring the food parcels they prepare right into the people’s homes, and she therefore knows how they live. But I ask myself how many undeserving frauds are being subsidized by our welfare system, along with the deserving.

A social worker I know says that government cut backs are making things very difficult. Children who have been taken out of abusive homes and put into care are being sent back home. Many more are not being dealt with at all.

But it seems people are still turning down work in agriculture and construction, maybe because the employers prefer to import cheap labor and pay them starvation wages.

But
The municipality has been changing the asphalt in our road for three nights now. The noise is horrendous, but I’m happy. What can I say? I’m an infrastructure freak. If the municipality can still afford to fix the roads and sidewalks, and pay nighttime fees, we haven’t hit rock bottom yet.

Social and economic inequality is not necessarily caused by a conspiracy of the affluent
A friend recently took on a new employee with a rather questionable past. The new employee was extremely grateful for being given such a wonderful opportunity and worked hard and long for a few weeks.

Then this person began to disappear for days on end, leaving work unfinished, and was soon given the boot. The process of sacking the employee was very unpleasant. The employee apparently yelled accusations at my friend, blaming him for the employee’s own shortcomings, threatening to sue, and so on.

My friend, who initially had been happy to give this person a chance, was frustrated at his inability to help this person, who, it seems, just couldn’t deal with the requirements of a holding a steady job.

Life is more complex than black and white/left and right
Igor B., whose regular feedback I enjoy and appreciate, sees me as a leftie. Does he mean leftie on the economy continuum, the hawk-dove continuum, or both?

These days, I fail to identify myself as left or right. Both sides seem to put such a lot of values into one basket. If one’s a leftie then one is in favor of 1,2, 3 and 4 and is opposed to 5, 6, 7 and 8. If one’s a right-winger he’s in favor of 5, 6, 7 and 8 and is opposed to 1, 2, 3 and 4. Since when were things so simple and clear cut?

I feel compassion for those who haven’t been as lucky as I have been and I donate as generously as I can afford to charity, but I refuse to feel guilty or to be trodden on by those who have less than me, materially.

I believe the state should supply all its citizens with the best education and health care possible and that children, old people, the handicapped (physically and mentally) and those who really cannot work should be looked after. But I also believe that those who harm others should receive much longer prison sentences, with rehabilitation programs only for the few convicts who can really benefit from them.

I believe we should take more care of the environment, but not at the expense of human lives.

I fail to see anything wrong with Macdonald’s, Coca Cola and other multi-nationals. It is my responsibility, as a parent, to make sure my children get a balanced diet and I see no harm in these companies offering their wares, as long as they don’t force me to consume them. Living as I do, in a little country, far from the affluent centers of “modern civilization”, I am grateful for the considerable material (and even spiritual) improvement in my life that Globalization has brought about. Moreover, I fail to see how it is possible to globally solve global problems without Globalization.

I am a vegetarian. I haven’t knowingly eaten an animal for six years. I believe that killing animals for food is wrong, when there is an abundance of available food and it is relatively easy to reach a balanced diet without eating animals. But I am strongly opposed to forcing such views on others, including my own children.

I think abortion is murder, but I am pro-choice.

I feel that for there to be a future for Israel, we must be strong and win this war at all costs, but I have compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians who hate me, and believe that the army should do the utmost to avoid unnecessary civilian deaths.

If I am a leftie because I see those who would rather see me dead as human beings, so be it.

Update: Alis wrote something that is worth posting here and not leaving on the comments:

"A social worker I know says that government cut backs are making things very difficult. Children who have been taken out of abusive homes and put into care are being sent back home. Many more are not being dealt with at all."

"If the municipality can still afford to fix the roads and sidewalks, and pay nighttime fees, we haven’t hit rock bottom yet."

Does this really have a greater priority than protecting children from domestic abuse? IMO, not being able to afford the latter IS hitting rock bottom.

I quite agree. This was rather thoughtless of me. I would like to point out that not all kids are being sent home to abusive homes. There is a shelter for kids near us, and as far as I know it hasn't emptied. I happen to know one of the kids, and he's still there. Moreover, there is a shelter for teenage girls near my work place that has recently been renovated with great love and care and this last week has been reopened and reoccupied.

A class celebrity – at last!
I have just noticed that a classmate of mine is reporting for a major Israeli newspaper. I haven’t heard his name for 19 years. I actually think of this guy every time I see Egyptian president Mubarak. I used to think they looked similar, except my classmate has enormous blue eyes. There’s an idea for a children’s party game, educational, too – blow up a photo of Mubarak and get the kids to stick on different features: big blue eyes; a moustache, long blond hair… Do you think it will cause a diplomatic incident? I wonder if my old classmate has aged as well as Mubarak has. Do you think Mubarak dyes his hair?

