Labels: Egypt, humor, John Kerry, LATMA, Middle East peace process, Nitzan Alon, organ theft, Palestinian Authority, Tawil Fadiha, Yair Lapid
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:11 PM
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Labels: Boston, Boston Marathon, Islam, Islamic terrorism, Judea and Samaria, LATMA, Machsom Watch, Nitzan Alon, Palestinian terrorism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:25 AM
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On Tuesday, the IDF stopped a Palestinian in the Jordan Valley who carried four improvised explosives.
Near Bethlehem, Palestinians threw stones at soldiers, lightly wounding one. They also threw stones at soldiers near Ramallah.
Separately, in a raid on a Palestinian home in Hebron, the IDF found a cache of weapons, including bullets and night vision equipment.
“Our forces are working day and night,” Alon told Channel 2. The IDF has arrested Palestinians who have harmed Israelis such as those who threw stones at cars on Route 5 earlier this month, he said.
But he added that still, “there are scores of intelligence reports of attempts to execute terror attacks. I am happy that we ended 2012 and the last few months without fatalities [from terror attacks] in the region of Judea and Samaria.”
The IDF, Alon said, has also taken steps to help diffuse the tense situation in the West Bank such as deporting to Gaza earlier this month the Palestinian prisoner Ayman Sharawneh who had been on a hunger strike.
Alon who signed the deportation order said, “on one hand we have to maintain our legitimacy, refrain from rash moves and make arrests when necessary.” On the other hand, he said, “we need to know how to dismantle land minds.”
The IDF, he said, seeks to find a balance between these two objectives.You have to wonder how much trouble Alon has keeping his job from his personal life. His wife is a member of Machsom Watch, a radical Leftist group that harasses IDF soldiers at checkpoints. Remember Ehud Olmert?
Labels: Ehud K. Olmert, IDF, Judea and Samaria, Machsom Watch, Nitzan Alon, Third intifada
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:16 AM
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Labels: LATMA, Middle East peace process, Nitzan Alon
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:47 PM
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Prime Minister Netanyahu has (apparently) approved the appointment of General Nitzan Alon as the head of the IDF's Central Command after completing a term as the Commander of the Judea and Samaria division. Alon is a radical Leftist, and one has to wonder how and why Netanyahu approved this appointment.Both Netanyahu's own experience and that of Sharon apparently led the premier to the conclusion that he must preside over a broad coalition in which no single party has the ability to destabilize his government. He also decided that he has to govern from the center.Unless, of course, Netanyahu has become a true believer of the Left. Well, Caroline, I warned you about this.
On the face of it, these are reasonable goals. The problem is the way Netanyahu is applying them. Netanyahu is implementing these lessons in a manner that would have made sense in 1999, or even 2005. But a lot has changed since then.
For instance, Netanyahu is ignoring the fact that Israeli society at the end of 2011 is far more right-wing than it was in 1999. In 1999, the peace process had yet to collapse. The Palestinian terror war had yet to begin. The notion that Netanyahu was responsible for the absence of peace still sounded credible to many Israelis in 1999.
This is not the case today.
Likewise, when Sharon was incapacitated, the public was still unaware of the dimensions of the strategic folly of his withdrawal from Gaza. This lack of awareness is what enabled Sharon to present Kadima as a centrist party and his Likud opponents as ideological extremists. Today Kadima is overwhelmingly recognized as just another leftist party. Sharon's opponents in Likud are led by Netanyahu, who is popularly perceived as pragmatic and responsible.
Moreover, the ideological right is not the same as it was in 1999. Likud's largest coalition partner is Israel Beitenu. Its leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, did not have a problem bringing his party into then prime minister Ehud Olmert's governing coalition in 2006. For better or for worse, Israel Beitenu's rise and the corresponding collapse of the national religious parties has brought about a situation where rightist parties' ideological commitment is now tempered by political opportunism.
All of these changes do not render Netanyahu's lessons from his failure and Sharon's success incorrect. But they do indicate strongly that Netanyahu's assessment of his own options for governing within the framework of those lessons is unnecessarily constrained.
With the political center far to the right of where it was in 1999 and 2006, Netanyahu does not have to embrace the Left's agenda in order to be perceived as a centrist. To the contrary, doing so harms him. The last twelve years have not been kind to the Left. The judicial excesses of the likes of Procaccia and her colleagues have soured much of the public on the Court. Public approval of the Court has been trending downward steeply for the past decade.
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Caroline Glick, Ehud Barak, Nitzan Alon, Supreme Court
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:47 PM
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Caroline Glick reports on the increasing politicization of the IDF. This week, Brig.-Gen. Nitzan Alon completed his two-year stint as Judea and Samaria Division commander. At his farewell party held two days after the terror attack in Jerusalem, Alon described the central challenge facing the IDF in Judea and Samaria as evicting Israelis from their homes.Read the whole thing.
As he put it, "It's likely that the IDF will be required to carry out, together with the police and the civil administration, certain missions that are not within the national consensus, and do so in the face of a rising conflict with the extremist but expanding fringes of Israeli society."
During his time as division commander, Alon ordered troops to shoot at Israeli residents of outpost communities slated for destruction with rubber bullets if they tried to oppose forcible expulsion.
Alon went on to speak of the grave threat of "Jewish terrorists."
