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THEN THEY CAME FOR THE NOVELISTS

Paris Book Burning
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal
March 12, 2008

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120527435282828463.html?mod=opinion_main_europe_asia

Then, in Paris, they came for the novelists.

One by one, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Iran, Muslim governments have signed up for the boycott of the international book fair opening Friday in the French capital. The reason? It showcases Israeli literature this year – which, by mere coincidence organizers say, happens to be the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state.

Impromptu or official boycotts of Israeli commercial goods or national sports teams are nothing new. But the assault on words – merely for being written in Hebrew by writers who happen to carry Israeli passports – adds a revealing wrinkle to a familiar story.

The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization late last month cited Israeli “atrocities, oppression and imposed starvation and siege against the Palestinian people” in its call for governments to keep their writers and books away from Paris. As did the Arab League. Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford scholar and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, proclaimed in Le Monde that the “fair can’t celebrate the Jewish state and ignore the fate of the Palestinians.”

Aware of his Western audience, the pop Islamist intellectual was quick to stress that “political criticism [of Israel] and anti-Semitism” aren’t the same thing. Sure – except we’re not talking about politics here. Culture expresses a people’s essential identity and the coordinated Muslim assault ahead of the book fair expresses a not so latent anti-Semitism.

The richness of Israeli society, as shown through its thriving arts scene, makes an illusive target for such venom. Joining Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld in the national delegation of 39 writers in Paris will be Israeli Arabs Sayed Kashua and Naim Araidi.

An Israeli Jewish poet, Aaron Shabtai, declined the invitation. “I don’t think that a state that maintains an occupation, that every day commits crimes against civilians, deserves to be invited to a week devoted to culture. That’s anti-cultural.” Working in the Middle East’s most vibrant democracy, Mr. Shabtai is free to make his choice and publicly proclaim it.

His peers in the Muslim world don’t have that privilege. Moroccan novelist Abdelouahab Errami told Le Journal du Dimanche of his “disappointment” at the boycott. “I don’t share the position of my government. But I won’t go... It is difficult to have a different individual position without exposing yourself to a campaign of pressure.”

 

“WE DON’T ATTACK. THE JEWS JUST TAKE THEIR BAGS AND GO.”

Jews fleeing Paris suburbs
By Devorah Lauter
JTA news agency
March 12, 2008

VILLEPINTE, France – Rabbi David Altabe looks older than his 27 years when he talks about the future of the Jewish community in this working-class suburb of Paris.

Altabe leans his elbows on a table set for the Sabbath and sinks his furrowed brow in his palms. “We do what we can, but it’s hard,” he says. “I don’t know why I stay. I ask myself that question all the time.”

Over a period of just three years, roughly half the Jewish families in Villepinte have left. Some have gone to other suburbs or Paris neighborhoods considered safer for Jews; a few have left the country.

Of 300 families three years ago, only 150 remain today, community president Charly Hannoun estimates. The reason, he says, is anti-Semitism.

Now Villepinte’s 40-year-old synagogue, which was torched in 1991 and 2001, is at risk of closing because there are barely enough regulars for a minyan. Jewish community leaders are wondering if Jews have a future here.

“It’s a whole history that’s being erased,” says Hannoun, who worked with contractors and friends to build the town’s synagogue. “It’s the end of the synagogue, and I say that with rage in my heart.”

Villepinte is one stark example of what is happening to many Jewish communities in the immigrant-heavy suburbs of the Seine-Saint-Denis region, north of Paris.

Scarred by the surge in anti-Semitism that swept through France between 2000 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of the mostly Sephardic Jews who once lived in these close-knit communities have left town.

Sammy Ghozlan, the president of the Seine-Saint-Denis Council of Jewish Communities, says more than 16,000 Jews have moved out of the suburbs since 2001. Left behind are synagogues weighing whether to close and mostly poor, elderly and religious Jewish families.

Experts say the Jewish flight from the suburbs is changing the demographics of France’s Jewish community and increasing the ghettoization of Jews in the country.

All of France is experiencing the problem, says University of Paris sociologist Shmuel Trigano, the author of “The Future of the Jews in France.”

“It is a general shift, not a passing crisis,” Trigano says. “The Jewish community is becoming a ghetto. It is no longer a community of choice but a community of necessity. In a democracy that shouldn’t happen.”

Though increased security has helped reduce anti-Semitic crime in France, bringing the level of anti-Jewish incidents in poorer suburbs down to the levels in Paris, the change has come too late for many suburban Jews fed up with worrying about what might happen.

Altabe says he recently had a glass bottle thrown at him from a passing car while walking with his 3-year-old child.

“If you hit us over the head enough times, we’ll protect ourselves,” says Marc Djebali, the president of the Sarcelles Jewish community, north of Paris.

Djebali says the Sarcelles community of 10,000 Jews lost about one-fifth of its population over the last decade. “We don’t attack,” he says. “The Jews just take their bags and they go.”

Jews from the northern suburbs who are wealthy enough to live in Paris are moving to eastern Paris and its suburbs, where anti-Semitism is minimal and Jewish schools are available.

