Shimon Peres z"l
Greetings from Paris - Charles DeGaulle where once again Every Landing Always Late. They've admitted to two hours and fifteen minutes so far. And to think that I ran like crazy thinking I had only an hour and fifteen minutes to make a connection (American left more than two hours late from Charlotte last night, but made up much of that time on the way).
That's okay, because I will have some time to work after I finish this post (and maybe another one) and Paris may be one of the most appropriate places in the world to talk about Shimon Peres, who passed away this morning at the age of 93, because he was fluent in French and because in his later years he so emulated the French.
Israel owes a lot to Shimon Peres, especially our alleged nuclear capability, which was his doing in the early 1960's. I saw a Facebook post this morning that claimed that Peres 'saved' the country from hyperinflation in the 1980's, but the person who wrote it was a child at the time, and I was an adult. I don't believe that's accurate.
There was much that Peres did in his later years with which I disagreed. Oslo (which was done
behind Yitzchak Rabin's back). His treatment of
Jonathan Pollard. His playing
fast and easy with Jewish lives to achieve his goals. His
undercutting of Begin on the Osirak attack. In fact, his
undercutting of Israeli governments generally in his later years, including during his term as President (a position he turned from
an honorary position into
a political one). And he was
reviled by many in Israel.
But most distressingly, Peres never seriously protested the kind of
myths promoted by the New York Times in its obituary of Peres.
Honest Reporting proves conclusively that the assertion that
Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount set off the intifada - a longstanding myth never protested by Peres - is false.
Palestinian Communications Minister Imad Al-Faluji, Al-Safir, 3 March 2001. (Translated by MEMRI):
Whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out
because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong..
. . This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President
Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the
table upside down on President Clinton.
Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha (pictured above) said the following (from Palestinian Media Watch):
On the personal level, I miss him very, very
much. [Our daughter] Zahwa also misses him, you can’t imagine. She
didn’t know him. She knows that Arafat sent us away before the [Israeli]
invasion of Ramallah. He said: ‘You have to leave Palestine, because I
want to carry out an Intifada, and I’m not prepared to shield myself
behind my wife and little girl.’ Everyone said: ‘Suha abandoned him,’
but I didn’t abandon him. He ordered me to leave him because he had
already decided to carry out an Intifada after the Oslo Accords and
after the failure of Camp David [July 2000].
Imad Faluji, PA Minister of Communications:
Whoever thinks that the Intifada started because
of the hated Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque is mistaken. That was only
the straw breaking the Palestinian people’s patience. This Intifada was
already planned since [Arafat] the President returned from the recent
talks at Camp David [July 2000].” [Private filming of speech by Faluji, Dec. 5, 2000]
The Israel Project
notes that American diplomat Dennis Ross recounts in his book The
Missing Peace how the Israelis called Washington with proof that the
Palestinians were “planning massive, violent demonstrations
throughout the West Bank and the next morning, ostensibly a response to
the Sharon visit.” Washington pressured Arafat to dampen the violence, but the Palestinian leader – again per Ross – “did not lift a finger to stop the demonstrations, which produced the second Intifada.”
Who was Shimon Peres. Some interesting quotes are
here. He did some good for the State of Israel, but he took many actions, especially in his later years, that were based on delusions of grandeur that harmed many people.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, intifadeh, Jonathan Pollard, Menachem Begin, New York Times, Osirak, personal stuff, Shimon Peres, Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat, Yitzchak Rabin
Elie Wiesel z"l (of blessed memory) and Mickey Mark HY"D (May God Avenge his blood): United in life and in death
On Friday afternoon Michael 'Mickey' Marc HY"D was
murdered while driving his car near his home in Otniel. He is being buried today.
On Saturday night, Elie Wiesel z"l
passed away.
If Marc and Wiesel meet on their way up to Heaven, perhaps they will recognize each other, for
they have met before.
An eerie photo has surfaced of Elie Wiesel hanging a mezuzah in
Otniel. Next to him in the photo stands Michael Mark (gesturing with his
hand).
Michael was murdered on Friday,
when a terrorist sprayed more than 20 bullets at his car. Killed
instantly, his car flipped, with his wife and children inside. His wife
is still on life support, although his son Pedaya is set to be released
today, while another daughter is awake in the hospital.
In a strange parallel, Elie Weisel passed away on Saturday,
at the age of 87. Weisel, a Holocaust survivor known for personifying
"Never Again," fought to represent the Jewish nation reborn, stronger
than ever.
In the picture, they were together at the dedication of a new Beit
Midrash (Torah study hall) in the town of Otniel, where Marc lived and
close to where he was murdered on Friday.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is standing behind Wiesel in the picture above. Marc is the man with the jacket and the white shirt without a tie. Here is a picture of the actual mezuzah hanging.
If I'm not mistaken, the man with the large white kipa and the longish white hair in the back (better seen in the top photo with his hands on Wiesel's shoulders) is Yitzchak (Ira) Rennert, a well-known American Jewish philanthropist. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me and I will delete this.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Elie Wiesel, Otniel, terror victims
Pass the popcorn: Donald Trump wants to visit the Temple Mount
If you think we had an explosion here when
Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount 15 years ago (and the 'Palestinians' used it as an excuse to start an intifada), you might want to check out this story.
Donald Trump may want to ascend the Mount (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
Republican US Presidential candidate and real estate mogul Donald Trump
is strongly considering a visit to the Temple Mount when he comes to
Israel for the first time at the end of the month.
A source closely connected to organizing the trip to Israel confirmed to The Jerusalem Post
on Wednesday that Trump's staff is looking into the logistics of
visiting the holy site and point of conflict between Israel and the Arab
world.
The planned visit follows Trump's call for "a total and
complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our
country's representatives can figure out what is going on" in light of
"great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim
population."
Palestinians have often used Israeli politicians'
visits to the Mount as an excuse for violence, falsely claiming Israel
is changing the status quo.
The government maintains the status
quo, in that non-Muslims may visit, but not pray on the Temple Mount,
which is administered by the Jordanian Islamic Trust (Wakf). Jewish
visitors are often harassed at the holy site, and earlier this year, a
delegation of US Congressmen visiting the plaza also complained of harassment by Wakf guards.
Palestinian claims about the Temple Mount reached a fever pitch in
recent months, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
claiming Jews' feet defile the site, and contributed to sparking the
current wave of terrorism, during which police found explosives hidden
in the Al-Aksa Mosque on the Mount.
