Lebanon2-Kfar Giladi

Israel’s bloodiest day yet as Hizbullah hits troops and Haifa. Strike on northern kibbutz of Kfar Giladi results in biggest death toll. [Lebanon second War]

Monday August 7 2006

Israel yesterday endured the bloodiest day of the war so far when at least 15 people, among them 12 soldiers, were killed in a series of Hizbullah rocket strikes on the north of the country.

The soldiers, all recently called-up reservists, were gathered around two parked cars under a row of fir trees at the edge of an historic cemetery next to the kibbutz of Kfar Giladi, when a barrage of rockets rained down on the northern hills. One landed just in front of one of the cars, gouging a shallow crater in the road. Both cars were left blackened and burnt out.

God Veto [Rabin]

The God veto .  Belief in the sacredness of the Holy Land has long bedevilled the quest for peace.  It’s time to challenge the ‘God veto’

Thursday Sept.18 2008

The possibility that Tzipi Livni will become Israel’s next prime minister has re-ignited hopes of a breakthrough in the peace process, but chances are we are probably in for yet another false dawn.

Since the 1990s, efforts to reach a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been going round and round in vicious circles, while the situation on the ground has been deteriorating constantly.

There is no shortage of thorny practical issues – from the question of Palestinian refugees to final borders – standing in the way of a deal, not to mention the power disparity between the two sides, but what role does rigid religious or pseudo-religious ideology play in perpetuating the struggle?

To get an idea, we need to rewind to the most hopeful period of the Oslo years.Finally at ease in his role as a dove, Yitzhak Rabin, the one-time hawk, soared on the wings of the biggest mass demonstration in Israeli history.

“This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jews of the world, to the multitudes in the Arab lands and in the world at large,” he urged the 150,000-strong crowd that had turned out to hear him speak in Tel Aviv, “that the nation of Israel wants peace”.

Lebanon2-Ben Gurion

A far cry from Ben-Gurion. The war has united the Israeli public – in its distrust for leaders who act without thinking.

Never has a new government with a line-up of fresh faces and ambitious goals been entangled in so many foolish affairs within such a short span of time as that of Ehud Olmert:

• a president suspected of sexual harassment;
  
• an environmental affairs minister accused of election bribery;
  
• a justice minister facing charges of indecent behaviour;
  
• a chief of staff who liquidated his stock portfolio two hours before the war;
  
• a defence minister who wasn’t aware of any missile threat; and
  
• a prime minister who raced into war without due consideration of its justness and consequences.

Iran’s proud but discreet Jews

Although Iran and Israel are bitter enemies, few know that Iran is home to the largest number of Jews anywhere in the Middle East outside Israel. About 25,000 Jews live in Iran and most are determined to remain no matter what the pressures – as proud of their Iranian culture as of their Jewish roots.

It is dawn in the Yusufabad synagogue in Tehran and Iranian Jews bring out the Torah and read the ancient text before making their way to work. It is not a sight you would expect in a revolutionary Islamic state, but there are synagogues dotted all over Iran where Jews discreetly practise their religion.

Jerusalem mayor spied on terrorists for MI5

Teddy Kollek, famous as Jerusalem’s mayor for almost 25 years, actively helped the British crack down on right-wing Jewish underground groups in the 1940s, recently released MI5 documents reveal.

Mr Kollek, who died three months ago, supplied British intelligence with vital information about the Irgun, led by the future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the documents show.

The revelation that the mayor was among those assisting the British to contain the right-wing groups - described by their Jewish opponents as well as the British authorities at the time as “terrorists” – came in yesterday’s issue of the daily Yedhiot Ahronot.

An Invention called “the Jewish People”

AntiWar:  Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian

The heading, “an invention called the Jewish people” is taken from an article recently published in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. It’s about a book by Professor Zand of the Tel Aviv University. The article concludes with:

His book, “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” (published by Resling in Hebrew), is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a “state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others – in contrast to its declared identity as a “Jewish and democratic” state. Personal stories, a prolonged theoretical discussion and abundant sarcastic quips do not help the book, but its historical chapters are well-written and cite numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time.

Photos casualties

Israeli crimes against humanity: Gruesome images of charred and mutilated bodies following Israeli air strikes

Eden Natan-Zada: Terrorist

Eden Natan-Zada:Gunman’s body to lie near his racist hero. Bus killer’s family in burial site row

The Jewish gunman who killed four Arabs last Thursday may be buried next to the killer he tried to emulate, officials at the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba said. The funeral of Eden Natan-Zada was postponed on Friday after his family was denied the right to bury him in a military cemetery or civilian cemeteries near his home.

The 19-year-old boarded a bus headed for Arab towns in the north of Israel and shot the driver and three passengers, apparently in protest at Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. After the shooting he was beaten to death by an angry mob.