Ah, the joys of being 37 and gainfully employed
On the way to work I pass a shoe shop with lovely shoes on display, but a bit expensive for me. I’ve had my eye on, more or less, all the sandals they’ve had in the window this summer. Today I noticed that the prices have come down a lot, now it’s the end of the season, and they’re much cheaper. Time to go shopping!

Now if I was still in my early twenties, I would…
a) worry that if I bought them now, they would be terribly out of fashion by next summer.
b) not be able to afford them even at the cheaper prices.

Reshet Bet in English
You can now read some of the Israeli radio station Reshet Bet updates in English.

But let’s renew talks, by all means.
Evelyn Gordon also discusses why the Palestinians think their war against Israel is a great success in today’s Jerusalem Post.

But it is time for Israel and the world to face up to what the Palestinians are really saying: that for an overwhelming majority of them, the "achievements" of undermining Israel's economy, security and international support are worth the steep personal and national price they have paid.

And as long as this is so, the idea that a Palestinian state would end the conflict is a pipe dream -- because the Palestinian goal is not a thriving Palestine alongside a thriving Israel, but a dying Israel, even at the price of a dying Palestine alongside it.

Update: Gil has posted a letter by one Palestinian who sees things differently. The heartbroken father of a suicide bomber bitterly challenges the religious leaders who sent his eldest son to die killing.

More on St. Francis of Assisi.
Alifa Saadya, from the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was kind enough to update us:

Apparently the Prayer of St. Francis is probably not actually by
him, so some Catholic sources say that it's "in the spirit of St.
Francis." I once read a book about the role of the clergy in the
town of Assisi, and what is really remarkable is that many of the
townspeople also took part in rescue activities. One printer and his
son made some of the best false passports and documents that you can
now see at Yad Vashem. Students in Assisi went to the post office
(which also provided telephone service) and looked up names from the
directories of cities that were at that time occupied by the Allies
in order to use them on the false documents (names from those places
would have been harder for an official to check in the chaos of
war). For some reason, that little detail about finding names in the
directory has always stayed with me. Sometimes the most unobtrusive,
simple things can be lifesaving.

St. Francis did write other hymns and prayers, but today, most
scholars think the popular Prayer was actually written by someone
else.

Are we to expect a full scale Gaza invasion in the event of a large scale terrorist attack?
Haaretz thinks so: “Israel has told the U.S. that an IDF invasion of Gaza "is a matter of statistics and time," because as terror attacks mount in the Strip - mostly against settlements - "Israel will be forced to act."”

There have been a lot of mortar attacks and Kassam rocket attacks, lately, not just on settlements and military outposts in the Gaza strip, but against towns and villages inside the "Green Line" (pre-1967 Israel) as well – Sderot, for instance. A factory was destroyed there, recently, by a mortar attack. Luckily no one was hurt.

Jenin
Tal G. summarizes an Israeli TV documentary about the Jenin battle, from the point of view of Israeli soldiers.

A chip on this Jew’s shoulder
Last Friday morning, my youngest daughter attended a school ceremony at one of the local synagogues with the rest of her classmates. The synagogue’s Rabbi presented her and her friends with her second grade version of the Book of Genesis, covered nicely with blue velvet with gold lettering (supplied by the parents, of course!). This ceremony marks the beginning of Bible study. It is a symbolic ceremony and has no religious significance. The Rabbi, who just happens to be an influential national figure, spoke at length about the “People of the Book”. I doubt if the seven year olds understood much of it. The parents seemed to be too busy excitedly taking photos to notice or care.

One of the young recipients of the book was a non-Jewish classmate of my daughter, who, I think, is from a country in East Asia (I’m not sure which one - my daughter can’t remember; I’m too shy to ask his mother and don’t like to gossip by asking other mothers or the teacher). He looked very cute with a big white kippa clipped on his head, along with the other boys.

I commented to Bish that I would have refrained from sending my daughter to a similar ceremony in a church, had we been living abroad. Bish replied that this is mainly a social event for the (largely secular) children. He added that the child’s parents obviously don’t feel as threatened by Jewish symbols, as we feel by Christian ones.

Some years ago, an Israeli balladeer with a wonderful voice, called Ahinoam Nini (her name is a bit difficult for Western ears so in the West she goes by the name of Noa), sang “Ava Maria” to the Pope and an audience of a hundred thousand Catholic worshippers, in the Vatican. My first impression was WOW. But then I began to feel uncomfortable. Something I heard her say on the radio, recently, has led me to understand that her rendition of “Ava Maria” has, by now, become her trademark.

I really love Ahinoam Nini’s work. Many years ago, I lost an unborn child. Around the same time Ahinoam Nini released her version of the beautiful Hebrew poem, “Uri”, by poetess Rachel, about the son she never had. I still cry when I hear her sing this song. (The real name of the poem is “Barren Woman”, by the way. I couldn’t find an English translation).