MK Taleb Abu Arrar (Joint
List) said of Trump's plan to visit the Temple Mount: "If Trump the
racist plans to visit Al-Aksa, the holiest place in the world for
Muslims, to harm the sensitivities of people against whom he incites, he
and Netanyahu will be responsible.
"Such a visit will set the whole region on fire, I am warning," Abu Arrar added.
Yes, but neither of those Congressmen (Bill Johnson (R-OH) and David McKinley (R-WV)) were a particular target for the Arab world, and they visited 'undercover.' Trump is very recognizable and is now a lightning rod for the Arab/Muslim world. While I believe it's wrong to allow only Muslims access to the Mount, I don't believe that Israel needs to give the 'Palestinians' an excuse for suicide bombings and murder by allowing Trump onto the Mount.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Donald Trump, intifadeh, Middle East peace process, Palestinian Authority, Temple Mount, United States Congress, US presidential campaign 2016, Wakf
9/11/2015: Americans don't get it any more than in 2002
This post is timed for the exact moment of 9/11 - 8:46 am US Eastern time.
I'd like to rerun a slightly revised version of a post I did three years ago (it has a new postscript). The original is
here.
I started looking for a column by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times
in the aftermath of September 11. Sontag had just returned from a stint
as the Times' bureau chief in Jerusalem during the intifadeh, during
which she was less than understanding of Israeli actions. I discovered
that I excerpted the article in last year's post on 9/11. And so, I
decided to run it again:
One of the immediate reactions to 9/11 here in Israel - crass though it
might have been - was "now the Americans will finally understand what
we've been going through." In the year leading up to 9/11, Israel had
suffered dozens of terror attacks. Parents looked to avoid putting their
children on public buses (in fact, we have raised a generation where
many of the kids no longer know how to use the buses before they are in
high school). And yet, we were pushed by Clinton and by Tenet and even
by Bush for the first few months, to make more concessions to the
'Palestinians' every time they murdered a few Jews.
For me, one of the most memorable pieces to come out of 9/11 was
this one
by Deborah Sontag. Sontag was the New York Times' bureau chief here
from 1998-2001, and was a constant nemesis. She returned to New York
shortly before 9/11. Here's some of what she wrote in the Sunday Times
Magazine ten days after the attack.
That terrible Tuesday
was the first day of American school for Emma, who was entering third
grade, and Adam, who was starting kindergarten. It was a glorious
morning as they skipped through downtown Brooklyn. They wore new
sneakers (Stride Rite won out) and backpacks that were essentially empty
but nonetheless an essential part of the American school uniform. I
left Emma designing a name tag to hang above her cubby. In Adam's class,
where he was seated at a table designated ''Femur'' in anticipation of a
unit on the human body, I patted his blond head and inadvertently said
aloud what I was thinking, ''You'll be safe here.''
Then a parent
barged into the room and told a few of us that a plane had crashed into
the World Trade Center. We walked, because there really was no other
choice, straight to the Brooklyn promenade on the East River overlooking
Lower Manhattan. The second airplane had just crashed into the twin
towers, and flames were devouring the tops of the buildings. It was a
perfect view of the horror, and there was nothing we could do but stare.
This
was terrorism of a different magnitude. In Israel, such attacks were
chillingly intimate. Within hours, everyone in the country knew who had
been killed and knew someone connected to the victims. Bombings were
also anticipated and routine. With grim efficiency, daily life was
restored to the bombed area. But this was so vast that it could not be
personalized or swept up. We were struck by the fact that no victims
were named on the news that first day. We were breathing the acrid,
dusty air that wafted across the river. The attack was palpable. Yet, it
was beyond our grasp.
Adam was clueless when we picked him up at
the kindergarten annex. In the school's main high-rise building, Emma's
class waited in the overheated basement where the elementary students
had been herded to stop them from watching the whole thing from their
classroom windows. We pushed through the thronged halls to get outside.
Passersby were wearing paper masks. ''Aliens!'' Adam said. A woman
snapped at us, ''Cover your children's mouths!'' Emma burst into tears.
''My first day of school wasn't fun at all,'' she said. ''You promised.
You promised it would be better here.''
In Israel, we could keep
our children, who were foreigners, in a relatively secure cocoon,
although that meant greatly limiting their universe. We could even
isolate them from much of the news. But here, waiting for our apartment
to be ready, we were staying in a hotel that was designated an emergency
relief center. People were streaming over the Brooklyn Bridge covered
in ash and seeking first aid in the Brooklyn Marriott. Security was
tight. School for the next day was canceled. A father of one of Emma's
classmates was missing. We had to start explaining. At first, I used a
silly, gingerly phrase, telling Adam that a plane had ''bumped into''
the twin towers. ''By accident?'' he asked. There was no avoiding the
ugly truth.
We turned on the television news. ''It looks like
Israel,'' Adam said. He asked if we were going to start seeing soldiers
in Brooklyn. I told him no, but then we descended to the lobby and
happened on several National Guardsmen in their camouflage uniforms and
army boots. We stepped outside. Sirens wailed. We were home?
Although ordinary Americans began to appreciate our plight on 9/11,
except for the period between June 2002 (when Bush called for a new
'Palestinian' leadership) and Arafat's death just after the 2004
election, American leadership has largely not recognized that we and you
are fighting the same battle. The first indications that would be the
case came within a few days of 9/11, and the point was driven home
strongly by President Bush's reaction to then-Prime Minister
Sharon's Czechoslovakia speech on October 4, 2001.
The
discovery of the Karine A weapons ship in January 2002 started to turn
the tide with Bush in our favor, and we enjoyed two brief romances with
him that have colored perceptions of his Presidency here: From June 2002
until November 2004 and during the final months of his term. Between
late 2004 and early 2008, the people who pushed Bush to be more
pro-Israel (the neo-cons - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith et al) had left the
White House and those who came in their place (people like Robert Gates
and Condoleeza Rice) were far less favorable to Israel.
Ten years
ago today, it looked like the American leadership would understand why
you cannot make peace with terrorism. Unfortunately, they no longer do.
And the fact that America elected Obama three years ago has to make you
wonder how many of the American people get it now either.
Postscript:
The last three paragraphs of this postscript are what I wrote in 2012. Perhaps, I should have changed 'terrorism' to 'Islamic terrorism' even then, but given what is going on in the Middle East, it would certainly be appropriate to do so today.
