of Israelites and Palestinians

[zim]

This will be long.

Janis Coulter HY"D

by Jay Berkovits

The horrible events of this past week, especially Wednesday's bombing
at the Hebrew University, have been difficult and trying. Because I
work daily at the Hebrew University, though at a different campus,
and have had connections to the University for almost 30 years, this
attack felt frightfully close. Young people, mostly Americans,
including two who had just completed post-graduate Jewish studies at
Pardes, perished that day. But it is because of my connection to one
of the victims, Janis Coulter, that I feel compelled to share some
thoughts.

Janis was my student at U Mass about thirteen years ago. She studied
in our department, and was also a History major. She was a lovely
person, applied herself diligently to her studies, and accomplished
quite allot. Because of her intelligence and excellent record, she
assisted me in grading exams in our department's introductory survey
of Jewish civilization. But the most striking thing I remember about
Janis was the uncommon warmth with which she approached the history
of the Jews. She wasn't Jewish, but she certainly had a yiddishe
neshomoh. After finishing U Mass, she went to the Univ. of Denver to
get a graduate degree in Judaic Studies, then attended the Hebrew
University. From time to time I would see her at the Association for
Jewish Studies meetings, and at some point she decided to work with
students, to encourage them to study in Israel. She met with
students at campuses throughout the U.S., and eventually became the
deputy director of the New York office of the American Friends of the
Hebrew University.

It therefore was not a complete surprise when Janis told me that she
had converted to Judaism. I could never have predicted it when we
first met, but it seemed so obvious. When I think about the Talmud's
description of what is expected of a prospective convert (Yevamot
47a), I think of Janis. The gemara says that when a person comes
before the beit din with the intention of converting to Judaism, that
person is asked why s/he would want to join the Jewish people.
"Don't you know that the Jewish people are despised and persecuted?"
the beit din asks. If the ger answers, "I know and I am not worthy",
s/he is accepted immediately, and only then is instructed in the
commandments. Rav Soloveitchik, zt"l, explained that first the ger
enters the covenant of fate (physical) -- "brit goral" -- and after
this enters the covenant of destiny (the Torah) -- "brit ye'ud."
What this teaches, continued the Rov, is that the first thing we
demand of the ger is not a leap of faith, but a leap of empathy for
the Jewish people. This is what we learn from converts about being
Jewish.

With the empathy she displayed for the Jewish people, Janis taught us
all a great deal. Her personal journey became intertwined with the
destiny of the Jewish people she loved so much, but ended tragically,
on a trip accompanying students to Israel from the U.S.
By converting to Judaism, Janis embraced the Jewish people as her
family. At this sorrowful time, the Jewish community must show its
support for this wonderful young woman, a genuine woman of valor, and
for the others who perished in the same attack. This is a time to
stand together with one of our own, and with the people of Israel. I
can't think of a better expression of Kiddush Hashem than to attend
her funeral and mourn her loss "betokh avelei Tzion vi-Yerushalayim".

I was told this morning that the funeral will be on Sunday at 10:00

[zim]

The carnage in Israel continues. The news on the radio this morning here in NYC stated that 18 people were killed yesterday is Israel. That's right, eighteen!

President Bush has condemned the recent murders forcefully and unequivocally. After the Hebrew University murders he said, "I am just as angry as Israel is. I am furious." However, he then went on to say, "But even though I am mad, I still think peace is possible." When he learned of the bus bombing yesterday that killed 9 Jews he also condemned these actions, but then he went on to say, "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process."

Mr Bush is making a grave mistake by thinking that peace with the "Palestinians" is possible. They do not want peace. They simply want to kill Jews. They have demonstrated this time and again by glorifying homicide bombers as martyrs. Thousands danced joyously when they learned of the Hebrew University massacre. And make no mistake, this is the sentiment of the vast majority of "Palestinians." Just as it was impossible to made peace with Hitler and his cohorts so it is impossible to make peace with the "Palestinians."

Unfortunately, the only solution is a military one, and it is crucial that the United States realize this and assist Israel with the implementation of such a solution. How many more Jews must die before such a solution is implemented?

I have emailed, faxed and written President Bush telling him the above. I also plan to call the White House today and express these sentiments. If you agree with me, then please do the same.

Contact information for the President and the Vice President is below.

The White House Mailing Address

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

The White House Phone Numbers

COMMENTS:
202-456-1111
SWITCHBOARD:
202-456-1414
FAX:
202-456-2461

White House E-Mail Addresses

President George W. Bush:
president@whitehouse.gov
Vice President Richard Cheney:
vice.president@whitehouse.gov

[zim]

Extremists on Campus
by Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer
New York Post
June 25, 2002

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/424
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/51063.htm

For three decades, left-wing extremists have dominated American
academics, spouting odd but seemingly harmless theories about
"deconstruction," "post-modernism," "race, gender and class," while
venting against the United States, its government and its allies.
Only these ideas are not so harmless. The radical notions espoused in
the classrooms and in campus demonstrations have recently had
dangerous consequences. These are especially visible with regard to
the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Consider some of the steps American professors took during 2002:
* Columbia University: Hamid Dabashi, a specialist on Iran, compared
Israel's military maneuvers in Jenin (to prevent future suicide
bombings) with the Nazi Holocaust. When one student protested his
canceling class to attend a rabidly anti-Israel sit-in, he sneeringly
replied, "I apologize if canceling our class in solidarity with
[Palestinian] victims of a genocide . . . inconvenienced you."

Joseph Massad, a Jordan specialist at Columbia, spoke at that same
anti-Israel rally, calling Israel "a Jewish supremacist and racist
state" that, he proclaimed, "should be threatened." This is in
addition to a talk with the inflammatory title "On Zionism and Jewish
Supremacy" and a course that (students report) served as a soapbox
for anti-Israeli polemics.

* SUNY-Binghamton: Robert Ostergard of the political-science
department converted his course into an anti-Zionist platform. One
guest speaker, Ali Mazrui, presented a lecture that a student called
"a 45-minute diatribe against Israel" equating Zionism with fascism,
Israel with apartheid South Africa and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
with Hitler.

* Kent State University, Ohio: Julio Czar Pino of the history
department published an ode to a Palestinian suicide bomber, lauding
her courage and calling on Allah to "elevate your place in paradise."

* University of Oregon: In a course entitled "Social Inequality," the
sociology department's Douglas Card called Israel "a terrorist state"
and Israelis "baby-killers" and insisted that students agree with his
view that Israel "stole land" on the final exam. One student said
Card bashed Israel and Jews "at every opportunity."

* UC-Berkeley: The English department's Snehal Shingavi, a leader of
"Students for Justice in Palestine," announced a course on "The
Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" with the now-infamous
"warning" to conservatives "to seek other sections."
In brief, instructors routinely tout wild-eyed politics and openly
wield their authority to indoctrinate students. At times, they even
admit this, as in the case of Andrew Ross, the then-Princeton English
professor who boasted in 1990 that he was using his position to
radicalize "the children of the ruling class."