But the “Ava Maria” thing offends me. I’ve looked up the words. They are very beautiful. I am sure they have given great comfort to countless Christians the world around for centuries, in times of pain and suffering. But for a Jew and an Israeli to sing a prayer to the mother of God (which to a believing Jew is the worst kind of sacrilege) in the Vatican, displays a lack of understanding for the terrible suffering endured by millions of Jews at the hands of Christians, in Europe, for centuries, in the name of Mary and Jesus.

I am not saying not to forgive. I think we already have done. I am not saying things have not greatly changed in this respect. They have, even given reports of a recent awakening of some anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe and elsewhere. I am not saying we should not strive to live in peace with the descendants of our historical tormentors. Of course we should. There is no question of that. But I am saying that it would do to be more sensitive. There are other beautiful songs she could have sung that are not prayers to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus.

It seems she wasn’t very sensitive when she performed for the Pope at a later date, either. This time she apparently embarrassed everyone by wearing provocatively revealing clothes. The Pope reportedly averted his eyes. A beautiful voice does not automatically guarantee its owner the gift of tact, it seems.

The reason I have brought all this up is a beautiful prayer that Jen posted a few days ago. I have read and reread it many times. I find it very moving. But I have been dithering about posting it. This is because it is attributed to a Catholic saint. And not just any Catholic saint. I am understandably rather ignorant of the legacy of Saint Francis of Assisi, besides his liking animals and helping the poor.

Isn’t it strange that I should have no such qualms about the teachings of the Buddha? Maybe not. Buddhism, in its purer form, has nothing to do with the worship of a deity. It is quite possible for a religious Jew to practice Buddhism. I know a number of people who do this. Furthermore, Buddhists have never persecuted Jews or tried to convert them forcibly, to my knowledge.

Back to St. Francis: Searching the net, I discovered that the clergy of Assisi saved many Jews during the Holocaust.

Please allow me to share this beautiful prayer with you. It has wisdom far beyond the beliefs of this religion or that:


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

More:
Eric Hoffer on weakness:
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
_________________________

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
_________________________

The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.
_________________________

Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.
_________________________

When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.
_________________________

Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.
_________________________

When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

A wise man.

This was on Middle East Realities:
ISRAEL'S PECULIAR POSITION
By Eric Hoffer, Los Angeles Times
May 26, 1968

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese -- and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.

Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break of diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway. The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the next Holocaust will be upon us.

Eric Hoffer 1968

[Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983, was an American (non-Jewish) philosopher, this article was published in the LA Times.]

This was published on my third birthday. Thirty four years later nothing has changed.

No longer welcome in synagogues
Yesha News gleefully reported, last night, that Attorney Shamai Leibowitz, advocate for Marwan Barghouti, was thrown out of two synagogues during Shabbat. Besides being Marwan Barghouti’s advocate he is also known to be one of the more vocal refuseniks (he’s currently number 50 on the list). You can read his beliefs here. But the worshippers didn’t refuse to pray with him because he is defending Marwan Barghouti nor for his refusing to defend his country in a time of war. What really offended them was his reported comparison, in court, of Marwan Barghouti with the biblical Moses.

You can read about the incident here: “The relative tranquility inside the courtroom was at one point punctuated by loud guffaws from the audience when Leibowitz compared Barghouti, accused of orchestrating attacks in which 26 Israelis were killed, to the biblical Moses. "Moses, too, did not recognize the Egyptians' jurisdiction to try him and fled the country," said Leibowitz, a grandson of the late biblical scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

Quoting Exodus, he continued: "Moses saw cruel occupation and he killed the Egyptian and left him in the sand." A patient (Judge) Gurfinkel carefully retorted "but Moses killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating an Israelite, not just any innocent Egyptian."”.

Jews know Moses as Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher. I think you could say that if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are regarded as the biological forefathers of the Jews, Moshe is our spiritual father, God’s vessel for teaching the Jewish people what was required of them. For a religious Jew (and Shamai Leibowitz is a religious Jew) such a comparison of Moshe Rabenu with the guy that Bish always used to call “whatsisname, the little one with the moustache”, a little schneck of a terrorist turned politician turned terrorist, is going way over the line.

Now, Jews aren’t into idolizing spiritual teachers. This is widely regarded as sacrilege. Although Moshe freed the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, led them out of Egypt, and to the Promised Land, supplying them with a whole new set of beliefs and laws on the way there, he is not mentioned even once in the Passover Haggada. This is the book the Jews (even the secular ones) read together every Passover, which tells the story of the Israelites’ exodus out of Egypt. The reason for this is to emphasize that it was God who freed the Israelites and Moshe was only His helper.

So it looks like the worshippers difficulty with Leibowitz’s comparison is essentially the same as Judge Gurfinkel’s. Moshe’s killing of an Egyptian taskmaster, who was beating an Israelite slave, cannot be compared to Barghouti’s sending suicidal mass murderers to indiscriminately slaughter innocents, many of them children.