It is perhaps fitting that the sellout to a nuclear-armed Iran by a partisan cloture vote in the Senate was completed on September 10. For several years after 9/11, 'September 10' was code for the naive way of thinking about Islamic terrorism before 9/11. The fact that a lame duck President was able to hold party loyalty enough to force that vote through the Senate shows how partisan the United States has become. It's hard to say that the Americans are even more clueless now about Islam and terrorism than they were 14 years ago, but I believe that's definitely true. Mark Steyn
got it right on Hugh Hewitt's Thursday show.
I think the problem is that we defined what we were
up against in the fall of 2001, 2002 too narrowly - and I think you can
see that actually at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. We are
in an ideological struggle... And we've seen that that ideology is very
seductive to people who hold the passports of Western nations. We are a
hole, we are a vacuum - and something fills the vacuum, which is what we
see in Europe and to a lesser extent over here. And you can't fight
this war even with the most brilliant military in the world because it's
as I said in America Alone
all those years ago - it's not my line, it's from Basil Liddell Hart,
the great military strategist – it's not about blowing up their tanks
and it's not about shooting their planes out of the sky – and nobody can
beat Western militaries for doing that - but if you don't understand
that you're up against this ideology and you don't target that ideology,
then you can never win. And that's why I find this anniversary about as
dispiriting as any of the fourteen since that Tuesday morning all those
years ago.
I don't know why I said that this ideological faintheartedness was
evident even at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. So, after
the show, I turned to The Face of the Tiger,
my account of the first year of the new war. Back then 9/11 was "the
day everything changed". With hindsight, very little changed, with the
exception of Muslim immigration, which accelerated. So, as I said to
Hugh, I find these anniversaries more dispiriting with each passing
year. Here's what I had to say on September 11th 2002, all of which
applies to 2015, only more so:
WE ARE BACK to September 10th 2001, at least if the National
Education Association is anything to go by. Their attractive series of
classroom lessons and projects for September 11th, sponsored by Johnson
& Johnson, begins with a little light non-judgmentalism: the NEA
advises teachers not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the, ah,
"tragic events". Just because Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'eda boasted they
did it is no reason to jump to conclusions:
Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist
situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still
believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from
our legal authorities proves otherwise.
So instead the NEA thinks children should:
Explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to
populations or nations of people by looking at contemporary examples of
ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad."
And by that you mean...?
Internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor
and the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf War are obvious
examples.
Not that obvious: for one thing, the "backlash against Arab
Americans during the Gulf War" is entirely mythical. But you get the
gist. Don't blame anyone. But, if you have to, blame America...
The fact that the United States went on to elect and re-elect a President whose answer to everything was to blame America, abandon its allies and give comfort to its enemies speaks volumes about how much Americans don't get it. No, they still don't get it. They don't understand that left to its own devices, Islam will come after them. It's not just Israel that Iran wishes to destroy with its nuclear weapons - we're just the warm-up act, the appetizer. It's the United States they're really after.
While I think you should
read the whole thing, this paragraph is particularly ominous, albeit not yet for the United States.
I believe western culture – rule of law, universal suffrage, etc – is
preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in
Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I
support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu
widow, the west is slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of its lost
empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared
of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations... The
Islamists are militarily weak but ideologically secure. A year on, the
west is just the opposite. There's more than one way to lose a war.
And now for my
2012 postscript: If Obama is reelected in November - and the fact that it is possible
that he will be - it will show that Americans really have forgotten 9/11
(the next post will show just how much the meaning of 9/11 has faded).
Unfortunately, the next 9/11-like event in the US could be worse. A lot
worse.
Every time I travel to the US, I shudder at the lack of
security in malls, theaters, ballparks etc. Yes, you have to go through
'security' at Fenway Park (I was there two weeks ago), but they seem
much more concerned with bottles and cans than with guns and plastic
explosives. You can walk into and out of the most crowded shopping malls
without anyone seeing you or checking your bags. Even airport security
is a joke, with the backscatter machine taking the place of human
intelligence. The big news on that front is that if you're over 75-years
old, you no longer have to take your shoes off!
We're in a war against terrorism. And the saddest thing is that most of the West doesn't even realize it.
Back to today - I feel no more secure in the United States than I did three years ago. Nothing has happened there on the security front. Nothing at all.
Labels: 9/11, Ariel Sharon, Barack Hussein Obama, George W. Bush, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat
Buji Herzog's mea culpa one of many about Gush Katif, most Israeli Jews favor retaking and rebuilding Gaza
Sunday will mark the 10th anniversary of the expulsion of some 8,000 Jews from Gaza. The expulsion was originally scheduled to happen on Tisha b'Av (that year, it actually fell on Sunday and was not delayed to Sunday as it is this year), but at the last minute, the government realized the deep historic symbolism that would evoke and postponed the expulsion (in those days it was all but forbidden to refer to it publicly as an 'expulsion' - it was called a 'disengagement') to Monday, which was the day after the fast.
There have been
many mea culpas over the expulsion of Gaza's (often referred to as Gush Katif's because the vast majority of the Jewish residents were there) Jews. But perhaps none so incredible as hearing it from opposition leader
Yitzchak 'Buji' Herzog.
Disengagement from Gaza was a mistake in terms of security, Zionist
Union chairman MK Isaac Herzog said Monday. “I don’t believe in the
ability to take unilateral steps diplomatically, but only by agreement,”
opposition leader Herzog added.
Speaking at a conference marking 10 years since the
disengagement, Herzog said he thinks “that it is important to rally
support so that Israel does not become an Arab-Jewish state at the end
of the road. We must go to an agreement, and only an agreement that
stands up to all the difficulties,” he said, the peace agreements with
Egypt and Jordan as examples. The conference was held in Nitzan, a
community near Asheklon where many evacuees of the Gush Katif
settlements in Gaza now live.
Herzog also spoke about the disengagement at a
conference last week sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute and the
conservative daily Makor Rishon. There, he said that people from his
side of the political spectrum “also need to think about whether the
move in general was right. In principle it was the right move to
separate from the Palestinians. We took 8,000 people out of a sea of
Palestinians, but in implementation it was a decision full of mistakes.”
“Unilateral evacuation caused a feeling of deep
national trauma and the public understands today that when we said Gaza
will be the Hong Kong of the Middle East, we failed to understand and
the opposite happened,” he added. “Any separation that comes must be the
result of agreement with the Palestinians and on the basis of a
regional infrastructure and of an updated Arab peace initiative. Because
unilateral evacuation today, following the lessons of the
disengagement, will not work.”