Not surprisingly, some interpret all this as implicit permission to
harass Jewish and pro-Israel students. The result: a wave of verbal
and physical attacks.

* At San Francisco State University, anti-Israel students physically
threatened students marching for Israel while shouting phrases like,
"Die, you racist pigs," and "Hitler should have finished the job,"
prompting the school's president to admit that he was never "as
deeply distressed and angered by something that happened on this
campus" in his 14 years there.

Even after this incident, pro-Palestinian students continued to use
an SFSU-owned Web page to engage in Holocaust denial and accuse Jews
of ritual murder.

* At Berkeley, anti-Israel students occupied a classroom building,
leading to the arrest of 79 of them, including one charged with a
felony for biting a police officer.

* At the University of Colorado at Boulder, students desecrated an
Israeli flag and chalked anti-Semitic slogans on the main campus
walkway.

* At the University of Illinois, they assaulted with rocks a home
flying an Israeli flag, shattering the front window.
Although professors teaching Middle East-related courses are the most
responsible for this degeneration on campus, others, too, are
complicit. By indulging the Middle East specialists' radicalism and
efforts at indoctrination, alumni, administrators, parents, other
faculty, Education Department officials and state legislators
effectively condone those activities.

The time has come for all these stakeholders to take back the
universities as institutions of civilized discourse. This can be done
only by ending the now-regnant atmosphere of extremism and
intimidation. The place to start is by condemning and curbing the
leftist activism that too often passes for Middle East scholarship.

To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this list, go to
http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/dplist Daniel Pipes sends
out a mailing of his writings approximately twice per week.

[zim]

ARAFAT RETIRES TO MIAMI BEACH; CLAIMS LAND HELD BY JEWISH RETIREES

Dutiful Palestinian medical personnel attend to stricken Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat after he was felled by a near lethal Mah Jongg
tile in intense Miami Beach skirmish.

(Miami)--In a move that has significantly altered the political
landscape of the Middle East, PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat last
Saturday announced his retirement and quickly moved to Miami, Florida. Almost
immediately, Arafat claimed 39% of the land owned by Hillel House on
the campus of The University of Miami, as well as land occupied by the
Moses Mendelssohn Community Retirement Center situated in the trendy South
Beach section of the city.

Arafat, however, got more than he bargained for when he attempted to
occupy the Retirement Center land. His military incursion was met
with fierce resistance by members of the South Beach Hadassah who were
meeting in the Center at the time. Reports are still sketchy, but it
appears that Arafat and his forces sustained serious casualties and
had to abandon their attack when elderly Hadassah members hurled Mah
Jongg tiles at the Palestinian terrorists.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Miami Police Chief Buford
Rodriquez. "You can't believe the lethal impact of a Mah Jongg tile
thrown at 95 mph. Man, some of those grannies ought to try out for
the Marlins. They'd be Cy Young contenders for sure."

The European Parliament quickly denounced the Hadassah group's
inflammatory use of Mah Jongg tiles, and decided to schedule a debate
to decide whether or not to form an exploratory group to consider a
proposal to request an investigation into the matter. Under
consideration is a proposal in which the Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein
would send peacekeeping troops to Miami Beach to establish "safe
zones" that would be free of all Mah Jongg activity.

For his part, Arafat is going to appear before the General Assembly
of the United Nations to urge the passing of Resolution 843, making Mah

[zim]

Media Commandos

Write to NPR personnel (and other media people too) and inform them
that from now on, we are going to call them "media commandos". Pass
this on.
On June 21, National Public Radio's Morning Edition once again
employed distorting terminology in a report on a Palestinian
terrorist attack. Forty-year-old Rachel Shabo of Itamar and three of
her sons were slain when a terrorist burst into their home, shooting
the family members. NPR introduced the story this way: "Israeli
officials say Palestinian commandos stormed a house in a Jewish
settlement on the West Bank last night killing five people."
In fact, commandos are elite troops whose mission is
characteristically to save lives -- not to slaughter defenseless
civilians in their homes. In addition, of course, neither the Foreign
Ministry nor Israel Defense Forces websites use any terminology but
"terrorist" attacks to characterize the killing of the mother and her
children. If NPR cannot produce actual "Israeli officials" who used
the "commando" terminology, the network should retract its
misleading language and desist from any further use of it.
The Random House Dictionary definition of "commando" is: "1. (In
World War II) a. any of the specially trained Allied military units
used for surprise, hit-and-run raids against Axis forces. ...2. any
military unit organized for operations similar to those of the
commandos of World War II. 3. A member of a military assault unit or
team trained to operate quickly and aggressively in especially
urgent, threatening situations, as against terrorists holding
hostages."
A mother and her children are obviously civilian targets, not
military "forces." And the terrorists were not rescuing the mother
and her children from other terrorists.
Action items:
1) Please email/call NPR to protest the mischaracterization of the
terrorist violence against Israelis. The network continues to shun
using the most accurate language, choosing instead softer terminology
with regard to Palestinian attacks.
Kevin Klose, President of National Public Radio: Kklose@npr.org
(202) 513-2000
Robert Coonrod, President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(which channels tax dollars to NPR): Rcoonrod@cpb.org
2) Contact your own NPR affiliate to remind the management that it is
this kind of coverage that prompts public ire. To find your local
affiliate's address, go to www.npr.org and click on "Find a station."

[zim]

You may not be aware of all of the history in the article below, but it
well worth knowing. And as the saying goes, "He who does not learn from the
past is doomed to repeat its mistakes."

Hitler and the
Palestinian Arabs
By Chuck Morse


Pro Palestinian spokespeople play bait and
switch to the charge of Jew-hatred
as the motivating factor behind suicide
bombings with sanctimonious stock
lectures on Christian complicity in the
Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. They
blame Israel for "occupation" without
explaining why Muslims, where they
maintain substantial populations, seem
incapable of living peacefully in countries
they don't control such as, besides
Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and elsewhere.
These premises are false on three counts.
Nazism was not Christian but
neo-Pagan, Moslem imperialism today echoes
Nazi aggression, and Arabs
share a historic complicity in the Nazi
Holocaust. In fact, understanding Arab
support for Nazism places the present
Israel-Arab conflict in its proper
context.

Britain was so concerned with Nazi inroads
into the Arab world in 1938, the
eve of World War II, that they issued the
infamous White Paper limiting Jewish
immigration to Palestine, contributing to
a locking of Jews into a Europe that
was being overrun by Hitler. Former
British Prime Minister Lloyd George, in a
1939 address, called the White Paper "An
act of national perfidy that will
dishonor the name of Britain." The White
Paper violated international law as
established by the Balfour Declaration of
1917 and the Faisal-Weitzmann
agreement of 1919. These agreements,
recognized by the world community,
supported the creation of a Palestinian
Jewish State and encouraged Jewish
immigration. Emir Faisal, heading the Arab
delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace
Conference, had formally recognized the
future Jewish state in a signed
document that explicitly called for Jewish
immigration to Palestine.
Nevertheless, the British gave into
pressure from the anti-Jewish faction led by
the Grand Mufti.

