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When something outrageous goes on for a long time, people stop being outraged. It is boring to hear or read about things like genocidal wars in Africa, Europe’s collapse into poverty, or the complaints of Israelis about being the targets of thousands of rockets, day in and day out. Better to search the internet, perhaps to find nude pictures of David Petraeus’ girlfriend.

I’m in Israel now, so a few words about the rockets. Everyone I talk to says the same thing: how can this be allowed to continue?

Every day, you take your kids to school (if it’s open and you are not in a shelter), hoping that there will not be a rocket barrage on your way — although Hamas makes an effort to shoot at these hours — moving quickly, keeping an eye on the closest shelter. Every day, rockets land all over southern Israel — small Hamas-built Qassams which can kill you if they land within a few yards, or larger military Grads, a Russian design that is built in multiple countries, including Iran. They smash into open fields, roads, parking lots, homes, schools, synagogues, stores, gas stations, living rooms, bathrooms, farms, factories, banks, telephone booths, markets, everywhere.

When they explode, they spray deadly shrapnel. If you are driving down the street and one lands near your car, the fragments penetrate the sheet metal. Then they penetrate parts of your body, and you may die or be permanently maimed. The sides of buildings are peppered with holes from the shrapnel, like they were hit by a shotgun blast. People’s faces can look like this, too.

When the rocket fire is dense, whole families go to shelters, as many as a million people. Then they come out and perhaps find their homes, cars or workplaces destroyed.

Children wet their beds, can’t concentrate in school, can’t sleep. Adults become phobic or crazy from their powerlessness to protect their families. Sometimes it’s quiet for hours and people relax. Then suddenly, perhaps at 3 am, the “color red” alert is heard, followed by the sound of explosions. In Sderot, which is relatively close to Gaza, there are 15 seconds between the alert and the explosion.

The Iron Dome system is deployed in some places, especially against the longer-range Grad rockets. Sometimes the explosion you hear is in the air, when a rocket is intercepted. Sometimes not.

Rocket fire into Israel from Gaza began in 2002. The intensity varied over time. Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 slowed Hamas down a little, but activity soon went back to ‘normal’. The people who live in southern Israel have been bearing this for ten years.

Deaths have been relatively few compared to the number of rockets because of a combination of factors: the area of effectiveness, especially of the Qassams, is small, they are not aimable except in a general direction, schools and public buildings have been hardened, shelters large and small have been sprinkled throughout the region, and the Iron Dome system works well where it is deployed.

But still there have been numerous injuries, many serious, a large amount of property damage, and incalculable psychological harm done, especially to children. Today even a young teenager who grew up here never knew a time when death didn’t fall randomly from the sky.

Would you live like this? Would you try to raise your kids like this?

The greatest obscenity in this is that it has become acceptable, to the world and even to the Israeli government, to shoot at Jews. If it weren’t OK, why is it allowed to continue? Is the Hamas more powerful than the IDF, than the US, than all the international institutions that supposedly exist to make human life better? If not, why can’t it be stopped?

Defensive measures like shelters and Iron Dome are not a solution, because they affect only the side effects of the Hamas program, not its central goal, which is to humiliate the Jews, to define them as interlopers and legitimate targets, to make them powerless. To make it acceptable to shoot at them.
This is how the Arabs get their “honor” back.

If the IDF takes serious steps to get at the root of the problem, as they began to do but didn’t complete in Cast Lead, the Arabs will squeal like stuck pigs, inventing war crimes to pull at the heartstrings of the West, which is always ready to believe them.

Well, there is Jewish honor, too. Or perhaps just the right to live as human beings who are not acceptable to shoot.

We have an army. Let’s use it.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, rockets

On Tuesday, three IDF soldiers were wounded by a bomb planted near the border fence between Israel and the Gaza strip. On Thursday when soldiers were trying to repair the fence, a huge explosion occurred when a tunnel packed with explosives was detonated. Luckily only one soldier was lightly injured, but it could have been catastrophic.

Then today an IDF jeep in the area was struck by an antitank missile. Four soldiers were wounded, at least two seriously (reports vary), and Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. The IDF either returned fire or otherwise retaliated, killing at least four Palestinians. The last time an antitank missile was used by Gazan terrorists was in April of last year when a school bus was attacked and 16-year old Daniel Wiflic was murdered. Hamas took ‘credit’ for that, too.