It was the
Left that pushed then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to
expel Gush Katif's Jews (apparently threatening him and his sons with jail if they did not carry it out). And once he adopted the cause, he did so with vigor, literally running over the opposition (which was a significant number of Israelis if not a majority).
But here's the truly astounding part: Until now, polls have said that Israelis regret the expulsion but would not consider going back. That's no longer true. 51% of Israeli Jews now believe that the government should
retake Gaza and rebuild the Jewish communities that were destroyed ten years ago.
Some 51 percent of Israeli Jews said they were in favor of rebuilding Gush Katif where more than 8,000 Israelis lived prior to the 2005 withdrawal.
The poll published on the NRG news website collected the responses of 587 people.
Israel evacuated Gush Katif and parts of northern Samaria in 2005 under a plan launched by then prime minister Ariel Sharon.
The poll, part of a series being conducted by Israeli institutes and
the media upon the ten-year anniversary of the Disengagement, reflects
past polls indicating that the Israeli public is highly pessimistic over the withdrawal. A poll published in Maariv earlier
this month showed that the vast majority of the public believed that
the move represents a political, diplomatic, and domestic failure.
Wow.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Gaza expulsion, Gush Katif, Yitzchak Herzog
Israeli official: 'No Palestinian state in our generation'
Confirming reports that the Obama administration had been part of a concerted effort to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu, a 'senior Jerusalem official' has told the Times of Israel that there will be '
no Palestinian state in our generation,' and that everyone knows it.
The Jerusalem official took Netanyahu’s
disavowal of Palestinian statehood further, claiming that a two
state-solution would be out of reach “in our generation,” due to
Palestinian rejections of Israeli proposals and US-led agreements.
“[Obama] continuously warns of a deteriorating
state of chaos in the [Palestinian] territories, when he knows that the
only place that truly manages to maintain stability in the Middle East
right now is [Israel],” the official said. “Netanyahu said there will no
agreement [with the Palestinians] during his term in office.”
A Palestinian state “won’t even happen in our generation,” the official added.” Everyone knows it.”
“They come and accuse us of torpedoing
negotiations even though they know that Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas himself said no [to a deal], twice — once to
then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton in 2011, and once to Secretary
of State John Kerry last year.”
The official went on to refer to two
“framework documents, designed to jump-start the process” that were
accepted by Israel and rejected by the Palestinians, and accused the
administration of devoting too much energy to the Palestinian issue, to
the detriment of other, more pertinent regional challenges.
“Look at what we did about settlement
construction. We took upon ourselves all the restrictions laid forth
during the Sharon-Bush era, which allowed for building to accommodate
natural population growth, but not for building new settlements,” the
official continued, referring to an arrangement in the last decade
between then-prime minister Ariel Sharon and president George Bush. “But
the [current] administration does not recognize the Sharon-Bush
understandings. They’re working according to a ‘no-brick’ policy and it
doesn’t make any sense.”
Obama rejected the Bush letter in
June of 2009. It was about a week before Netanyahu's
Bar Ilan speech. Netanyahu's second government (the first of the Obama administration) was formed on
March 31, 2009. Anyone not think Obama had it in for Israel from Day One.
Labels: Abu Mazen, Ariel Sharon, Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Bush letter, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Palestinian state
When - for a brief moment - the Americans got it
Finally, I'd like to re-post something I wrote
three years ago.
One of the immediate reactions to 9/11 here in Israel - crass though it
might have been - was "now the Americans will finally understand what
we've been going through." In the year leading up to 9/11, Israel had
suffered dozens of terror attacks. Parents looked to avoid putting their
children on public buses (in fact, we have raised a generation where
many of the kids no longer know how to use the buses before they are in
high school). And yet, we were pushed by Clinton and by Tenet and even
by Bush for the first few months, to make more concessions to the
'Palestinians' every time they murdered a few Jews.
For me, one of the most memorable pieces to come out of 9/11 was this one
by Deborah Sontag. Sontag was the New York Times' bureau chief here
from 1998-2001, and was a constant nemesis. She returned to New York
shortly before 9/11. Here's some of what she wrote in the Sunday Times
Magazine ten days after the attack.
That terrible Tuesday
was the first day of American school for Emma, who was entering third
grade, and Adam, who was starting kindergarten. It was a glorious
morning as they skipped through downtown Brooklyn. They wore new
sneakers (Stride Rite won out) and backpacks that were essentially empty
but nonetheless an essential part of the American school uniform. I
left Emma designing a name tag to hang above her cubby. In Adam's class,
where he was seated at a table designated ''Femur'' in anticipation of a
unit on the human body, I patted his blond head and inadvertently said
aloud what I was thinking, ''You'll be safe here.''
Then a parent
barged into the room and told a few of us that a plane had crashed into
the World Trade Center. We walked, because there really was no other
choice, straight to the Brooklyn promenade on the East River overlooking
Lower Manhattan. The second airplane had just crashed into the twin
towers, and flames were devouring the tops of the buildings. It was a
perfect view of the horror, and there was nothing we could do but stare.
This
was terrorism of a different magnitude. In Israel, such attacks were
chillingly intimate. Within hours, everyone in the country knew who had
been killed and knew someone connected to the victims. Bombings were
also anticipated and routine. With grim efficiency, daily life was
restored to the bombed area. But this was so vast that it could not be
personalized or swept up. We were struck by the fact that no victims
were named on the news that first day. We were breathing the acrid,
dusty air that wafted across the river. The attack was palpable. Yet, it
was beyond our grasp.
Adam was clueless when we picked him up at
the kindergarten annex. In the school's main high-rise building, Emma's
class waited in the overheated basement where the elementary students
had been herded to stop them from watching the whole thing from their
classroom windows. We pushed through the thronged halls to get outside.
Passersby were wearing paper masks. ''Aliens!'' Adam said. A woman
snapped at us, ''Cover your children's mouths!'' Emma burst into tears.
''My first day of school wasn't fun at all,'' she said. ''You promised.
You promised it would be better here.''
In Israel, we could keep
our children, who were foreigners, in a relatively secure cocoon,
although that meant greatly limiting their universe. We could even
isolate them from much of the news. But here, waiting for our apartment
to be ready, we were staying in a hotel that was designated an emergency
relief center. People were streaming over the Brooklyn Bridge covered
in ash and seeking first aid in the Brooklyn Marriott. Security was
tight. School for the next day was canceled. A father of one of Emma's
classmates was missing. We had to start explaining. At first, I used a
silly, gingerly phrase, telling Adam that a plane had ''bumped into''
the twin towers. ''By accident?'' he asked. There was no avoiding the
ugly truth.