Haj Amin al-Husaini, the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, was a major participant in
the Holocaust. On July 1, 1937, the
British appointed Mufti asked the German
Consul-General of Palestine "to what
extant the Third Reich was prepared to
support the Arab movement against the
Jews." Following this meeting the Mufti
was visited in Palestine by Adolf Eichmann
who was getting "acquainted with
the country and the life and to establish
contact with people." Around the time
of Eichmann's visit, a prolonged and
organized campaign of atrocities against
the Jews of Palestine was launched.

Around this time, The Mufti became a paid
agent of the Nazi Abwehr and was
put in charge of counterintelligence and
sabotage. When the British stopped an
Abwehr shipment of arms to the Mufti in
Palestine through Saudi Arabia and
Iraq, the Mufti re-located to Baghdad
where he directed Arab and Nazi
finance, diplomacy, and propaganda. In
1941, the Mufti inspired a pro-Nazi
coup in Iraq led by General Rashid Ali.
Collaborating with his masters in
Berlin, he would declare a Jihad against
Britain, which he called "the greatest
foe of Islam." The British backed a
successful countercoup and the Mufti
proceeded on to Berlin where he was
appointed by the Nazi's as titular head of
a Nazi-pan Arab government in exile.

November 21, 1941 the Mufti met with
Hitler and recorded the following in his
diary:

The Mufti.."The Arabs are Germany's
natural friends...
They are therefore prepared to
cooperate with Germany
with all their hearts and stood ready
to participate in a
war, not only negatively by the
commission of act of
sabotage and the instigation of
revolutions, but also
positively by the formation of an
Arab Legion. In this
struggle, the Arabs were striving for
the independence and
the unity of Palestine, Syria and
Iraq. ... Hitler... Germany
was resolved, step by step, to ask
one European nation
after the other to solve its Jewish
problem, and at the
proper time direct a similar appeal
to non-European nations
as well.Hitler.Germany's objective
would then be solely the
destruction of the Jewish element
residing in the Arab
sphere under the protection of
British power. The moment
that Germany's tank divisions and air
squadrons had made
their appearance south of Caucasus,
the public appeal
requested by the Grand Mufti could go
out to the Arab
world."

Hitler and the Mufti were planning to
first exterminate the Jews of Europe and
then the Jews of the Middle East. The
Mufti, who visited Nazi death camps
several times, organized support for the
Nazis from amongst Muslims in Russia,
the Balkans, and the Middle East. He
headed the "Arab Bureau" in Berlin
where he directed a massive network of
Arab-Nazi collaborators. He
organized tens of thousands of Bosnian and
Albanian Muslim into military units
known as Handschar divisions which carried
out atrocities against Yugoslav
Jews, Serbs and Gypsies, and he attempted
to organize an Arab-Nazi Legion.
Handschar fighters would be discovered
battling against Israeli independence in
1948.

In 1943, in a speech in Berlin, the Mufti
stated:

"The Treaty of Versailles was a
disaster for the Germans as
well as for the Arabs. But the
Germans know how to get rid
of the Jews. That which brings us
close to the Germans
and sets us in their camp is that up
to today."

On 1 March 1944, in a radio broadcast to
the Arab people from Berlin, the
Mufti stated:

"Arabs! Rise as one and fight for
your sacred rights. Kill the
Jews wherever you find them. This
pleases God, history,
and religion. This saves your honor."

The Mufti initiated some of the most
virulently pro-Nazi and Jew-Hating
broadcasts in history. Declared a war
criminal at Nuremberg, he would spend
the rest of his life living in opulence in
Cairo. His broadcasts, pamphlets,
intelligence network and sabotage against
Israel would continue after his death
in 1974. In his memoirs, he wrote,

"Our fundamental condition for
cooperating with Germany
was a free hand to eradicate every
last Jew from Palestine
and the Arab world. I asked Hitler
for an explicit
undertaking to allow us to solve the
Jewish problem in a
manner befitting our national and
racial aspirations and
according to the scientific methods
innovated by Germany
in the handling of its Jews. The
answer I got was: 'The
Jews are yours."

Page URL:
http://www.chuckmorse.com/hitler_palestinian_arabs.html

[zim]

The Washington Times

www.washtimes.com
Yasser Arafat: Nazi trained by David N. Bossie Published 8/9/2002

President Bush is right about Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian dictator
is a lifelong terrorist and must be replaced before peace can be obtained.
Mr. Arafat's reign of terror includes last month's Palestinian suicide
bomber murdering 20 people, most of them schoolchildren on a Jerusalem bus,
and the recent rash of bombings and shootings of Israeli innocents in
retaliation for the killing of one his henchmen by the Israeli military.
Since September 2000, Mr. Arafat's terrorist network has murdered at least
560 Israelis and wounded thousands more, and last week murdered five
Americans. These innocents are small change to the Palestinian dictator.
Since he was a teen-ager in the 1940s, the co-winner of the 1994 Nobel
Peace Prize has ordered the murder of thousands of civilians while waging
war against the Jews.

Mr. Arafat's mentor, Haj Amin Al Husseini, the grand mufti of
Jerusalem, indoctrinated him with hatred toward Israel. The grand mufti led
Palestinian Arabs from 1920 until Mr. Arafat succeeded him in 1967. The
mufti encouraged Arab terrorism against Jewish immigrants to Palestine
between the two world wars, and like Mr. Arafat today, the mufti piously
disclaimed any responsibility for terrorist acts committed by his
followers. In 1929 and 1936, the mufti personally led large-scale riots
against Jewish settlers. During World War II, the mufti journeyed to Nazi
Germany where he personally begged Adolf Hitler to invade British-ruled
Palestine and rid it of Jews. The mufti received sympathy, but no help,
from Hitler. Nevertheless, he broadcast radio tirades approving Hitler's
"final solution" of the Jewish problem.

The mufti barely escaped trial for treason by fleeing to Egypt in
1946. There he made young Yasser Arafat, then living in Cairo, his protege.
The mufti secretly imported a former Nazi commando officer into Egypt to
teach Mr. Arafat and other teenage recruits the fine points of guerrilla
warfare. Mr. Arafat learned his lessons well; the mufti was so proud of him
he even pretended the two of them were blood relations.

Mr. Arafat first shed Jewish blood during terrorist raids in 1947
and has kept it up ever since. He also became a leader in Palestinian
politics and was the first Palestinian nationalist to declare, "Violence is
the only solution," that "Liberating Palestine could only take place
through the barrel of a gun." During the 1950s, Mr. Arafat lived and worked
as an engineer in Kuwait. There, he recruited followers for Fatah, his
Palestinian guerrilla group. Mr. Arafat also raised funds from rich Persian
Gulf oil and construction millionaires in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and
the United Arab Emirates. These Persian Gulf millionaires remain Mr.
Arafat's main financial backers a half-century later. They also comprise
the al Qaeda terror network's primary source of funding.