In his much quoted explanation of why Israeli Jews should refuse to serve in the territories, he maintains that what we are doing there is collective punishment of innocents. He brings a few examples from the Bible to prove that Jewish sources view collective punishment as wrong. Among other things, he quotes Deuteronomy: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” (Deuteronomy 24:16); and the prophet Ezekial who said: “The soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not hear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself alone.” (Ezekial 18:20)

In this case, the bringing to trial of Marwan Barghouti is what Leibowitz himself has been demanding: Punishment of those responsible.

I believe that every person has the right of a decent defense, when put on trial (not a right automatically granted to Palestinian defendants in Palestinian courts, by the way). But by offering himself as Barghouti’s defense lawyer, and by claiming that the Israeli court has no jurisdiction to try Barghouti for the mass murder of innocents in Israel, Attorney Leibowitz contradicts his own explanation for his refusal to serve his country. I’m not saying that Barghouti’s defense lawyer should not use this line of defense. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know. I’m saying that Attorney Shamai Leibowitz, personally, has no moral right to use this claim.

Moral right? What am I talking about? The man’s a lawyer!

By the way, with regard to Shamai Leibowitz’s grandfather, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I highly recommend reading anything written by him, you can get your hands on. I know he is known to have said some things that annoyed a few people (well a lot of people), but everything I’ve read of his has been exciting, inspirational and thought provoking.

Bish rephrased the Talmud and commented on Shamai Leibowitz: “The vinegar is the grandson of the wine”. (The original is “vinegar son of wine” in the Gemara, Bava Metziya, 83b, meaning something on the lines of: a ne'er do well son of a righteous father).

If you understand Hebrew, you can listen to Moshe Gantz, from a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and furthering Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s philosophies, explaining why Shamai Leibowitz does not represent his grandfather’s way of thinking.

Update: Yisrael Neeman from Mideast: On Target discusses Shamai Leibowitz here. He is less fond of Grandpa Leibowitz than I am.

This is all over the place in Hebrew, but I’ve just found it in English:
Israeli head of military intelligence said on Israel TV’s channel two, today, that there are no missiles in West Iraq. Phe-ew! What a relief.

He said Saddam might try to send some nasty stuff in a plane, but I don’t see that as a serious threat.

He also said Iraq’s four years from nukes.

Here’s another “Believe It or Not” item:
I’ve just tidied my side of our bedroom! Gasps of disbelief can be heard in different corners of Israel, right now.

OK, I’ll come clean. There is still a small pile of socks on the floor, waiting to be sorted. But that’s it. I promise!

What???
It says here that Frankfurter Allgemeine writes in this morning’s edition that Israel has agreed to the King of Jordan’s request to annex the Sunni West of Iraq to Jordan following the fall of Saddam Hussein in the coming US attack.

Update: I'll rephrase that and remember to put in some dots and commas, this time: King Abdullah of Jordan has asked Israel's permission, to annex the Sunni West of Iraq. This annexation is scheduled to take place following the U.S. attack of Iraq, which should result in the fall of Saddam Hussein. Is that any better? I don't know, it still sounds just as weird.

Friends
Fred Lapides, who is doing great stuff on Israpundit, sent me this update on the activities of what he calls my “not friends”. Now where did he get that idea? I’ll have you know, I have some very dear friends who can be seen regularly among the ten to twenty people attending pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

This lady, whom I don’t believe I’ve ever met, sounds very sweet, but a bit confused about the facts. She says: “Despite these difficult times, more and more people on both sides have come to understand that violence is not a solution”. We obviously haven’t been reading the same opinion polls. She’s also not very knowledgeable about history: “Like every occupation in history, the Israeli occupation too is doomed to failure, and will come to an end sooner or later”. You see, Bish, this is why they should be teaching more general history in Israeli schools. She sums up: “And at the end of that occupation, two vibrant states - safe, secure, independent of each other, and cooperative for the benefit of all - must inevitably emerge”. So optimistic. So naive. I pray for your vision to come true, Gila. It is also my vision. But it’s just unrealistic right now.

Bzzzzzz. Wrong answer.
The Iranian parliament commissioned an opinion poll about how people feel about dialogue with the USA. But when the research institute commissioned came back with the wrong results, the judiciary shut down the state-run polling institute and is taking both its director and the head of the state news agency to court.

Operation S.I.C.K
Opposed to the exploitation of children in armed conflicts? This site has information about it, including about the exploitation of Palestinian children.

There's a petition to sign, if you like.

When does he have time for linguistics?
This article that appeared in a university rag was spotted by Israpundit at Instapundit. The article apparently appeared after Noam Chomsky, a linguist, spoke at that university. Am I right to suppose that the linguist wasn’t talking about linguistics? By the way, the article is not written by a fan of the linguist.

Chomsky's flunkies
Israpundit has the list of professors in Israel who have signed the Harvard MIT petition to boycott Israel. Five out of six are -- you've guessed it -- linguists!