Hamas is bombarding southern Israel with rockets as I write this (Nov. 10, 11:59 PM Israel time), making at least 25 that have hit Israel this evening. A million Israelis are in shelters, schools are closed tomorrow, etc. In fact, warning sirens have been heard in Gedera, just 8 miles south of my daughter’s home, Rehovot, where I am sitting now!

It isn’t just rockets. There are reports that several terrorists infiltrated into Israel from Gaza.

The pattern of escalation is similar to what occurred in late 2008 — an IDF-Hamas clash over a tunnel under the border fence led to a rocket barrage and ultimately to Israel’s response, Operation Cast Lead — and there are other worrisome parallels to that period.

Cast Lead was supposed to have three phases: the first was to attack Hamas assets from the air, the second was to enter the strip and take overall control of the territory, and the third was to go into the densely populated areas and rescue hostage Gilad Schalit, destroy Hamas control centers, and kill or capture a large number of its fighters and perhaps its leadership as well. For various reasons — including the probable intervention of the incoming Obama Administration in January 2009 — phase III never happened, Hamas kept Schalit for two more years, and with construction materials, electricity, etc. provided by Israel for ‘humanitarian’ reasons, rebuilt its damaged infrastructure.

Is history about to repeat itself exactly four years later? Israel can’t go on accepting rocket barrages like a particularly dangerous form of weather. Hamas is pushing very hard and there will soon come a point at which Israel’s leadership will have to act to defend its population, despite what the Obama Administration or the UN would prefer.

It is going to be a long night at the PM’s office in Jerusalem, and at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. And for about a million Israeli civilians in rocket range of Gaza.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Gaza, terrorism, rockets

Crooked, defeatist, incompetent, cynical Ehud Olmert

Could there be an Israeli politician more cynical than Ehud Olmert?

Yesterday he accused PM Netanyahu of alienating President Obama — as if Obama could dislike him more — by ‘intervening’ in the US election:

“Following what Netanyahu did in the last few months, the question arises of whether or not our prime minister has a friend in the White House,” Olmert said in a meeting with New York Jewish leaders.

Olmert said that while the Israeli head of state was allowed to have a personal preference for one candidate over another, it would be “better, obviously, if he kept it to himself.”

“What took place this time was a breaking of all the rules, when our prime minister intervened in the US elections in the name of an American billionaire with a clear interest in the vote,” Olmert continued. “The very same billionaire used Israel’s prime minister to advance a nominee of his own for president.”

Olmert’s words were a clear reference to Jewish-American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who according to reports donated some $100 million to Romney’s failed campaign. Adelson also owns the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which is largely perceived as a stalwart backer of Netanyahu.

Olmert didn’t explain how he knows that Adelson was acting on Netanyahu’s instructions. He seems to think that it is impossible for a Jewish billionaire to prefer one or another candidate for US president or Israeli PM without engaging in a conspiracy. His remarks, intended to damage Netanyahu with the Israeli public, can only damage his relationship with Obama as well.

Olmert, who was probably the worst Prime Minister in Israel’s history, plans to return to politics after a miraculous escape, with his skin mostly intact, from a trial on several serious corruption charges. The Israeli state prosecutor’s office has filed an appeal of his acquittals on the major charges and an especially light sentence he received for one minor offense.

Olmert said that he would run only if Obama won the US election — which makes one wonder if he expects ‘intervention’ in the opposite direction, which apparently he considers appropriate! He is expected to join with Tzipi Livni and other outspoken enemies of PM Netanyahu, take over the moribund Kadima party, and run against him in upcoming elections on an anyone-but-Bibi platform.

Livni was Olmert’s partner in the government which so badly bungled the 2006 Second Lebanon War, leading to the unnecessary deaths of dozens of soldiers and a disadvantageous cease-fire which left Hizballah in a position to rebuild and rearm (which it has done with a vengeance).

Both Livni and Olmert are preferred to PM Netanyahu by the Obama Administration, because of their perceived willingness to withdraw from the territories in a deal with the Palestinian Authority. Olmert claims to have come close to such a deal in 2008, which thankfully fell through when he left office under a cloud of accusations of corruption.

He has recently criticized the PM for his tough position on the Iranian nuclear project and echoed Obama’s position that sanctions and diplomacy must be given more time to work. I’m sure this has endeared him even further to the president.