Mr. Arafat's Fatah terror network began conducting murder raids into
Israel from Syrian bases in 1964. Mr. Arafat's raids triggered the 1967 Six
Day War between Israel and its hostile Arab neighbors. Despite causing this
disastrous defeat for the Arabs, which lost them strategic territory in
Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Mr. Arafat emerged as a hero. The "Arab street"
lauded Mr. Arafat for the purity of his hatred for Israel; they could have
cared less that his actions resulted in military disaster. Mr. Arafat used
his popularity to merge Fatah with the Palestine Liberation Organization in
1968. Since then Mr. Arafat has been on a mission, a man wholly dedicated
to destroying Israel in order to replace it with a Palestinian state.

While Mr. Arafat's anti-Israel terrorism is popular with Arab
peoples, it is less beloved by their Arab rulers. Cheering for PLO
terrorists who murder Israelis is much easier than controlling its
murderous, undisciplined thugs. Mr. Arafat and his ruthless PLO terrorists
were violently expelled from three different host countries: Syria in 1968;
Jordan in 1971; and Lebanon in 1982. From 1982 to 1994, Mr. Arafat and the
PLO resided in Tunisia. Mr. Arafat returned to world attention when he
supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1990-91 Gulf War. This
foolish move temporarily turned his Persian Gulf financial supporters
against him. Mr. Arafat now seemed discredited.

The Palestinian Intifada uprising against Israeli rule beginning in
1987 rescued Mr. Arafat's career. At first Mr. Arafat tried to stop the
Intifada since it threatened his dictatorial control over the Palestinians.
Mr. Arafat, a control freak, pays only lip service to democracy. PLO
elections are always rigged. But the uprising in the Palestinian occupied
territories continued, so Mr. Arafat began lending it military assistance.
Israel tried everything to quell the Intifada, but nothing worked, so
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon
Peres, cut a deal with Mr. Arafat in 1993. In return for limited autonomy
by a Palestinian National Authority ruled by him, Mr. Arafat promised to
renounce terrorism and accept Israel's right to exist.

Mr. Arafat soon broke his promise to the Israelis. Palestinian
terrorist bombings murdered 256 Israelis between September 1993 and
September 2000. Mr. Arafat oversaw the assassinations of any Palestinian
opposed to his one-man rule. Bill Clinton, vainly seeking a legacy for his
disgraced presidency, assisted Mr. Arafat's terror strategy. He convened an
Israeli-Palestinian peace conference during the summer of 2000. Mr.
Clinton's bullying of Israel encouraged Mr. Arafat to step up terrorism.

Mr. Arafat is 72 now, an old man in a hurry. He is using American
pressure on Israel to undermine the Jewish state in favor of a Palestinian
state. We must beware of his past lies and broken promises. As President
Bush says, Mr. Arafat must be replaced with a democratic Palestinian leader
committed to peaceful coexistence with Israel.

David N. Bossie is president of the Citizens United Foundation and
former chief investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and
Oversight. This article is excerpted from his latest investigative report,

[zim]

This article came from the New Republic. Obviously, I look at people
becoming religious as a positive development. This author does not.
But the perspective is interesting anyway:

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020708&s=halevi070802

HOW DESPAIR IS TRANSFORMING ISRAEL

The Wall
by Yossi Klein Halevi

Post date 06.26.02 | Issue date 07.08.02
E-mail this article

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

"The world hates us and always will," a neighbor said to me on the
stairs before wishing me a good day. "What more do you need than the
Holocaust?" He is Sephardi, without familial memory of Europe; but
the bitter, new mood of besieged Israel has penetrated everywhere. In
a full-page newspaper ad urging Israelis to boycott European nations
that now refuse to sell Israel military equipment, employees of the
country's military industry wrote, "In the moments of truth, we learn
yet again that we can only rely on ourselves." Even the left isn't
immune from the growing sense of siege. In a recent interview, the
liberal novelist Amos Oz confessed he's haunted by his father's
observation that, before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, "JEWS
TO PALESTINE," only to be transformed in our time into, "JEWS OUT OF
PALESTINE." The message to Jews, noted Oz: "Don't be here and don't
be there. That is, don't be."

While international concern is focusing on the physical wall, along
the length of the West Bank, that Israel is now building to ward off
suicide bombers, Israelis have been increasingly concerned about the
invisible wall of isolation that is rising between the Jewish state
and much of the world. Israelis haven't felt so alone since the mid-
'70s, when the United Nations declared that Zionism equaled racism
and when more nations maintained diplomatic relations with the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) than with the Jewish state.
The eagerness with which most of the world adopted the Palestinian
account of the Camp David talks and dismissed Israel's previously
unimaginable concessions as irrelevant; the U.N.'s obsessive search
for a nonexistent massacre in Jenin even as it ignores the massacres
of Israelis; Europe's growing sympathy for suicide killers and its
simplistic reduction of the conflict to occupation; anti-Zionism's
emergence, since the Durban anti-racism conference, as a defining
feature of the anti-globalization movement; the application of
traditional Christian anti-Jewish imagery to the Palestinian conflict
(like the new mural in a Scottish church depicting a crucified Jesus
surrounded by Israeli soldiers)--all have convinced many Israelis
that collective Jewish existence is again on probation. Last year,
after the collapse of the Camp David talks and the renewal of anti-
Jewish frenzy in the Arab world, Israelis began to suspect that the
Middle East might never accept a Jewish state, no matter what its
borders. After all, denial of the most basic elements of the Jewish
story--from the biblical connection to the land of Israel to the
existence of the gas chambers--has become routine in much of the Arab
world. But in the last few months Israeli despair has broadened.
Israelis now fear not only that they will never be accepted in the
Middle East, but also that they will never be accepted in the world
at large.

Along with returning the Jews to their land, a key Zionist goal was
returning the Jews to the community of nations. Addressing the U.N.
General Assembly in 1949, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett
declared that Israel's admission into the world body was "the
consummation of a people's transition ... from exclusion to
membership in the family of nations."

But today Israelis fear the transition is happening in reverse. "The
suspicion slips into the heart that maybe the ultra-Orthodox were
right when they warned that a sovereign state for Jews would annoy
the nations and bring annihilation on the remnant of the Jewish
people," wrote Peggy Cidor, a former left-wing activist, in Kol
Hazman, a secular Jerusalem newspaper. "The state of Israel, which
was intended to give the Jews an entry ticket into the family of
nations, didn't deliver the goods. We're still being judged by
separate standards; there is still no proportion between our actions
and the responses around the world.... It was nice to feel like
everyone else for a while, but that seems to be over.... The state of
Israel has turned into the `Jew' of the nations."