The sad truth about Saudi prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
11 Saudis die (and another is blinded) after drinking cheap after-shave for it’s alcoholic content. Saudi newspaper calls for cheap after-shave to be taken of the shelves. Anticipated result: Only rich Saudis will be allowed the pleasure of dying after drinking expensive after-shave.

I’m sure an aging porn star, who is also an unsuccessful politician, is just what will make Saddam a much better person.
Pathetic.

Israeli radio station, Reshet Bet, quoting an interview to a Danish newspaper, says senior Hamas guy in Gaza, Abd el-Aziz Rantisi, admits that the IDF has halted suicide terrorist attacks and has made Hamas activities very difficult. He says Hamas will return to widespread terrorist activities once they get used to the new situation. He said the IDF is not entering Gaza city for fear of heavy soldier casualties and will probably enter with tanks.

A poll
Thank you Renathina for pointing to this: “Sixty percent of Israelis believe Israel is fighting for its existence in the now two-year old Palestinian war, according to a poll conducted for The Jerusalem Post by Smith Research and Consulting. The poll covered a random sample of 500 Israeli adults.

Twenty percent of Israelis believe that the war is being fought to determine the borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state, and only 11% of Israelis believe that the war is being fought over the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”.

The 20%, who think this is a war to determine the border, are disproportionately loud. They are also extremely derisive of the stupid, uneducated, ignorant people who see things differently.

A random sample of Israelis, BTW, includes Israeli Arabs, in case you were wondering.

Another poll, also given here, shows that the Palestinians don't get it yet.

Go read on Tal G what Arnold Roth, has to say about the events at the Marwan Bargouthi trial. Roth, whose 15-year old daughter Malki was killed in the Sbarro bombing in Aug 2001, has been in attendance at the trial.

[The previous post seems to be in some sort of bloggy black hole and I can't edit it. Please disregard]

Go read on Tal G. what Arnold Roth, has to say about the events at the Marwan Bargouthi trial. Roth, whose 15-year old daughter posted by Imshin @ 11:34   0 Comments

Is Israeli Arab support for their elected leaders waning?
An article in Yediot Aharonot’s “Shabbat Supplement”, this week, takes a look at a new Arab Israeli political movement called “A-Nahada”, which the newspaper translates as revival, but according to my dictionary also means, awakening, uprising and repudiation. This is a group that claims to be fed up of the Israeli Arabs’ elected leaders who are only interested in the Palestinian struggle and are not at all interested in the status of Israeli Arabs. Many of the activists involved in this new movement were formerly active in Arab political parties and are disillusioned. One of them says he believed that solving the Palestinian problem would ultimately solve the Arab Israelis own problems of inequality. Although hardly an excuse for the Israeli Arabs’ widespread support of the war the Palestinians in the territories are currently waging against Israel, this is probably true.

If there was a peaceful Palestinian State along side Israel, right now, established on the basis of Ehud Barak’s offers in the Summer of 2000, and Israeli Jews could see that the Arabs are were no longer a threat, Israeli Jews themselves would be fighting for equality for Israeli Arabs. So up till two years ago, the Israeli Arabs support for the Palestinians was logical. Two years ago it ceased to be. The Israeli Arabs were shocked and horrified when 12 Israeli Arabs (the 13th was from Gaza) were killed in violent demonstrations staged by thousands of Israeli Arabs in October 2000. Their anger and indignation led to the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the events.

What they don’t seem to realize is how shocked and horrified Israeli Jews were. The inside of Israel became like the West Bank. Main roads were blocked and became dangerous. A man was killed on the main road from Haifa to Tel Aviv by a stone thrower from an Arab village. People were actually afraid to go from Tel Aviv to Haifa! Can you imagine such a thing? Roads to the north became dangerous and the north was actually cut off from the rest of the country, for a short while. I remember my father couldn’t go visit his friend from Deganya on the shore of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), because roads were closed. Jewish inhabitants of the Galilee found the roads to their villages cut off by angry mobs, made up of their neighbors in villages they’d been on friendly relations with for decades. Jewish Israelis suddenly understood that Israeli Arabs are a potential danger.

The thirteen deaths shocked the Arabs into ending the hostilities, but left them angry and hostile. The Jews have also been slow to forgive. In the summer of 2001, I took my family north to Mount Meron for a few days. It is nice and cool there, even in the heat of August. I did my homework, and checked all the nice places to visit in the area. I decided that on the way up, we should eat in a restaurant on the road, in Ma’iliya, an Arab village near Ma’a lot. This restaurant was highly recommended in all the best books and I hoped we’d have a table. After all, it was the height of the summer vacation and lunchtime. The restaurant, run by Christian Arabs, and bearing the same name as a very famous Lebanese Jewish singer, was empty. That summer, I also took a nighttime tour of Yaffo (Jaffa). It was a Thursday night, usually a night many Israelis spend out on the town, because many people don’t work on Friday. We went past the popular Abu-Lafiya’s bakery. In normal times people would have been queuing up there. They had one or two clients that evening. I think business has picked up in Yaffo, but few Israeli Jews dare venture into Israeli Arab villages these days, even after two years of quiet.