We turned on the television news. ''It looks like
Israel,'' Adam said. He asked if we were going to start seeing soldiers
in Brooklyn. I told him no, but then we descended to the lobby and
happened on several National Guardsmen in their camouflage uniforms and
army boots. We stepped outside. Sirens wailed. We were home?
Although ordinary Americans began to appreciate our plight on 9/11,
except for the period between June 2002 (when Bush called for a new
'Palestinian' leadership) and Arafat's death just after the 2004
election, American leadership has largely not recognized that we and you
are fighting the same battle. The first indications that would be the
case came within a few days of 9/11, and the point was driven home
strongly by President Bush's reaction to then-Prime Minister Sharon's Czechoslovakia speech on October 4, 2001.
The
discovery of the Karine A weapons ship in January 2002 started to turn
the tide with Bush in our favor, and we enjoyed two brief romances with
him that have colored perceptions of his Presidency here: From June 2002
until November 2004 and during the final months of his term. Between
late 2004 and early 2008, the people who pushed Bush to be more
pro-Israel (the neo-cons - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith et al) had left the
White House and those who came in their place (people like Robert Gates
and Condoleeza Rice) were far less favorable to Israel.
Ten years
ago today, it looked like the American leadership would understand why
you cannot make peace with terrorism. Unfortunately, they no longer do.
And the fact that America elected Obama three years ago has to make you
wonder how many of the American people get it now either.
What I wrote three years ago about American leadership not getting it is even more true today. But the American people seem to be starting to get it. The American people overwhelmingly want their government to fight ISIS by bombing Syria and Iraq. Will that desire carry over into an election in which the current Islamist-loving American administration is replaced with one with clearer vision? We can only hope and pray.
The time on this post is 13 years to the minute from the crash of
United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The resistance put up by the passengers of that plane likely prevented it from crashing into the US Capitol or the White House. In the meantime, I'd like to remind you all of what was going on in 'Palestine' exactly 13 years ago, just a few minutes from now.
Let's go to the videotape.
That video has only 200,000 views. The one in the previous post has more than 3 million. It's time for Americans to awaken to the reality of who the 'Palestinians' are and how they really feel about the United States. It isn't going to change even if they get their 'state.'
Labels: 9/11, Ariel Sharon, Barack Hussein Obama, George W. Bush, Iraq, ISIS, Palestinians, Syria
Pigs fly: Shimon Peres (SHIMON PERES!) tells the Beeb he has 'problems' explaining support for Gaza expulsion
Shimon Peres has told the BBC that he has 'problems' explaining why he supported the Gaza expulsion (although the media STILL insists on calling it a 'pullout') nine years later.
Let's go to the videotape.
I'm sure the people of Sderot will never forget
how hostile Peres was to them.
While later taking a more supportive tack, in 2006, Peres publicly
upbraided residents of Sderot, who live about three kilometers from Gaza
- as “crybabies,” for complaining about 14 years of incessant
Palestinian terrorist rocket attacks on their town.
“I don’t understand what the hysteria is about. Kiryat Shmona was
shelled for years,” Peres said, referring to Israel’s northernmost town,
on the Lebanon border, Ynet News reported at the time.
“This hysteria over the Qassams must end,” he told journalists at the
Knesset, according to the report. “We’re just adding to the hysteria.
What happened? Kiryat Shmona was shelled for years. What, there weren’t
missiles?”
Yes, Kiryat Shmona was (and still occasionally is) shelled. But not with the consistency or the length of time that Sderot is shelled. I never heard that Kiryat Shmona residents had only 15 seconds to make it into shelters.
One day, God Willing, those who brought the Gaza debacle on us will pay a political price. One quarter of the Jews expelled from Gaza
still don't have a place to live nine years later. And whatever money they received to 'compensate' them for losing their homes and businesses is long since gone. Most of them are broke. And a lot of the money went in the early years when they were forced to live in hotels - and to pay for them. .
The entity that was set up to 'resettle' them spent a huge amount of its budget on public relations to garner support for the expulsion. Government corruption at its worst. Simply disgraceful.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, BBC, Gaza, Gaza expulsion, Hamas, rockets, Sderot, Shimon Peres
Was Ariel Sharon right after all?
Evelyn Gordon puts into words something I have thought about for a long time: That by expelling Gaza's Jews, Ariel Sharon saved Israel from a much more dangerous unilateral withdrawal and expulsion in Judea and Samaria.
I received this one by email (I think it was published by JPost behind a paywall).
If the Gaza pullout doesn’t kill us, it may well have saved us from a far more lethal West Bank one.
Last
week, I thought something I never dreamed I could think: that perhaps I
owe former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon an apology. Not that I’ve
altered my conviction that he bears direct, personal responsibility for
every rocket fired from Gaza over the last nine years, every
cross-border tunnel, every soldier killed there, every bit of damage
done to Israel’s global standing by the periodic wars with Gaza and even
many Palestinian casualties of these wars; all are the bitter fruit of
the unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza that he conceived, bulldozed
through the Knesset and finally implemented in August 2005. Yet if an
apology is owed – and I’m still not sure it is – it’s not despite his
responsibility for these evils, but because of it. Here’s why:
During the second intifada, then-IDF chief of staff (and now defense
minister) Moshe Ya’alon used to talk about the need to “sear the
Palestinians’ consciousness” – to make the intifada so costly for them
that they would never again resort to violence. The Gaza pullout now
looks uncannily like a similar exercise in consciousness-searing. But it
wasn’t the Palestinians’ consciousness Sharon seared; it was our own.
Sharon understood his countrymen. He understood that many Israelis
desperately wanted to believe peace with the Palestinians was possible
despite all evidence to the contrary. He understood that Israelis’
desire to be loved by the world made the country far more vulnerable to
international pressure than economic or strategic considerations alone
could ever do. He understood Israelis’ demographic fears – that absent a
two-state solution, a single Palestinian-majority state could someday
replace a Jewish state. And he saw how, even as the intifada still raged
in autumn 2003, the mere fact that Israeli casualties had dropped
markedly since its peak in early 2002 sufficed to enable these other
considerations to regain their sway. Consequently, various schemes to
cede land to the Palestinians were already making a public comeback.
Sharon also understood one other thing: Important as control of Gaza was
to Israel’s security, it paled beside the importance of the West Bank.
Gaza primarily threatened Israel’s sparsely populated south. The West
Bank threatened not only Israel’s major population centers, but also its
industrial and commercial base, its main international airport and its
seat of government.