That last phrase--among the bitterest ever written by a Zionist--was
first used by the late Israeli scholar of intellectual history J.L.
Talmon in an essay in The New Republic, written in 1976 in response
to the "Zionism=Racism" resolution. Now, though, the bitterness may
run even deeper, precisely because many Israelis believed
international stigmatization of the Jewish state had ended. In the
1990s Israel seemed to finally be realizing the old Zionist dream of
normalization; Jews would be neither chosen, nor outcast, but simply
a nation among nations. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
United Nations in 1991 rescinded the Zionism=Racism resolution, and
key nations--including India, China, and the entire former Soviet
bloc--resumed relations with the Jewish state. Israelis reciprocated,
tempering their defiant independence with a sense of global
interdependence. With far greater enthusiasm than in the past, they
joined international relief efforts, raising funds for Somali famine
victims and Turkish earthquake survivors. The Israeli press even
debated whether the Israeli army should participate in international
peacekeeping missions. A new prosperity allowed Israelis to become
travelers. Tens of thousands of young Israelis participated in the
post-army ritual of backpacking in India, and Indian spirituality
came to influence Israeli popular culture. In their new
identification with far-off places, Israelis displayed a new embrace
of the world.

At times Israelis revealed an overeager provincialness, as in 1993
when the local media turned the opening of the country's first
McDonald's into a major cultural event. Still, as the world opened up
for Israelis, their sense of permanent ostracism began to recede.
Many quietly stopped using the ugly word "goy" to describe gentiles
or stopped referring to the nations outside Israel as "the world," as
if Jews inhabited a separate planet. After the 1982 Sabra and
Shatilla massacre, says Aharon Klieman, professor of diplomacy at Tel
Aviv University, former Prime Minster Menachem Begin dismissed
criticism of Israel by noting, "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the
Jews." "Can you imagine Rabin or even Sharon using the word `goyim'?"
asks Klieman. "Israelis learned to make distinctions among nations."
Yitzhak Rabin caught the new ethos in his inaugural speech as prime
minister in 1992: "No longer is it true that `the whole world is
against us,'" he declared. "We must overcome the sense of isolation
that has held us in its thrall for almost half a century. We must
join the international movement for peace, reconciliation, and
cooperation that is spreading over the entire globe these days--lest
we be the last to remain, all alone in the station." Israelis were
adopting a new national vision; the millennia-old dynamic of Jewish
separatism and gentile ostracism seemed about to end.
But now the world is closing up again. I know Israelis who hesitate
to write their home address on their luggage when they travel to
Europe. When some Norwegian supermarket chains recently announced
plans to mark Israeli products so customers could consider boycotting
them, a spokesman for the normally understated Israeli Foreign
Ministry caustically suggested that the chains use yellow stars.
Increasingly, Israelis and the rest of humanity are speaking mutually
unintelligible languages of moral outrage. Liberal-minded foreigners
can't understand how Israelis elected Ariel Sharon, and many have
taken his election as license to view every Israeli act of self-
defense as aggression. Israelis can't understand how the world has
forgotten the circumstances that produced Sharon's election: Yasir
Arafat's terrorist war, launched in September 2000, against the most
left-wing government in Israel's history.

The last time Israelis felt this besieged, in the mid-'70s during
Zionism=Racism and the widespread severing of diplomatic ties that
followed the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil boycott, the political
and social consequences were formidable. In 1977 a right-wing
coalition of outsiders, led by Begin, unseated the Labor Party, which
since Israel's founding had never lost a national election. The
settlement movement, which until the 1973 Yom Kippur War had moved
only a few thousand Jews into the West Bank, became an irresistible
popular force, luring tens of thousands of Israelis with the promise
of cheap, abundant housing and territorial annexation. A back-to-
religion movement, attracting some of the country's leading artists
and bohemian symbols, emboldened the ultra-Orthodox, who established
yeshivas aimed at secular Israelis and grew increasingly aggressive
in promoting religious legislation and won massive government
subsidies for their insular communities.

True, those trends were directly influenced by factors that had
nothing to do with Israel's diplomatic isolation. The Yom Kippur War,
Labor Party corruption, Sephardi resentment of Ashkenazi hegemony--
all boosted the settlement and back-to-religion movements and
especially the Likud Party. Still, it's no coincidence that those
three movements shared a contempt for the judgment of the outside
world. The seeming failure of Zionism's experiment in normalizing
Jewish relations with the world was the incubator in which
isolationist movements grew. In the atmosphere of late '70s ghetto
Israel, it somehow made sense that the prime minister was a Holocaust
refugee whose passion was taunting Europe's leaders as anti-Semites
and that Uri Zohar, the country's leading satirical filmmaker and
symbol of the Tel Aviv beach culture, would suddenly appear on
television wearing a yarmulke.

The settlement and back-to-religion movements have been called a
"counterrevolution" against the Zionist vision of integration with
the nations. The impact on Israeli Judaism has been particularly
devastating. The settlement movement created self-ghettoized West
Bank communities where religious stringency became the norm, driving
many "modern Orthodox" Jews closer to ultra-Orthodoxy. Even worse,
back-to-religion yeshivas transformed a tolerant Sephardi Judaism
into a mimicry of Eastern European ultra-Orthodoxy. The most extreme
example of this cultural climate was the transformation of the late
Rabbi Meir Kahane from political militant into theological racist.
Kahane had moved to Israel in 1971 and created a tiny far-right
movement that advocated encouraging Israel's Arabs to voluntarily
resettle abroad. But after the Yom Kippur War and Israel's growing
international isolation, Kahane embraced religious fundamentalism and
a policy of forced mass expulsion. Only by adopting anti-Arab
policies that would transform Israel into a pariah state, he
preached, would Jews prove their contempt for the nations and their
trust in God. For Kahane, expelling Israel's Arabs wasn't so much a
political as a religious strategy--a crazed bid to push the Jews into
a splendid isolation in which they depended on God alone for their
salvation. Kahane was a reminder that the great Jewish fear--an
incurable otherness--is also a great temptation. And after a hiatus,
that temptation is back.

The more that Israelis are treated as pariahs, the greater their
tendency toward recklessness. The Likud's recent, self-defeating vote
against a Palestinian state wasn't just a political stance but an
expression of contempt for the world's judgment of Israel. And one
friend, a veteran critic of the occupation, said to me with a
terrible casualness, "If the world can't find space for a sliver of a
Jewish state, then the world doesn't have the right to exist. And if
it blows up because of a nuclear war in the Middle East, maybe that's
poetic justice."

One tangible warning is the growing support for transfer of
Palestinians from the territories. For now that support is a
reflexive reaction to terrorism, not a program. But if Israel's
isolation grows, so will the temptation toward extreme, repellent
solutions. Earlier this year the National Religious Party (NRP)
elected as its new leader a just-retired career combat officer named
Effie Eitam. The NRP has long been a mainstay of the settlement
movement, but until now it was careful to avoid extremist
proclamations that would banish it to the political periphery. In the
past, NRP leaders tempered their hard-line politics with compassion,
as when the late NRP leader Zevulun Hammer called for a commission of
inquiry into the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacre. Even Yitzhak Levy,
Eitam's immediate predecessor and a rigid ideologue, was careful to
repudiate transfer. Eitam, though, is the first NRP leader to flirt
with mass expulsion. And Eitam's theological message--that the Jews
are a divine people operating beyond normal rules and that the
gentile nations matter only as passive recipients for Israel's
spiritual greatness--offers a seductive justification for radical
policies like transfer that would place the Jewish state outside
international norms.

