August 2006

Let’s give it up for ESPN, whose homepage today features the good ol’ blue and white Israeli flag. (And, as best as I can tell, the opening line to Take Me Out To The Ballgame in Yiddish) In an article about the nascent professional baseball league in Israel , set to open in 2007, Jerry Crasnick writes a very nice article, talking a bit about Zionism and even busting out quotes from both Leon Uris and Psalms. Apparently Daniel Kurtzer, who compares understanding baseball to learning Talmud, has signed up as commissioner, and work is being done to get Israel a team in the 2009 World Baseball Classic. Anyway, if you love baseball and Israel like I do, I’ve already said enough to convince you to read this article.

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Lebanese TV broadcast a report with a voice clip and movie of who appears to be missing Israeli airman Ron Arad. Security officials in Israel have verified the images and sound are of Ron.

Something needs to be done immediately about this. He is just as important and Ehud, Eldad, and Gilad.

Novelist David Grossman’s beautiful eulogy for his son Uri who was killed in Lebanon two days before the ceasefire went into effect.

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May his memory be a blessing.

Isi Leibler, writing in the Jerusalem Post, brings up the point made by Ari Shavit–a center-left Israeli journalist writing in Haaretz–that political correctness set the scene for the failures in Lebanon. He writes,

Shavit maintains that the main lesson to be absorbed from the Lebanon imbroglio is that the shocking performance of our national leadership was a logical consequence of the erosion of the national spirit among Israeli elite circles. He writes that “we were drugged by political correctness,” by a discourse dominated by the baseless assumption that “occupation” is the source of all evil.

According to Shavit, that resulted in the demonization of core values like heroism and fortitude. Military power became identified with fascism, and the army, the most hallowed icon of the state, was transformed into a dirty word. Those who warned that we were becoming weaker and our enemies stronger were mocked, as were those who dared question unilateral withdrawals.

…

THE DECONSTRUCTION of Zionist ideals led to the repudiation of practices considered sacrosanct by our founding fathers and undermined the spirit of volunteerism, one of the pillars of Israeli society. In these circles money was everything; they began to convince themselves that Tel Aviv was Manhattan.

Word.

Ha’aretz reports today that five more Lebanese were wounded by cluster bombs left over from the bombing raids.

Before I go on, I’d like to state unequivocally: the use of cluster bombs is simply wrong in this war.

Does it constitute a war crime? Not sure. I do not know whether those bombs were dropped upon a rocket crew in the act of shooting katyushas on Israeli cities. If that is the case, to be completely rational in analysis, their usage could make sense: a highly mobile crew cannot be stopped by a conventional bomb, so cluster bombs–if they explode on impact, as they are supposed to–seem to be the right munition to choose, and within the law of war.

Thing is, they don’t explode on impact always, and that is why they are the wrong choice even if they might not constitute a war-crime.

Yes, Israel should kill those who rise up to kill its citizens, but no, Israel should not use weaponry that is prone to malfunction and kill innocent children days or weeks or months after the war passes through.

One does not have to look far to understand why World Jewry completely failed to organize against the looming threat of Nazism in the 1930s. All it takes is a quick look over some of the posts on one the the blogs I think well-represents liberal activist Jewish circles in the US, Jewschool.

Not all of Jewschool–there are those that remain aware of the world around them. But the tone has become such that one cannot escape that this segment of American Jewry has veered down the path of auto-subjugation.

As the president of Iran prepares Iran for a “nuclear birth”, those same Jewschoolers who agitated previously for nuclear disarment remain silent and sometimes even openly state that such arming is justified, because of the Neocon conspiracy for their “fiscal self-interest.”

As the president of Syria gives impassioned speeches calling for war on Israel, and Hizbullah refuses to disarm, bourgeois Jewschoolers stage die-ins and seek to undercut American support for Israel while blaming the war on Israel.

As Saudi Arabia and Iran pour money into Islamic fundamentalist centers and programs around the world, Jewschoolers somehow have taken up the notion that Israel has driven Muslims into Islamist arms.

And while all of this is happening, the unbearable lightness of being a bourgeois Jewschooler living in Israel as others die for your protection leads self-proclaimed beautiful souls to throw fundraisers for all victims, and others to urge troops to risk their lives more, instead of raising money to help stock and prepare Israeli troops who arrived at the North only to find warehouses empty and out-of-stock.