Sharon assuredly didn’t belittle Gaza’s importance. He was an army
officer during the 1950s, when Palestinian terrorists used Gaza as a
base for staging bloody attacks inside Israel, and after Israel captured
it in 1967, he spearheaded construction of the Gaza settlements
precisely to ensure it would remain Israeli and never revert to being a
Palestinian terror base. That’s why the unilateral withdrawal plan he
unveiled in December 2003 was so shocking: It contradicted the
fundamental security doctrine to which he had hitherto devoted his life.
Nor was he naïve enough that he could possibly have believed the rosy
promises he sold the Israeli public about the pullout: that it would
promote peace with the Palestinians, enhance Israel’s security, give
Israel international legitimacy to fight Palestinian terror and buy
American support for retaining parts of the West Bank. Indeed, the exact
opposite occurred: The unilateral pullout bolstered Hamas, which rode
to victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election in 2006 partly by
claiming credit for driving Israel out of Gaza; it drastically decreased
Israel’s security, resulting in 16,500 rockets and mortars fired at
Israel from Gaza since the withdrawal and more soldiers dying there
since the pullout than before; it severely eroded international support
for Israeli counterterrorism measures, because once Hamas could
entrench its rockets, tunnels and booby-trapped buildings amid Gaza’s civilian population,
military operations against it necessarily caused far more Palestinian
casualties than they did pre-withdrawal; and US promises of support for
Israeli retention of parts of the West Bank evaporated the minute a new
American president took office.
All this seemed to leave only the most cynical of explanations for
Sharon’s about-face: He sacrificed Gaza, its 8,000 settlers and Israel’s
security solely to ensure his own reelection and/or the end of the
criminal investigations against him. At best, perhaps he convinced
himself that since he was (truly) head and shoulders above all his
possible successors, his reelection would benefit Israel enough to
compensate for this sacrifice.
I still can’t rule this explanation out. As the fantasies he peddled
about the disengagement show, he was plenty cynical enough (and
megalomaniac enough) to make it plausible.
But I now think there’s an alternative explanation: Seeing that even the
second intifada hadn’t sufficed to cure Israelis of their
susceptibility to territorial concessions, he concluded that unless he
did something drastic, Israel would someday quit the West Bank. So he
sacrificed the less-important Gaza to teach his countrymen a lesson they
couldn’t possibly disregard. He bequeathed us a metastasizing horror in
Gaza to ensure that Israelis never, ever made that same mistake in the
West Bank.
For Sharon also understood one final thing about Israelis: Much as they
crave the world’s love, once a critical mass of them is convinced that
something is vital to their country’s survival, they are capable of
defying the entire world to secure it.
The Gaza experiment’s deadly results may finally have convinced that
critical mass of Israelis. Outside the radical left, not many would be
willing to risk a repeat in the West Bank right now. And while nothing
else that’s happened justifies the disengagement, averting a far more
dangerous withdrawal from the West Bank actually might.
Except for one minor problem: The success of the operation doesn’t
matter if the patient dies. And it’s not yet clear Israel can survive
the success of Sharon’s operation. It’s not clear it can survive the
security consequences – which, for the first time since 1948, have
turned Israeli communities within the Green Line into ghost towns
– and it’s not clear it can survive the cumulative toll on its
international legitimacy that repeated applications of Hamas’ wildly
successful “dead baby strategy” are exacting.
That’s why I haven’t yet decided whether Sharon actually deserves that
apology. I’m waiting to see whether anyone finds a cure for his
operation’s deadly side effects.
The main argument against this being Sharon's principal motivation for the Gaza expulsion is the fact that he also expelled the Jews in two northern Samaria towns (Homesh and Sa Nur) at the same time. How critical was Homesh to Israel's security? Here's a picture taken from the hilltop on which Homesh once sat:
Yes, that's the main Hadera power plant off in the distance, with the Mediterranean behind hit.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Gaza expulsion, Judea and Samaria
Washington Post publishes cartoon of Netanyahu punching infant
This reminds me of the infamous cartoon of Ariel Sharon
eating babies.
The Washington Post has published a cartoon of Prime Minister Netanyahu punching an infant in the face. The cartoon is supposedly meant to show that both sides are equally to blame for the current fighting - a lie on its face.
Let's go to the videotape. More after the video.
American Jewish organizations are
understandably outraged.
The caricature is aimed at apportioning blame equally between Israel and
Hamas for the suffering of Gazan civilians. It was created by Ann
Telnaes, one of the newspaper’s editorial cartoonists.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared its outrage over the cartoon. In a
statement released to news agencies on Friday, the center’s associate
dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said the clip was “disgusting.”
"It is disgusting that The Washington Post would present an
animated cartoon that is so profoundly removed from the truth," said
Cooper. "Millions of Israeli citizens—men, women, and children—have been
forced into bomb shelters and saferooms by thousands of missiles and
rockets targeted at them by Hamas terrorists, whose open and avowed goal
is the destruction of the Jewish state."
“Even Israel's enemies have recognized that Israel's military
countermeasures against Hamas have included phone and text warnings as
well as leaflets urging innocent civilians in Gaza to vacate the
targeted areas," Cooper said. "It is the Hamas leadership that openly
uses the people of Gaza to act as human shields to protect their weapons
of mass destruction."
"Israelis are saddened by the deaths of four Palestinian children on a
Gaza beach yesterday, but the blood of these innocent children is on the
hands of Hamas leaders, not Binyamin Netanyahu," Rabbi Cooper also
said.
It is indeed disgusting.
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu, Leftist anti-Semitism, Operation Protective Edge, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Washington Post
How we got here
For those who have forgotten, here's a video from 2004 that highlights the debate over Israel's expulsion of Gaza's Jews and abandonment of the territory. Who was right and who was wrong?
Let's go to the videotape (with English subtitles).
Speaking of history, for what it's worth, one of my children told me last night that he had a conversation with Mrs. Carl while I was in the US in which he said "I remember Abba telling me all about Obama eight years ago. Every single thing he said would happen has come true." I invite you to go back to my archives from 2006 and 2007 and see how many more things I predicted correctly.
Unfortunately. this blog did not exist until January 2006, and my predictions with respect to the Gaza expulsion were wiped out when Charles Johnson purged all comments on his blog from those who did not agree with his new political views.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Ashkelon, Binyamin Netanyahu, Gaza expulsion, Gush Katif, Hamas rockets, Limor Livnat, Sylvan Shalom, Yuval Steinitz
Netanyahu could pull a Sharon and break away from the Likud... at a price
If he wants to form a new party to back a 'peace agreement' with the 'Palestinians,' a new poll indicates that Prime Minister Netanyahu, like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, could do just that. But his new party would be hard-pressed to form a governing coalition, and most of his support would be
coming from the Left.