A benign or at least neutral international climate is a key
precondition for Israeli willingness to take risks for peace. Though
it's widely assumed that the Oslo process restored Israel's
diplomatic standing, the sequence of events was actually the
opposite. Only after the former Soviet bloc, China, India, and much
of the Third World renewed diplomatic relations with Israel in the
early '90s, following the Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet
Union, did Israel feel safe enough to begin negotiating with the PLO.
The Madrid Peace Conference, precursor to the Oslo process, occurred
at the beginning of a new era of reconciliation between Israel and
the international community. Now, though, that era has ended. Almost
every day the Israeli papers report another attempt to transform
Israel into a pariah state--like the recent statement by Swedish
Foreign Minister Anna Lind accusing Israel of war crimes. Israel's
attorney general, Elyakim Rubenstein, has warned that the new
international criminal court about to open in the Hague could begin
targeting Israelis for supposed war crimes, including the mere act of
moving to a settlement or even a Jewish neighborhood in East
Jerusalem. In the current atmosphere, it's ludicrous to assume the
Israeli public will feel safe enough to consider returning to the
concessions offered by Ehud Barak, let alone the concessions
envisioned by the Saudi plan. Barak himself has declared his Camp
David offer irrelevant.

In the ongoing if temporarily muted culture war between ultra-
Orthodox isolationists and Israelis who embrace the outside world,
the burden of proof has shifted to the normalizers. "You might as
well oppose the law of gravity," an ultra-Orthodox friend said to me,
referring to those of us who believe gentile hatred of Jews is not
immutable. While it's too early to see an increase in ultra-Orthodox
ranks, the growing hatred of Israel around the world emboldens our
theologians of despair.

Crucial to the ultra-Orthodox worldview is that secular Zionism was a
false messianism, promoting the absurd idea that the nations would
welcome a Jewish state into their club. And so the fact that Israel
is the target of more hostile U.N. resolutions than all other
countries combined isn't only a political crisis, but also a
theological one. Why, indeed, has the state of the Jews, the very
instrument intended to end ostracism, become the Jew of the states?
The answer is happily provided by dozens of ultra-Orthodox pirate
radio stations operating throughout the country and drawing tens of
thousands of listeners. Soft-spoken rabbis offer the beguiling
message of Jewish chosenness, an exalted otherness. The word "goy" is
constantly evoked, as is this despairing rabbinic quote: "Esau hates
Jacob"--that is, it's a law of nature that Esau the gentile hates
Jacob the Jew. Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, a secularist turned ultra-
Orthodox preacher who draws packed crowds with his insider's mockery
of secular culture, maintains a website that has tracked the world's
latest anti-Jewish outbursts--ongoing proof of Zionism's failure to
normalize Jewish fate.

"The Israeli debate about our place among the nations is essentially
reduced to two alternative worldviews," explains Klieman. "The first
is the isolationist position of am l'vadad yishkon, a nation that dwells alone. The second is a nation like all
others. That's the position of the younger generation, but it's
fluid. If Israelis feel they're being given their day in court, they
lean toward integrationism. But when they get slapped down, they
recoil behind a protective shield. And that's where we are now."
The growing pessimism threatens Zionism's great psychological
achievement: protecting the Jews from a fatal, post-Holocaust
bitterness. Israel's founding preempted a massive Jewish rejection of
the world, allowing survivors to turn rage into reconstruction.
Israel even forced the Jews to make their peace with Europe. When
David Ben-Gurion negotiated the German reparations agreement in the
early '50s, resisting the violent opposition led by Begin, he
compelled Israelis to choose pragmatism over history. But that choice
should not be taken for granted. Perhaps the Holocaust's deepest long-
term wound on the Jewish psyche isn't the actions of the murderers
but the passivity of the onlookers. Jews must continually resist the
suspicion that even the enlightened world cares little for their
survival. The consequences--political, social, and theological--of
feeding that suspicion could be shattering.
Most Israelis, of course, still realize that "the world" doesn't hate
the Jews. Even now, says Klieman, many Israelis insist on
distinctions within the Arab world, let alone the world generally:
"We still speak of Egypt and Syria rather than `the Arabs.'" The
expansiveness of the '90s remains imprinted on the Israeli psyche and
won't be easily forfeited. That's why Israelis seize on every sign of
support from abroad. A recent pro-Israel demonstration in Rome, for
example, received more coverage in the Israeli press than far larger
demonstrations by American Jews, precisely because most of the
participants in the Italian protest were reported to have been non-
Jews.

Most of all, it's American support that keeps Israelis from total
despair. The United States is the great exception that doesn't prove
the rule. It challenges the subversive Jewish voice that whispers,
"Don't trust the goyim; at the moment of truth, they'll betray you."
Israelis know that in moments of truth, the United States has stood
with them and presumably will do so again. President George W. Bush's tacit
endorsement, in his Rose Garden speech this week, of Sharon's
strategy--denying Arafat's terrorist war any political gain--has
reinforced Israeli faith in the United States.

Israel's psychological struggle is between the optimism of the '90s
and the despair of the '70s. International detractors who turn every
Israeli act of war into a war crime and subject the Jewish state to a
level of moral judgment not applied to any other nation are inciting
the very hard-line forces they deplore. Effie Eitam and Amnon Yitzhak
have no better recruiters than Kofi Annan and Javier Solana. Those
Israelis who cling to Zionism's promise and insist on remaining part
of the world are fighting for their lives.

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI is a contributing editor at TNR.

[zim]

Palestinians Whoop It Up
How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder?

BY MICHAEL B. OREN
The Wall Street Journal
August 10, 2002

JERUSALEM--In Gaza last week, crowds of children reveled and sang while adults showered them with candies. The cause for celebration: the cold-blooded murder of at least seven people--five of them Americans--and the maiming of 80 more by a terrorist bomb on the campus of Jerusalem's Hebrew University. The joyful response of so many to the death, suffering and mutilation of students and university workers raises pointed questions about the health of Palestinian society, both mental and moral. It makes many Israelis ask whether, even if a cease-fire is reached and negotiations someday resume, peace with the Palestinians is possible.

There is, of course, nothing new about Palestinians applauding terror. During the Gulf War in 1991, they danced on rooftops in praise of Iraqi scud missiles raining on Israeli neighborhoods. Again, in the mid-1990s, after bus bombs in Israel killed dozens--one of them was my sister-in-law--an estimated 70,000 Palestinians filled a Gaza stadium to cheer a re-enactment of the massacre. The deaths of over 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11 was another cause for dancing in Palestinian streets, though Arafat's men suppressed foreign coverage of the fete.

The terrorist acts and their gruesome effects are celebrated as inspiration for the next generation. Most recently, a West Bank university held an exhibition in honor of the suicide bomber who killed 14 Israelis at a Jerusalem pizzeria in 2001; the props included painted puddles of blood and scattered body parts. Palestinian parades regularly feature columns of masked and hooded youths girded with cardboard explosives, proclaiming their frenzy to kill. Palestinian babies have also been photographed--proudly--in suicide bomber's garb.