Back to the Yediot Aharonot article, this group has decided to leave the Arab parties and join the Labor Party. They say the only way to make a difference is to be part of a large influential party. The interviewer suggested that maybe they’re backing the wrong horse, the state of the Labor Party being what it is. But it seems they are not backing the party as much as Mitzna, personally. One of them told the interviewer that without Mitzna as head of the labor Party, many of the 1,500 new Labor Party members who joined the Party through this new Arab movement, would not vote for the Labor party in the elections.

An interesting passage: ““I would rather cut off my hand than vote for the Arab parties” says another interviewee, “Arab parties that represent Arafat, do not represent me and my problems. Azmi Bishara who traveled to Damascus and sat next to Nasrallah, did not go to represent me or to deal with my problems. He represents himself and I have no problem with his standing trial for it. Abie Nathan was also tried for flying to Egypt. We elected them, we sent them to the Knesset, we expected them to deal with our problems, and in the end they are representing Arafat there. They say that that is what’s important? I say no. I voted, as others did, for representatives who would look after problems of education, unemployment, health and housing. We can’t sit quietly and listen to them talking all day about what is happening in the territories””.

Bish and I can’t remember if Abie Nathan was tried for flying to Egypt. He didn’t go to prison, that’s for sure. Anyway, it’s not a relevant comparison. Abie Nathan flew to Egypt to promote peace, not to give his support to terrorists.

It is hard to tell, from the article, how much support this way of thinking has among Arab Israelis. I think that it’s paramount for the state to invest in Israeli Arabs. There is no justification for less investment in infrastructure and education in Arab towns and villages. Many Arab Israelis seem to truly wish to be more involved in Israeli society. They may wish to support their Palestinian brethren but have no wish to join them in the Palestinians State. It seems foolish to drive them away. Serving in the army may be problematic for them, because they do not wish to fight their brothers. Why not organize civilian national service for them, like many Jewish religious girls do? They could work in hospitals, clinics, schools; they could be used to develop social projects in their villages and towns. I’ve read about Arab girls applying for national service and being turned down because they are not religious Jews. This is wrong. But isn’t this is the sort of project the Israeli Arab leaders should be promoting instead of screaming about Arafat in the Mukata’a?

Maybe it would be wiser for A-Nahada to join the Likud and fight for their rights from within the ruling party. I understand their difficulty in doing so. But it would be wiser.

Exciting stuff.
According to Haaretz, Thomas von der Osten-Sacken is a journalist, German human rights activist and intellectual, and leading German authority on human rights in Iraq. It mentions somewhere towards the end of the article that he is a marxist, but you wouldn’t think it to read most of what he says. He has some extremely interesting insights on Iraq, the Kurds and the middle East, but also about German society.

Just a snippet of what he has to say about Iraq: "The Ba'ath ideology mixes pan-Arabism with admiration of Mussolini and Hitler, some ideas of state socialism and the notion of an Arab supremacy which will be realized after the Arabs have liberated themselves from foreign - that means mainly Jewish - influence and British and American imperialism. Ba'athism is strongly anti-communist and anti-imperialist, and it is anti- Semitic from its beginning. Everything in Iraq is explained through this huge conspiracy theory against the Arabs, in general, and Iraq, in particular. Iraq is thought to be the greatest Arab nation and the natural leader of Arab unity.

[…]

Saddam Hussein dreams of ruling a united Arab nation that would become a superpower confronting East and West. Iraqi children are taught in kindergarten that they have to be strong Arab fighters.

[…]

Pan-Arabism has always said that Mohammed is the forefather of pan-Arabism and that Islam was spoiled when it crossed the borders of the Arab world to Iran and Turkey. The task now is to `re-animate' the real Islam that was taught by Mohammed as an Arab ideology. Especially during the Iran-Iraq war, when Iraq had to face the Iranian revolution, they loaded their own ideology with Islamic content. The Iranians and the Zionists, they said, are part of a 2,000-year-old plot to smash Iraq and divide the Arabs. `We are fighting for the real Islam' the regime said, not the kind of spoiled Islam that Iran represents. I think it was a mistake for the Americans to believe, as they did, that Iraq was a stronghold against Islam.

[…]

The most regressive and dangerous elements in the Arab and Islamic world depend on Saddam Hussein. Really toppling Saddam Hussein means uprooting the Ba'ath regime, with the help of the Iraqi people. This would give the final blow to pan-Arabism in the Middle East. Syria and a lot of very radical factions in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf states would be affected. These factions look up to Saddam Hussein as a pan-Arabist, anti-imperialist hero - although he is anti-imperialist in the tradition of the Nazis, not the left. Also, Saddam is financing organizations like the Arab Liberation Front in Palestine, which is a Ba'ath organization. He is paying the families of suicide attackers. He is directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of terrorism in the Middle East."