The scenario poll question was phrased thus: "if the Likud prevents
Netanyahu from reaching an agreement that involves giving up territory
and elections were tomorrow – whom would you vote for?"
The poll predicted that 18 seats would go to Netanyahu's new party,
making it the Knesset's largest. Likud would drop from 20 to 17,
followed by Labor and Jewish Home at 16 each. Far-left Meretz would
shoot up from 6 to 11 seats.
Analyst Jeremy Saltan (aka Knesset Jeremy) spoke to Arutz Sheva to
make sense of all the figures, noting that the most surprising aspect
of the poll is that Netanyahu's seats would mostly come from voters who
currently support parties other than Likud. About 46% of those seats
would come from current Yisrael Beytenu supporters, and most of the rest
would come from center-left parties.
Finance Minister Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party would fall hard,
dropping from 19 to 10 seats. Similarly, Yisrael Beytenu and Shas both
would drop from 11 to 5. Hatnua would drop to 4 seats and Kadima would
not make it in.
"In my opinion, 18 seats is not strong enough for Netanyahu to break
off from Likud," assessed Saltan. "Even if it would be the biggest
party, the numbers don't merit a breakaway."
Saltan also has some more warnings for Netanyahu.
Saltan warns that one must be cautious in interpreting scenario
polls, as other factors - such as which MKs would follow Netanyahu into a
new party, and which MK would take over the Likud - could highly
influence the outcome.
The analyst notes that prior to Sharon's breakaway from Likud, voters
didn't foresee that Kadima would be a mix-match of "refugee MKs" from
various parties.
In response to the question of what Netanyahu should do if the Likud
opposes a peace deal, 51% said he should accept the Likud's decision,
while only 25% responded that he should create a new party.
Saltan remarks that this response may show that while the poll
indicates Netanyahu would retain the largest party, this doesn't mean
the majority of the Israeli public supports him breaking off to push
through land withdrawals.
Feiglin for Likud leader anyone? That would probably drain enough votes from Jewish Home to make Likud the largest party....
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu, coalition government, Likud party, Middle East peace process, Moshe Feiglin
Saudi columnist: Number of Sharon's victims 'tiny' compared to Arab rulers
This is astounding. A columnist writing in the Saudi government daily writes that the number of Ariel Sharon's victims is '
tiny' compared to the number of victims of Arab rulers.
The article was written pegging off the death of Ariel Sharon and
contains the usual extreme attacks on him. However, it is the lengths to
which he is prepared to go to condemn the Arab world that will be
surprising to many people. The excerpts quoted below are from MEMRI's
translation from the original Arabic.
"...as we ponder the news of the death of the [former] Israeli prime
minister [Ariel Sharon], we find that, despite the horrific acts of
massacre he carried out against the Palestinians, the number of his Arab
victims is nowhere near that of the number of Arabs who have been
murdered by tyrannical Arab [rulers] or killed in suicide bombings
carried out by Arab terrorist groups. This is the truth, whose shame
will haunt us throughout history."
There is certainly an agenda against the Arab Spring in columnist
Khalaf Al-Harbi's writing and his anti-Zionism is, of course, a given.
Nonetheless, his assault on violence and oppression from Arab leaders
and terror groups is devastating, as is his recognition of Israeli
democracy:
...
The writer goes on to say:
"Today we understand that, even using nuclear bombs, Sharon could not
have done the Arabs more [harm] than they have caused themselves. The
schisms and the blood feuds ongoing throughout the Arab homeland in
general, and in Palestine in particular, exceed our enemies' greatest
hopes.
"Moreover, [until recently,] every extremist Zionist who tried to
portray Arabs as a barbaric people who only understand the language of
force [had to] base his argument on a few small lies.
"Today, however, [we face] a reality that exceeds imagination, [and
includes] decapitations, bombing houses with explosive barrels, the rape
of women, and the expulsion of millions of innocent civilians. [Now]
the Zionists no longer have to try and distort the image of the Arabs
using American cinema and global media, [for] the Arabs have provided
them with a short cut.
"Now the world need only follow the news in order for to know how cheap human life is in Arab countries!"
For a Saudi government newspaper to write this is simply astounding.
Labels: Arab freedom, Ariel Sharon, Saudi Arabia
Sharon's legacy
Many Jews abroad feel unbridled admiration for Ariel Sharon.
Many Jews in Israel feel utter contempt for him. Here's why - from the Washington Post of all places.
Many of those Israeli evacuees maintain a simmering anger, and
hundreds of families who were settlers in Gaza can be found living today
in communities such as Nitzan, a kind of upscale refugee village built
on sand dunes beside the Mediterranean Sea, just a 20-minute drive from
the Gaza border.
“Welcome to my little piece of junk,” said
Rachel Saperstein, who knocked on the side of her government-issued
caravilla, Israel’s version of a FEMA trailer.
“It’s made of cardboard, you know,” she said.
Saperstein,
73, a retired English teacher at a girls’ school in the Gush Katif
settlements in Gaza, has lived in her mobile home for eight years.
“Sharon
could have been remembered as a brilliant general, a great leader. But
what did he do before he was turned into a vegetable? He destroyed
people’s lives,” Saperstein said as she sat in her little temporary
home. “He sent Jewish soldiers in to drag Jews out of their houses.”
Here the evacuees kindle a deep sense of betrayal and loss — and they place the blame squarely on Sharon.
“I
have very mixed feelings about him,” said Esther Lilintal, 76, whose
job in the Gaza settlement was to help newcomers. “Until his turnaround,
Sharon was a hero to us. He was much loved. The young men would carry
him on their shoulders when he came to visit.”
Some of the residents here expressed open hatred for Sharon. Others have tried to forgive, but said they would never forget.
“When
he had his stroke, many people thought, ‘Yes, he is being punished for
what he did. He is getting his due,’ ” she said. “I understand that
feeling very well.”
Sharon suffered a massive stroke six months
after the Gaza withdrawal. He lingered for eight years in a coma until
he died Saturday.
Residents here say they wonder what Sharon
achieved by pulling out of Gaza. Israel and Hamas remain belligerents.
They fought two brief but intensewars
in 2008 and 2012. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu served as finance
minister in Sharon’s government in 2005. He resigned over the Gaza
pullout and warned that it was a mistake.