Such festivities contrast radically with the reaction of Israelis to the deaths of Palestinian civilians in a recent attack on a Hamas terrorist leader in Gaza. Though "collateral damage" is virtually unavoidable in battle, though the army apologized for its mistake, and though the terrorist himself bore some responsibility for the tragedy by hiding out in a densely populated area, Israelis were deeply disturbed. Many engaged in introspection over antiterrorist tactics; some took to the street in protest. There was no gloating, no cheering, certainly, but rather nationwide expressions of remorse, even shame.


For all its anomalies, Israel is at base a healthy society. The reaction of Israelis to civilian casualties, even among their mortal enemies, is similar to that shown by Americans after the accidental bombing of villagers in Afghanistan. But the Palestinians are different. Though Palestinian spokesmen often seek to justify terror in terms of popular frustration and despair, there is no rational explanation for the outbursts of joy bordering on ecstasy at the dismemberment of innocent children, women and men. Beyond the controversy over settlements and territory, beyond the bitter conflict over Jerusalem, there is something else at work in the delight displayed by Palestinians over slaughter--something sick and perhaps even evil.

Readers of Richard Rhodes's recently published book, "Masters of Death," learn that, after a day of shooting thousands of Jews, members of the SS Einsatzgruppen often repaired for a celebratory drink and banquet. The Nazis' behavior is readily identified as barbaric and insane. Surely those same adjectives apply, then, to Palestinians who rejoice not only when great numbers of Jewish civilians are butchered, but when their own children are blown up in the process.

For all the kudos discretely given SS killers by the regime, Nazi Germany never publicly lionized them, never plastered their pictures on the streets, or openly encouraged children to emulate them. That kind of adoration for mass murderers can only be found, in abundance, among the Palestinians.

The majority of Israelis, myself included, are willing to make far-reaching sacrifices for peace and to embark on a process of genuine reconciliation with the Palestinians. Yet that same majority will have immense difficulty forgetting the horrific scenes of carnage and the spectacle of Palestinians extolling them. For us, the issue is no longer merely borders and topography nor even the terms of a cease-fire, but whether a fundamentally sound society can trust one that has lost its mental and moral bearings.

The damage to peace efforts has been massive, and the chances for repairing it are slim. Still, a sane and responsible Palestinian leadership might yet arise and put an end to the bombings and their public glorification. The alternative is the elimination of all hope for a peaceful settlement in this or even future generations. For the Palestinians, who are now paying a staggering price for their ruinous resort to terror, that is reason enough not to celebrate.

Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is author of "Six Days of War" (Oxford, 2002).

* Find this article at:
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110002113>

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[zim]

This article came from Friday's Jerusalem Post.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK: No tolerance for genocide

Aug. 2, 2002

The television camera lens moves with seeming effortlessness from the
pictures of suffering and death at the Hebrew University to the
carnival in Gaza City, where thousands take to the streets in
celebration of the pictures from Jerusalem. Gazing at the revelers on
the screen, one strains one's eyes to find an expression of shame,
guilt, or remorse on the faces in the crowd. One unconsciously prays
to discern anything that would show that those in front of the camera
are there by accident or because they were forced to be there. But
no, the faces on the screen are uninhibited, joyful ones.
Far from being forced to participate in the festivities, each and
every one of the people at the parade in Gaza makes a personal
decision to leave his or her home and join the crowd in applauding
the mass murder of Jews. They are there because they support the
murders. They are there because such murders make them happy.
These Gazans, and their counterparts at Balata refugee camp near
Nablus, were not celebrating a military victory. There was no battle
at the cafeteria in the Frank Sinatra International Student Center.
These Palestinians men, women, teenagers, and small children came
together to celebrate another massacre in their genocidal campaign
against the Jewish people.

Yes, genocide. The Palestinians have reached a point in this war
where it has now become clear that their goal in this struggle is not
the end of the so-called "occupation," but rather the organized,
premeditated mass murder of Jews because they are Jewish. That is,
the Palestinian goal today is genocide.

In a seminal article in Commentary magazine this past February on the
recent rise of anti-Semitism, Hillel Halkin argued,
counterintuitively, that the Holocaust is the main reason why it is
so difficult for Jews today to accept the fact of anti-Semitism. In
his words, "The Holocaust has made some Jews less, rather than more,
able to see anti-Semitism around them. This is because if the Nazis
demonized the Jew, they also demonized the anti-Semite." In short, if
an anti-Semite is not a Nazi, then it is hard for Jews to perceive
him as a threat.

Just so, even as generations of Jews adopted "Never Again" as their
rallying cry, the Holocaust made it difficult for us to notice when
genocide is adopted as a policy against the Jewish people, without
gas chambers present. The fact that the Palestinians currently lack
the means used by the Germans to perpetrate their genocidal policy
against the Jews blinds us from the fact that their desire to do so
is the same as that of the Germans in the 1930s and 1940s.
The absence of the trappings of the Nazi Holocaust also prevents us
from properly identifying repeated massacres of Israelis by
Palestinians. Contrary to what we tell ourselves, these attacks are
not expressions of rage or reactions to specific actions by the IDF.
They are acts of genocide perpetrated against Jews as Jews because
the Palestinians have descended to the level of depravity where they
do not view the Jews as human beings whose murder is an inherently
immoral act.

The fact that the Palestinians don ski masks and keffiyehs rather
than brown shirts and swastikas also makes us undervalue the fact
that, like the Nazis, the Palestinians are utilizing all their
technological know-how and military resources to kill Jews and are
making their best efforts to constantly improve and enhance these
resources to increase their kill rate.

Daniel Goldhagen showed in his masterful book, Hitler's Willing
Executioners Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, that contrary to
popular belief, the Holocaust was not a Nazi-specific affair, but
rather a German affair. While Hitler and his Nazi Party dominated
Germany, the Germans allowed themselves to be dominated. While the
Nazis were the architects of the Holocaust, they perpetrated it with
the active support and participation of many rank-and-file Germans
from all walks of life, in all sectors of German society regardless
of membership in the Nazi Party.

Such is also the case in Palestinian society today. It is not just
Hamas or Tanzim or Islamic Jihad that we must fight, but Palestinian
society itself must be transformed for there to be peaceful
coexistence. All major indicators point to the conclusion that the
overwhelming majority of Palestinians is complicit in the aim of
committing genocide against the Israelis. Poll after poll shows that
a solid majority of Palestinians from all socio-economic levels
supports suicide bombers and other forms of terrorism against Israel.
In fact the polls show that the higher the socio-economic level of
the respondents, the stronger their support for terrorism. [So much
for Simple Shimon's view that it's only the Palestinian terrorists
we're at war against and not the "Palestinian people." C.S.].