Now Natan-Zada could be buried next to Baruch Goldstein, a US-born doctor who killed 29 Palestinians in a mosque in 1994, it was reported by Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Argentine Jewry’s dark secret

New book reveals story of Jewish association of pimps that operated in country in late 19th and early 20th century, and was involved in women trade and rape.

‘This is a silenced story, ‘ author says, ‘The Jewish community in Argentina remembers it well, but badly wants to keep it under wraps’

Superintendent Julio Elsogray was a strange kind of Buenos Aires cop because he would not take bribes from the pimps who dominated the city in the early 20th century. Eventually, therefore, he was the man who managed to stop them. He did that thanks to a brave whore named Rachel Lieberman, who dared file a complaint against the Zwi Migdal Organization – an association of Jewish women traders.

Thus, in 1930 the two managed to shut down the only association of Jewish panders in the world after 60 years of activity. The Zwi Migdal group was an organization that traded in women while its members wore tefillin and built themselves a synagogue, and their story is both embarrassing and exciting. It involved loads of money, corrupt politicians, violent sex, international women trade, hard brutality, rape, and cheating, all lightly spiced with yiddishkeit and God-fearing traditions.

Birth of Hamas.

Sharon’s Terror Child: How the Likud Bloc Mid-wifed the Birth of Hamas

Hamas is considered one of Israel’s greatest threats, but the Islamic terrorist organization found its beginnings in the misguided Israeli effort to encourage the rise of a religious alternative that would undermine the popularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasir Arafat.

The strategy resulted in the birth of Hamas which rose from these Islamic roots. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a member of the government when the policy was developed in the late 1970s.

• Although Sharon and his Likud (formerly Herut Party) government colleagues could not anticipate that the Islamic leaders they backed would eventually evolve into Hamas and suicide bombings,
  
• the two have benefited from each other’s extremism over the years.

1948: Truman-Israel

A Case of Courage. Exclusive Book Excerpt: Truman and the birth of Israel.

By Michael Beschloss | Newsweek Web Exclusive

As the Wednesday afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows of the Oval Office, Gen. George Marshall, Harry Truman‘s secretary of State and the architect of victory in World War II, took a chair beside the president’s. Sitting in front of the president’s desk, befitting his more junior position, was Truman’s White House counsel, Clark Clifford. On Friday, May 14, 1948, at midnight, two days from now, the British would withdraw from Palestine. The United Nations had resolved to divide the region into one Jewish state and one Arab state, with ancient, holy Jerusalem as an international city. Despite the U.N. plan, five Arab armies were ready to kill the fledgling Jewish state.

Clifford implored Truman to recognize the new nation as soon as it was declared. If the U.S. granted legitimacy, so would its allies, allowing the Jewish state to survive. But Marshall advised Truman to keep his distance, warning that the Jews could never stave off Arab legions who far outnumbered them. If they came “running to us for help,” the U.S. would have to say no. In what Clifford called “a righteous Goddamned Baptist tone,” Marshall said, “If you follow Clifford’s advice … I would vote against you.” Shaken to be condemned by the national hero he called “the great one of the age,” Truman later warned Clifford, “I can’t afford to lose General Marshall!”

Truman’s ultimate decision about a Jewish state—one of the most significant foreign-policy decisions in U.S. history—emerged from a storm of cross-pressures and motives. He was besieged by Zionists, anti-Zionists, Democratic politicians eager to court the Jewish vote in an election year and diplomats afraid to rile the Arabs. He felt compassion for the Holocaust survivors still in European camps and reverence for Biblical history. But he feared as well that the new state might require defence by U.S. troops and dreaded that respected leaders like Marshall would accuse him of warping American diplomacy to his own cheap political needs. Truman also had to rise above his own lingering small-town parlor anti-Semitism. Even as president, he privately said malicious things about American Jews to his wife, his friends and his diary that were unworthy of the towering leader he had become.

Lebanon2-Wrong?

Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong

The assault on Lebanon was premeditated – the soldiers’ capture simply provided the excuse. It was also unnecessary

Tuesday August 8 2006

Whatever we think of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to agree about one fact: that it was a response, however disproportionate, to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah. I repeated this “fact” in my last column, when I wrote that “Hizbullah fired the first shots”. This being so, the Israeli government’s supporters ask peaceniks like me, what would you have done? It’s an important question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is flawed.

• Since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been hundreds of violations of the “blue line” between the two countries.
• The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) reports that
• Israeli aircraft crossed the line “on an almost daily basis” between 2001 and 2003, and
• “persistently” until 2006.
• These incursions “caused great concern to the civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over populated areas”.
• On some occasions, Hizbullah tried to shoot them down with anti-aircraft guns.