In all fairness, Netanyahu resigned after all the votes had been taken. Netanyahu voted in favor of the expulsion every single time. Netanyahu the elite soldier was courageous. Netanyahu the finance minister under Sharon was a yellow-bellied coward.
There have been many complaints about how the Gaza evacuees were
treated after their eviction. The Nitzan community lacks permanent
synagogues. The girls’ high school is not complete. Half the town looks
like a California suburb under construction. The other half, with the
mobile homes, looks like rural poverty.
“You
want to know the legacy of Sharon? It is broken houses, broken
community, broken people,” said Aviel Eliaz, 42, a community manager in
Nitzan.
Eliaz said that almost nine years after the settlers were
evicted, they are still battling government bureaucrats for
compensation. He said that families lived with too many kids in spaces
that were too small, that hundreds of families still were in mobile
homes, that divorce had increased, that children had emotional problems.
“What Israel did to us after they evicted us was the disgrace,” Eliaz said, and he blamed Sharon.
“He
planned every last detail of how to get us out” of the settlements in
Gaza, “but he never planned for what to do the day after.”
Yes, is a disgrace. And Netanyahu is planning to do it again in Judea and Samaria to keep Masters Kerry and Obama happy.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu, Gaza expulsion, Judea and Samaria, Middle East peace process
Ariel Sharon gets his 21-gun salute
Ariel Sharon got his 21-gun salute
moments after his funeral.
But the graphic above already needs updating. Although we haven't heard from Blair or Biden, the 'Palestinians' have already
heard from the IDF.
The Israel Air Force struck on Monday evening two targets in Gaza in
response to rocket fire on southern Israel earlier in the day, the IDF
confirmed.
The targets hit were a military compound and a terror infrastructure
site, said an IDF spokesperson, adding that both targets were accurately
hit.
Both targets belonged to Hamas, which the IDF holds responsible for failing to prevent Monday's rocket fire.
The problem is that the targets were probably empty when they were hit.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Gaza, Hamas, Hamas rockets, IAF
A really nice tribute to Ariel Sharon
This is actually a
really nice tribute to Ariel Sharon from someone who used to live in Teaneck (hence the photo).
I am writing to tell you that I have and will always have tremendous gratitude and thanks to PM Ariel Sharon for my decision to make Aliya to Israel in January 2002. You will read in a second why I feel that the PM was my personal messenger from G-d, and the final and convincing inspiration to uproot my family from America and move to help build this great country of ours.
Here is my story.
My wife and I are both from the USA and consider ourselves Dati Leumi. We lived in Teaneck, New Jersey after we were married. Life there was great. We had 3 boys and a house a great job and all our friends and family were in the US. We both studied after Yeshiva High School in Israel and although we loved Israel we never thought of ourselves as the ones to make Aliya. It was mostly a hypothetical discussion of something we would do if everything fell into place. At the same time the intifada in Israel was starting up again and every time something happened, we felt guilty that we were living a comfortable life in NJ while our brothers were risking their lives for our collective homeland. But these feeling would then pass and life went on in the wonderful USA.
Around 2001, my job had me traveling to Moscow every other week from NY integrating a company we had purchased there into the parent company. The work was definitely interesting but also taxing on the family with all the travel. I thought about looking into relocating to Israel and commuting from there to Moscow as the travel and jetlag were much easier to deal with and even approached my company in April of that year to do so. Of course, I knew it was a long shot but I felt that after 120 years I would be able to stand in front of G-d and say “I tried”.
As expected, my company turned down my request and I felt a feeling of mostly relief but also some disappointment. A few months had past and at the end of August 2001 my company came back to me and said that as they see this position extending for a long term they have reconsidered and now would like me to move if I was still interested. However, they needed an answer in the next 10 days and that we would have to move quickly thereafter.
Well, my wife and I were a bit taken aback and suddenly were faced with one of the hardest decision of our life. All our friends and the great majority of our family were in the US and we were not sure we were ready to leave it all behind to move to Israel. We were having trouble making a decision. That week I was scheduled to be in Moscow and I told my wife that we will both think this over and decide when I return from my trip.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: aliya, Ariel Sharon
Hamas tries to give Ariel Sharon a send-off
Another story you won't see reported in the Western media....
Hamas tried to give Ariel Sharon a send-off on Monday morning by firing
two rockets from Gaza (link in Hebrew). The rockets fells short. But they were shot in broad daylight - 7:25 am.
Maybe they don't think they owe him too much.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Gaza, Hamas, Hamas rockets
Oh my: 'Thousands' were expected, only a few hundred showed up
I guess the media is still protecting Ariel Sharon, because you won't find this story in too many places on the web. The IDF prepared buses for 'thousands' of ordinary Israelis to attend Ariel Sharon's burial at his Sycamore ranch near Sderot. But
only a few hundred showed up (link in Hebrew).
In fact, the crowds were so light that employees at the Sycamore ranch were ordered to participate in the burial service.
Here's the original Hebrew and a translation of the first paragraph (the rest of the article is interviews with participants).
שעתיים לפני הלוויה עשרות אוטובוסים ממתינים, מאות שוטרים מאבטחים את האזור
ומאות סדרנים פזורים ורק מאות בודדות של אזרחים הגיעו לגבעת הכלניות. עקב
הדלילות, המארגנים אשר ציפו לאלפי אנשים שיגיעו לטקס הלוויה אף נתנו הוראה
לעובדים במקום להשתתף בטקס. נכבדי המדינה מצידם כבר הגיעו לגבעת הכלניות
ובראשם שרת המשפטים ציפי לבני.
Two hours before the funeral, tens of buses are waiting, hundreds of police officers are securing the area, and hundreds of ushers are spread out, but only several hundred citizens came to the Kalaniyot Hill. Because of the sparse crowd, the organizers, who expected thousands of people to show up for the ceremony, even ordered workers at the site to participate in the ceremony. The State's honored leaders already arrived at the Kalaniyot Hill, led by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni.
Livni should be the first one there. She owes her wretched career to Sharon.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Tzipi Livni
This is rich: VIP's at Sharon funeral have to wear orange bracelets
Attendees at Ariel Sharon's funeral were given
orange bracelets (link in Hebrew) like the one pictured above (Hat Tip for Photo:
David HaIvri) to identify them.
The orange bracelet was the symbol of opposition to Sharon's expulsion of Gaza's Jews from their homes in 2005.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Gaza expulsion