It is only now that I can understand why European, Diaspora-minded Jewry failed to react to the looming threat in the 1930s. Instead of recognizing that the Islamists are human beings full of hate, some Jews insist on taking responsibility for being hated. Instead of realizing that the Islamists are human beings who are conscious of what they say and how they say it, and usually mean what they say just like any other human beings, these Jews condescend by claiming that these words are said only because we, the Jews, are not acting fairly towards them. Instead of realizing that these Islamists are imperialists, set on reconstituting a Caliphate and subjugating all peoples now living in that territory to their own law and morality, these Jews call us the imperialists even as we were going down the path of leaving all Palestinian-populated territories until this war was forced upon us.

With Jews like these, who say such things as “Sometimes I think the Jewish people get everything they deserve”, 1930s Europe makes sense–not because the Jews deserve it, but because Jews such as these Jewschoolers are so intent on being Jews-of-conscience that they forgot the other side is composed of human beings too who actually, truly, want us dead–and will gladly kill us if we do not do something about us first.

Haaretz reports today that “a majority of the Jewish Israeli public believes Israeli Arabs supported Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah during the war in Lebanon.”

And why would they? Maybe it could be that sensationalist newspapers such has Haaretz reported to the Jewish Israeli public that such support was the case. Elie Reches, director of the Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at the Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, wrote it was the case, as did Sayed Kashua, who wrote, “My hands tremble as I write this, but in this war I was against my country.”

Then there were the articles about the Israeli Arabs who admired Nasrallah, and the call by Nasrallah for Arabs to leave Haifa, which some of them listened to.

And I’m not even going to get into the behavior of Arab members of Israeli parliament, who often forgot that they are under oath to be loyal to all of Israel’s citizens, even the Jews.

I would like to point out that this need not be the case. Some of our history’s most loyal fighters for Israel have not been of Israel–just see Uriah the Hittite. (That King David acted the self-interested prick is besides the point–David was one of the most immoral members of our tribe, in my opinion).

So, taking only these few articles I linked into consideration, can someone blame the Israeli public when it thinks that Israeli Arabs were supportive of Hizbullah during the war?

It seems to me that Haaretz is looking to start a fight.

As well-intentioned souls from around the world try to help clean up the mess Hizbullah made in Southern Lebanon, it turns out that they’re playing right into the hands of the…Hizbullah.

As the New York Times reports, everything in Southern Lebanon goes through the Hizbullah.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Hizbullah has built up its standing in Southern Lebanon over the past six years, openly brandishing its weapons and preparing for further resistance–even with Israel long gone across the international border. And what did the citizens of Southern Lebanon do? They thanked them for it by voting Hizbullah into government.

That is why certain efforts to raise money (even in part) for Lebanese civilians are wrongly conceived and entirely unethical. Wrongly conceived because there is simply no way to discriminate in funding a reconstruction when the very houses that will be reconstructed will, almost surely, be of those who aid and comfort the Hizbullah–that is, if the Hizbullah doesn’t take that money and put it into rockets instead. Unethical because those people who will be giving Israeli money to the Lebanese will necessarily be reducing the amount they’d give to those same people who are ready to die to protect other Israelis–regardless if those Israelis are Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druz.

So, dear dreamers for Peace, wake up and realize that peace can only be made with those people who want it. Support those who would die for you so that they may live with you, and hope that the other side will hold its own fighters accountable for their actions, and force them to think twice before they start a war. If they are made to clean up their own mess, they may decide not to make another mess in the future.

A great article in Haaretz asking where are the voices of protest about this war. With so much that went wrong in this past war and no one holding themselves accountable, it is only a matter of time before Motti steps up.

I am speaking of 1701.

Are we better off now than we were a month ago when this war started? Is Hezbollah disarmed completely, unable to operate? No, of course not, they are allowed to regroup and rearm with the condition from the Lebanese that they not brandish their weapons in public. Wow, what an accomplishment Israel!

Where are Ehud and Eldad? They were kidnapped on July 12th sparking this current war, and they are still languishing in Hezbollah captivity.

Has anyone put any concerted pressure on Iran and Syria to stop arming and supporting Hezbollah? No, not to the extent that should have been. Most of the advanced weaponry in Hezbollahs arsenal comes from those two. There has been one good thing but that probably wont last though, not with this and this coming

Basically, I don’t really see what we have gotten out of this past war, we let it end before we completed our goals and what we agreed to won’t work. How can the UN force be anything different than their predcessors UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon, also the “interim” force has been there for 28 years)? If these troops can’t forceably disarm Hezbollah then they are of absolutely no use, to anyone.

Hopefully we can ensure that Hezbollah isnt allowed to continue to operate, otherwise all of that was for nothing.

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