He said, "Already today there is an extremist minority, marginal in size but not in influence, that is liable to steeply escalate the acts commonly referred to as 'price tag,' but are actually terrorism. These acts must not only be condemned; their prevention, and the arrest of their perpetrators, must be undertaken more effectively than what we have managed to accomplish to date."
As far as Alon is concerned, "Jewish terrorists," pose a threat to Israel that is just as dangerous - if not more dangerous - than the threat posed by the real terrorists just freed from prison. And from OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrachi's supportive statements at Alon's farewell bash, it appears that Mizrachi agrees with him.
But how can this be? No "Jewish terrorists" have stabbed and murdered Palestinian children. No "Jewish terrorists" have sent missiles into Palestinian residential neighborhoods or strapped bombs on their chests to blow up Palestinian cafes and buses. What Jewish terrorism are they talking about?
True, earlier this month there was an arson attack at the mosque in Tuba Zanghariya in the Galilee. While the media was quick to blame it on unknown Jewish assailants, it is hard to see why they would be the obvious or even most likely culprits.
Residents of Tuba Zanghariya torched their own clinic and community center. They routinely steal and kill livestock belonging to Jewish farmers in neighboring communities and set fire to their fields.
Aside from that, the police arrested two Jewish suspects but were compelled to release them this week due to lack of evidence. The police arrested a third suspect this week but failed to convince a judge to remand him to custody for 10 days. The judge scolded the police for even asking, given that they had no evidence of guilt.
Why would Jews from Judea or Samaria go to all the way to the Galilee to attack a mosque anyway? There are plenty closer to home.
The truth is that the "price tag" attacks are not acts of terror. They are acts of hooliganism and warrant criminal punishment. But their Jewish perpetrators are not terrorists. They are petty hooligans.
The fact of the matter is that there is no Jewish terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria or anywhere else. And there never has been. This was reported this week by Amir Oren in Haaretz.
Among other things, Oren's article dealt with the 1994 Shamgar Commission formed in the aftermath of Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Arab worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Oren revealed that following the massacre, the Shin Bet recommended forming fake Jewish terror groups in order to provide an organizational framework for would-be Jewish terrorists that would enable the Shin Bet to find and arrest them. The commission adopted the recommendation in its final report.
Obviously, if there had been a Jewish terror infrastructure, the Shin Bet wouldn't have needed to build fake ones.
So what has motivated Alon to focus his attention on fighting a nonexistent Jewish terror threat? Throughout his two years in Judea and Samaria, Alon distinguished himself as one of the most politicized IDF commanders. He consistently overstepped his authority, contradicted government policies and advocated positions of the radical Left. For instance, in an interview this month with The New York Times, Alon indicated that unlike the government, he supports a full IDF withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and doesn't believe that a withdrawal would be dangerous for Israel.
In the same interview, Alon reprimanded Congress for threatening to cut off US funding to the Palestinian Authority's terror-aligned security forces, claiming that they are a stabilizing force in the region. It is hard to think of another example of an IDF officer telling Congress how to spend US taxpayer dollars.
But while Alon's political activism is more pronounced than that of his colleagues, he is far from the only commander who misunderstands the responsibilities of the military.
Labels: Caroline Glick, Israel's Hebrew Palestinian daily, Nitzan Alon, politicization of the IDF
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:48 PM
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Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon, who is the commander of the Judea and Samaria brigade, has told the New York Times that Congress should not cut aid to the 'Palestinian Authority.' “Stability in the region includes the ability of the Palestinian Authority to pay its salaries,” General Alon said this week in a rare on-the-record interview, reflecting a consensus among Israeli defense officials. “Reducing the Palestinians’ ability to pay decreases security. American aid is relevant to this issue.”Alon ignores the fact that 60% of the aid that goes to the 'Palestinian Authority' gets turned over to Hamas to pay 'salaries' to its terrorists in Gaza and in Israeli jails. Oh wait - will that amount be reduced now that so many of the terrorists are being let go?
The position of both the White House and a number of American legislators is that the only path to Palestinian statehood is through direct talks with Israel. The Obama administration has promised to veto the recent Palestinian bid for recognition by the United Nations Security Council, but some legislators — Republicans and Democrats — want to go beyond that and cut off the hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress allocates annually to the Palestinian Authority.
General Alon, a former commando and intelligence officer who is scheduled to end his command after two years in his post, agreed to discuss issues that have arisen during his tenure. In a wide-ranging conversation, he brought up American aid and spoke with great concern about increasing violence by radical Israeli settlers, which he called “Jewish terrorism.” “We should do much more to stop it,” he said.
He called for more police officers and for getting them to shift some focus from their main mission of protecting settlers to stopping radicals. The army has sent some troops in for this.
General Alon said violence was a problem in both directions. He said Palestinian rock-throwing had increased since the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, went to the United Nations last month, leading to the deaths of a settler and his infant son whose car turned over after they were pelted. In recent months, the militant settlers have burned several mosques and destroyed acres of Palestinian olive and fig trees. Last week, dozens of settlers surrounded an Israeli Army vehicle and assaulted soldiers.
Labels: Nitzan Alon, Palestinian Authority, security cooperation, US foreign aid
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:26 PM
2 comments
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
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