Virulent, Nazi-style Jew hatred and dehumanization has become for the
Palestinians, as for the Germans before them, the central unifying
theme of society. The best-seller lists in the PA for years have
included such works as Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. Being a relative of a suicide bomber is a status symbol.
>From the schoolrooms to the mosques to the daily papers to the art
studios, Palestinians teach, preach, write and paint in praise of
genocide. Even Yasser Arafat's purportedly democratic and pro-Western
opposition has no moral qualms about massacring Israelis. Leaders
like the much-feted Sari Nusseibeh argue against suicide bombings not
because they are morally reprehensible, but because of their tactical
inconvenience.

In an interview on Al-Jazeera television on July 14, translated by
Palestinian Media Watch, Nusseibeh praised everyone involved in jihad
against Israel. Explaining that he did not want to pass moral
judgment on the murderers when he signed a petition a month earlier
calling for an end to suicide bombers, Nusseibeh said that terrorism
presents no moral dilemma, it is only a question of whether or not
"political benefit" accrues from killing Israeli civilians.
Nusseibeh's explanation echoes the official PA condemnations of every
attack. There is never a moral judgment made, only a cost-benefit
analysis. That killing Jews is acceptable is quite simply taken for
granted.

Once we understand that this is the situation in Palestinian society,
we reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are not in a struggle
against a political movement for national sovereignty. We are being
victimized by a genocidal campaign for our violent elimination
supported by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians.
To defuse the danger presented to Israel by the genocidal
Palestinians, we must also look to the German experience and take our
cue from the Allied policy for the de-Nazification of postwar
Germany. In World War II it was clear to the Allies that Germany
would have to undergo a long process of social and political
transformation before the Germans could again be trusted with
sovereignty. The first step on the road was an unconditional
surrender of the German army to Allied forces. As part of their
military surrender, German nationals were forcibly deported from the
strategically vital Danzig corridor and East Prussia, which were
handed over to Poland. The Germans ceded all claims to the territory
and deported nationals were banished with no right of return. [This
sounds like an argument for "transfer," which is anathema to the
Israeli left. C.S.].

Furthermore, the surrender terms for Germany involved the stationing
of a permanent occupation force on German soil, which still exists
today, 58 years later, and forced limitations on German military
capabilities and troop levels.

The transformation of German politics involved permanently banning
anyone involved in the Nazi regime or supportive of that regime from
participation in German political life.

There is no longer any room to doubt that the Palestinians, to become
a nation that will live at peace with Israel, must undergo a similar
transformation. Whether Israel can force such a process onto the
Palestinians by itself or whether such a transformation will
necessarily take place as part of a reshuffling of the Arab world
that supports its genocidal program remains to be seen. But what is
clear enough is that there can be no negotiations, no legitimacy, and
no tolerance for a society whose central organizing principle is the
physical elimination of the Jewish people.

[zim]

Terror bombing kills 7, wounds 70 at Jerusalem university


By Jonathan Lis, Ha'aretz Correspondent, and Ha'aretz Service
July 31, 2002

A bombing in a crowded cafeteria at the Mount Scopus campus of Jerusalem's Hebrew University killed at least seven people Wednesday afternoon and injured at least 70, 14 seriously.

Some of those in the cafeteria were foreign students taking summer school classes.

The injured were taken to hospitals in the city, but the evacuation efforts were hampered by the location of the attack, inside a building on the campus.

In a statement released to Al-Jazeera Television, Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, denying reports that it was a suicide bombing. Hamas has repeatedly sworn to avenge the assassination last week of its military commander Salah Shehadeh in an IDF air raid that also killed 11 children and a number of adult civilians.

Dr. Ovadia Shemesh, deputy director of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, said most of the wounded were between the ages of 18 and 30. He said that most of the injuries were from shrapnel and from the collapse of the cafeteria ceiling.

David Baker, an official in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, said that "Israel is fighting a pitched battle against terror and for the right to walk down the street, take a bus or sit in a cafeteria without the fear of being
decimated by Palestinian terrorism."

Though classes were not in session, students were taking exams at the time of the blast, and the cafeteria, situated in the university's Frank Sinatra building, was crowded with diners. There were also numerous students in the building registering for classes for the coming school year, witnesses said.

"This was one place that I thought was safe," said a shaken and bloodied survivor of the attack, who identified herself as Anat.

Another eyewitness, Oshrit, said that although there were security personnel in nearly every building, "The security is not thorough, they check your bag and that's it."

"At first we didn't know what was happening. The whole building shook," she said. "The street was full of smoke and broken glass."

It was the second bomb attack in the capital in the space of 24 hours. On Tuesday five people were injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a falafel stand in downtown Jerusalem, near the border with the city's largely Arab eastern half.

The Mount Scopus campus is adjacent to the West Bank, and is close to Arab neighborhoods of the holy city.

Emergency information hotlines:
Hadassah Hospital, Mount Scopus 125-5121
Hadassah Hospital, Ein Karem 125-5122

* Find this article at:
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/Flash1.html

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[SimpleSimon]

Originally posted by Dyslexic Tangent:

….snip

The more that Israelis are treated as pariahs, the greater their
tendency toward recklessness. The Likud's recent, self-defeating vote
against a Palestinian state wasn't just a political stance but an
expression of contempt for the world's judgment of Israel. And one
friend, a veteran critic of the occupation, said to me with a
terrible casualness, "If the world can't find space for a sliver of a
Jewish state, then the world doesn't have the right to exist. And if
it blows up because of a nuclear war in the Middle East, maybe that's
poetic justice."

Snip….

A not totally unreasonable attitude, given the provocation. I have already clearly stated my position vis-à-vis such action;

http://www.thehypertribe.net/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6396&pagenumber=1

Originally posted by SimpleSimon:

…snip

Personally, I'd utilize my available weaponry (were I Israel), and wipe Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya out in one series of lightning raids, then round all of the Palestinians up (every single one) and deport them to Saudi Arabia.

Before you say they cannot achieve that, think about this: they possess nuclear (and probably thermonuclear) devices, and the means to deliver them. Egypt would require one conventional heavy bomb into the face of the Aswan Dam.

[I]Originally posted by Dyslexic Tangent:[I]

….snip

All major indicators point to the conclusion that the
overwhelming majority of Palestinians is complicit in the aim of
committing genocide against the Israelis. Poll after poll shows that
a solid majority of Palestinians from all socio-economic levels
supports suicide bombers and other forms of terrorism against Israel.
In fact the polls show that the higher the socio-economic level of
the respondents, the stronger their support for terrorism. [So much
for Simple Shimon's view that it's only the Palestinian terrorists
we're at war against and not the "Palestinian people." C.S.].

emphasis added

My problem with the statement above is not that it is not true, for quite possibly, it is. My problem is the total lack of supporting documentation.

Assert things as facts with no offer of documentation or substantiation, and you descend to the level of the author of “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion”.

And before you accuse me of the same tactic – my replies are opinion, although based upon facts.

[zim]

bwahahaha that wasnt a jab at you SS. That was purely a cut and paste from email i get every day from my calc1 professor.


u 2 know each other? :)

I believe it refers to shimon peres.