About Germany: "Anti-American and anti-Israeli-anti-Semitic. At the moment, you can hardly distinguish between the very far right wing and the very far left wing. The far right openly supports Saddam Hussein, saying that he is fighting the Jews and the Americans and thus supporting the German battle. And certain left-wingers from an orthodox left-wing tradition think that Saddam Hussein is anti-imperialist, anti-globalization, that he is fighting for the rights of the Arabs to self-determination. Others on the left say that Saddam may be horrible, but another American war will not solve any problems. The war will just help Israel's interest, so we should oppose it. This is also the governmental policy at the moment."

And a word of warning to Israel in the event of Scud missile attacks: "Seventy percent of the Iraqi people are allies of the Americans. If the war is waged correctly, it will focus on the regime, on the leaders, on the security apparatus and on this horrible Ba'ath Party, but not on the Iraqi people. So if Israel is attacked, it should consider this point: This is a war against the regime, and the Iraqi people are allies in fighting Saddam Hussein. So it is very important to refrain from attacking civilians. There has been a debate about Israel nuking Iraq if attacked with weapons of mass destruction. That would be a disaster - the end of the democratization of the Middle East. Everyone would be against the Iraqi opposition and against Israel. If there is a need for Israel to strike back, it should only be against military targets. Israel should openly declare that it is not conducting a war against the Iraqi people, and that it is ready to support a multi-ethnic democracy in Iraq, friendly to the Iraqi people and only hostile to this government."

What Obscure Animal are you?

This looks fun.
If you have to flee a burning building in a hurry, you might as well enjoy yourself on the way down.

Jen from What's Brewing has a brother.
Here’s an article he wrote about ”the Intifada's anniversary of failure”.

Yahoo: Poles May Shun Guinness if Irish Reject EU Vote
None of my business, whatsoever. I have no relatives left in Poland, they were all killed by the Nazis and I couldn’t care less which beverages the Poles consume. I don't suppose it will be such a crippling blow for Guinness either. But I do hope this doesn’t negatively affect any Irish Guinness representatives in Poland. Don’t ask. The one and a half people who know what I’m on about, know what I’m on about.

It rained today.
I read, one year, that statistics show that if October is very rainy, the whole year will be very rainy. That year happened to have a very wet October, but the rest of the winter was completely dry. So much for statistics!

I hope this year fills the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), at last.

Bish would prefer they got on with desalination.

Update: I have been advised that this post is not clear. Suggested rephrasing: I read that statistics show that if October is very rainy, the whole year will be very rainy. One year happened to have a very wet October, but the rest of the winter was completely dry.

This is an eye opener. It’s written by a homeless guy. Via
The Pandavox. Anticipating the inevitable question – the answer is: the public library.

Meryl Yourish on the U.N.’s longtime radical anti-Israel bias. She’s got the statistics of anti-Israel U.N. Security Council resolutions. Did you know that 210 of its 1436 resolutions are anti-Israel? That’s 15%. We’re infamous!

Ben Gurion had it right. Most of you probably know of the contempt he felt for the U.N. (which he called “Umm Shmum” – Umm being Hebrew for U.N.).

When I was a child in Haifa, my family and I regularly drove down U.N. Blvd on the way to our favorite falafel stand (the Arab-owned King of Falafel). One evening, U.N. Blvd. was no longer U.N. Blvd. As if by magic, it had become Zionism Blvd, overnight.

It wasn’t really magic. It was the U.N. equating Zionism with racism, of course. So at quite a tender age I discovered that the U.N. was more than a big building in New York where they sold “baboushka” (“matroushka”?) dolls from the USSR.

Look who's started his own blog.
It's Haggai, famous for his interesting comments. Looking good so far. And I'm on his links, hurray.

I just heard British Ambassador to Israel, Sherard Cowper-Coles, being interviewed on Israel television in very nice Hebrew. According to his biography, on the British Embassy site, this is a newish effort, on his part, although he has been studying Arabic since 1978. I’m very impressed that an ambassador should take the time to learn the language of a tin-pan country like Israel.

What did he say? Oh, the usual ambassador stuff: Prime Minister Blair is Israel’s friend blah blah blah.

The British Embassy site is very polite, pleasant and bland, as only a British Embassy site, could be. You wouldn’t believe the embassy has any connection to the British Foreign office. It’s informative, too. Here is Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, yesterday, for those who missed it.

He said: “Some say the issue is Iraq. Some say it is the Middle East Peace Process. It's both. Some say it's poverty. Some say it's terrorism. It's both”.