Olmert is also known for making one of the most embarrassing speeches in oratorical history in 2005, prompting me to call him “the anti-Churchill:”

We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies. We want them to be our friends, our partners, our good neighbors, and I believe that this is not impossible… That it is within reach if we will be smart, if we will dare, if we will be prepared to take the risks, and if we will be able to convince our Palestinian partners to be able to do the same.

As I noted at the time, an unprecedented combination of defeatist rhetoric, bad politics, and fundamentally wrong analysis! But nobody ever accused Olmert of lacking arrogance or chutzpah, and he seems to think that with everyone to the left of Bibi and President Obama on his side, he can retake the Prime Minister’s chair.

Israel does not need a Prime Minister whose major selling point is that he is prepared to be a lackey for the anti-Israel President Obama. I believe that the Israeli public is much, much smarter than that.

Technorati Tags: Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu, Obama, Israel

Somewhere between 68 and 70% of American Jewish voters went for Obama, depending on whose exit poll you believe. Israelis that I talk to are mystified. “Are they crazy? What were they thinking?” they ask.

It’s not really mystifying. Here are some general facts about non-Orthodox and secular (the large majority) American Jews:

Although they will say that they support Israel, they do not know the history of the Middle East and the 100-year old conflict over Jewish sovereignty. They are well-educated, which means that they went to universities where, if they studied the conflict, they are likely to have been assigned books and articles by the revisionist (read: anti-Zionist) historians. They will certainly have been exposed to numerous lectures and films presented by Palestinian advocates and student groups. If they are left-of-center and engaged in antiwar or other ‘progressive’ causes, they will certainly be bombarded with extreme anti-Israel propaganda as well.

They tend to be liberal, which means that they get their news of current events from sources like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, etc. What they will see and hear will generally confirm their mildly left-wing beliefs, but in one area — Israel — will be consistently and deliberately biased to an extreme degree.

They are very concerned about what they perceive as the danger of a Christian takeover of American society, in which Christian symbols and prayer will be officially sanctioned in public places, abortion and contraception will be prohibited on religious grounds, their children will be required to sing Christmas carols, etc. They associate Christianity with antisemitism — but do not seem to be alarmed by growing antisemitism on the Left, or in the black community.

They are less threatened by Muslims, whom they see as another minority in the US who suffer from discrimination, like blacks and Jews. They seek interfaith cooperation, and are not alarmed by the treatment of Islamist organizations as mainstream by the administration.

Although today many are financially successful, they are suspicious of “big business” and — not entirely incorrectly — feel that the population is being ripped off by corporations like banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc. They are pro-union. But they are not as worried by the fact that the tax burden on them is rapidly rising while government services that actually benefit people are falling. As liberals, they tend to be less concerned about the increasing power and intrusiveness of government than the loss of privacy to corporations.

Finally, as well-educated liberals, they find it hard to criticize Barack Obama, who presents himself as ‘black’, lest they be guilty of racism, a secular blasphemy punishable by total social ostracism.

Not everything I’ve said applies to all American Jews — there are conservatives among them, and some who take both conservative and liberal positions on various issues. There are Orthodox Jews who are more conservative, and even haredi anti-Zionists (who knows how, or even if, they vote). But I think my generalizations are, er, generally, correct.

So along comes Mitt Romney, a guy who represents corporate power if anyone does, who draws support from the Christian Right — at least, at the beginning of the campaign when he plays to the conservative base — and who complains about ‘big government’ and threatens to undo the only liberal success of the Obama Administration, Obamacare.

He is at a huge disadvantage from the start. And the issue of Israel has little or no power to sway American Jews, because, as I’ve argued, deep in their hearts they are not sure that Israel is not really a colonialist oppressor of third-world Palestinians. In an emotional sense, many of them are not with Israel.

We know that politics is mostly emotional, so when Republicans or pro-Israel Jews presented arguments that Obama was not a friend or Israel, they bounced off. Accepting and acting on them would mean going against their deeply felt liberalism and voting Republican, something many could not bring themselves to do. And their pro-Israel feeling is not strong enough to push them over the edge. So they looked for reasons to justify their emotional position.

The Obama campaign presented simplistic talking points to ‘prove’ that he is pro-Israel. They did not have to stand up to analysis. Liberal Jews were looking for a rational excuse to justify their emotional stance, and the talking points provided one.

It’s remarkable that Jewish support for Obama — 78% in 2008 — dropped as much as it did!

Technorati Tags: Obama, Jews, Israel