Now that I’m doing a bit of writing, on a regular basis, I find myself sometimes writing things that sound great and that I really love. Often, when I reread them, I find that their content is utter tripe. (I know what you're thinking! You just watch it!). The thing is that I’m so in love with the way they’re written, I find it sad not to use them. It’s very upsetting having to rewrite them to make them less idiotic. It’s like … er… cutting your child’s long hair short (I think. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had the urge to shorten my daughters’ hair, I love it long, and so do they) or … or… I can’t think of any other example, sorry (not that the first one was so hot. OK, I'll come clean. This was just an attempt to prove my point. Please disregard.). Anyway, doesn’t it look like this is what happened to Mr. Blair’s speechwriter? He must have thought: “It sounds so good. No one will notice it’s a load of meaningless demagogic rubbish”.

And then there’s the passage devoted solely to lucky old us: “And yes what is happening in the Middle East now is ugly and wrong. The Palestinians living in increasingly abject conditions, humiliated and hopeless; Israeli civilians brutally murdered. I agree UN resolutions should apply here as much as to Iraq. But they don't just apply to Israel. They apply to all parties. And there is only one answer. By this year's end, we must have revived final status negotiations and they must have explicitly as their aims: an Israeli state free from terror, recognized by the Arab world and a viable Palestinian state based on the boundaries of 1967”. (Duh!)

“UN resolutions should apply here as much as to Iraq”???? What is this horrible comparison? Is he insinuating that we’re next? I know there are a lot of Brits out there dying for the US to invade Israel, remove the cruel totalitarian ruler, who regularly maims his most loyal subjects (after his son has finished raping their daughters), having gassed and massacred the opposition and install a puppet government until norms of democracy and freedom can be instilled in those nasty Jews. What a great idea. It’s sure to get full backing in the UN as well, that home of such honored Security Council members as Syria, a well-known upholder of democratic norms.

Yes, Mr. Cowper-Coles, Mr. Blair is our friend. He went out of his way to be nice to us in this speech, on the whole, and we are grateful. But I think we’d better not turn our backs on him, lest he borrow a nice big sword from his oil-producing pals, (the one on the Saudi Arabian flag would do nicely) and stab us in the back with it.

Update: Oops! Two people have corrected me. Israel is apparently a TIN-POT country and not a tin-pan country. Well, actually, Diana was polite enough to say it isn't either - see comments. I know for a fact that the other person to correct me is British born AND has actually met the aforementioned ambassador in person, so he must know what he's talking about.

I was going to write TIN-CAN at first, so tin-pan isn't all that bad!

In what way does a Prime Minister appointed by Arafat constitute a reform?

God bless the Phillipines

And the nice people that live there.

So frustrating
I can understand why people would decide to keep watching the news to a minimum. I know a lot of people who do that. Most are just fed up to the back teeth with the hopeless situation we’re in. Some believe that counting their blessings and taking the time to smell the flowers is much healthier. They also hope it could have a positive effect on others.

Writing that, I had this mental image of my friends walking single-file in blissful meditation, through a green meadow full of lovely flowers. And all around them bombs are exploding, people are shooting and stabbing each other and tanks are rolling past making that screechy noise they make.

It would be lovely to be able to see only the blue sky and the green trees. Unfortunately, the sound of violence is louder than the sweet singing of the birds.

Why Palestinians are celebrating.
Danny Rubinstein, in Haaretz, explicates why the Palestinians are celebrating and overwhelmingly wish to see a continuation of hostilities. He quotes Dr. Ali Sha'ath (son of PA cabinet member Nabil Sha'ath), who offered a possible answer at a conference held last week in Abu Dhabi “The intifada (has) undermined the security of Israel, weakened its economy and caused the exodus of Jews abroad. In other words, we Palestinians are suffering, but we mustn't forget that the Israelis are suffering no less than we - and maybe more”.

I doubt if Israelis are suffering more than Palestinians.

I’m told the Palestinian press discusses the fabled exodus of Jews in great length. I see little evidence of such an exodus. Reports of rising antisemitism outside of Israel hardly make it a tempting option, for one thing. Even unemployed hi-tech people, who surely have better job options abroad, do not seem to be rushing to leave.

I have finally finished Bernard Lewis!
He explains clearly here, why the two main reasons commonly given for not waging war against Saddam Hussein are mistaken.

"The conflict with Israel certainly receives overwhelmingly major attention in the Arabic media, but since this is the only specific grievance that may be publicly expressed in a region of numerous and painful problems, that is hardly surprising. One may therefore wonder whether Middle Eastern governments would indeed wish for a peace settlement, which would deprive them of this valuable safety valve, leaving them to face the undeflected anger of their subjects, including those who live under the rule of the Palestinian Authority. From the almost monotonous regularity with which a series of promising peace processes have failed at the moment when they seemed most likely to succeed, one may be driven to the conclusion that they prefer to keep the conflict unresolved, but at a low level--simmering not boiling, and usefully controllable".

Eleven today!
Happy Birthday, eldest daughter.