“By the next generation there will be practically no more Jews in the northern Paris periphery,” says Maurice Robert Fellous, the president of the Jewish community in Noisy-le-Sec, a northern Paris suburb. “In 25 years we’ll have to sell our synagogue.”

Since 2000, nearly 40 percent of Noisy-le-Sec’s school-aged Jewish families have pulled their children from area public schools and enrolled them in Jewish institutions, Fellous says.

He attributes the shift to the area’s general anti-Jewish environment and specific incidents students have encountered, such as being beaten up and subjected to insults and taunts. Many regularly hear the cry “dirty Jew!”

This shift to Jewish schools is apparent in many places in France, albeit to a lesser degree than in Noisy-le-Sec.

Exact numbers are hard to access because by law, public schools cannot identify or count their Jewish students. Patric Petit-Ohayon, the director of the education department at the Jewish community social welfare umbrella group, the Jewish Unified Social Funds, says Jewish school enrollment in the northern Paris suburbs increased rapidly during the 2000-2005 period.

In moving their children to Jewish schools or their families out of the suburbs, many Sephardic families make a direct comparison between this migration and their families’ flights from North Africa some 40 years ago.

“They chased us from Algeria and they followed us here,” Robert Sebbane, 81, says of the North African Muslims responsible for much of France’s anti-Jewish crime.

In 2000, “we were shocked because we didn’t think this would happen here,” says Sebbane, who lives in the town of Creteil.

Even in Seine-Saint-Denis, which community leaders say is a comparatively safe area, Jewish residents are subject to anti-Semitic taunts and youths regularly spit at synagogues as they walk past.

Some religious Jews in France have warned community members not to display their yarmulkes in public.

In Villepinte, Hannoun says families started departing “very rapidly” in 2004, when “the reality of the situation set in.”

“It was horrible,” he says. “You couldn’t walk out of synagogue. Families couldn’t take it.”

Despite the drop in anti-Semitic crime, which Hannoun attributes to the declining number of Jews in town, Jews have continued to leave Villepinte.

Hannoun says he is torn between the desire to recruit new Jewish families to the neighborhood to replace those who have left and discouraging potential community members from coming to a place he fears is not good for Jews.

“Honestly, I don’t know if I want them to come,” he says, adding however that he encourages couples who cannot afford housing elsewhere to settle here.

Though he has the financial means to relocate, Hannoun says he will not move so long as he is needed by Jews in Villepinte.

“After us there’ll be nothing left,” Hannoun says. “We can’t lower our hands while we still have a role to play. It’s like being the captain on a sinking ship.”

In 2002 Hannoun’s son, Olivie, 40, moved with his family to Miami from France because of anti-Semitism.

Olivie Hannoun says he misses a lot about home, but his three children have become accustomed to life in the United States.

“They can’t understand that it can be difficult to be a Jew elsewhere,” Hannoun says. “They don’t know what that is, which is exactly what I wanted.”

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BORN IN ISRAEL

Palestinian twins under rocket fire from Gaza
By Christoph Schult in Ashkelon
Der Spiegel (Germany)
March 11, 2008

www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,540689,00.html

When a Palestinian woman gave birth to twins in an Israeli hospital she experienced what it is like to be the target of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

The humming noise in the sky over Beit Lahia grows slowly louder. It sounds as if the buzzing of a hornet were being amplified by loud speakers in a football stadium. Residents of the Gaza Strip call them “Sannana,” or the humming ones, the small unmanned drones that the Israelis use to scan the border region for rocket commandos –and then to liquidate them with precisely targeted missiles.

Ashraf Shafii has climbed onto the roof his house and is looking across strawberry fields toward the border wall. The smoke-belching towers of the power plant in the Israeli city of Ashkelon jut into the sky along the horizon. His wife is over there in Ashkelon today.

Shafii, a 34-year-old lab technician at the Islamic University of Gaza, glances at his six-year-old daughter. “We were so desperate to have more children,” he says. For years, he waited in vain for his wife to bear a son. When she turned 30, the couple decided to get fertility treatment.

Iman Shafii finally became pregnant. During an ultrasound examination, doctors discovered four small embryos. The first died in the fifth month of pregnancy and the second died a few weeks later. Shafii was admitted to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, but the condition of the two remaining embryos became increasingly fragile. “You have to go to Israel,” the doctor told her.

Because Israel refuses to engage in any contact with the authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza, patients turn to private brokers who submit their entry applications to the Palestinian Authority of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. But it can be a lengthy process.

The Shafiis were lucky. Iman was permitted to enter Israel after only 24 hours. She took a taxi to a spot near the Eres border crossing, and then she was pushed in a wheelchair across the last 500 meters of bumpy ground. She reached the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon just in time. She gave birth on Feb. 25, by Caesarean section, to a girl, Bayan, and to the couple’s long-awaited son, Faisal.

Iman Shafii, 32, wearing a headscarf and oval glasses, and speaking in a soft voice, sits on a chair between two incubators. Today is the first day she is permitted to hold her babies in her arms. A nurse brings out the boy first, then the girl. As the tears well up in her eyes, Shafii kisses her children on their foreheads. “If the children had stayed in Gaza, they would not have survived,” she says.

Her only impression of Israel has been the one she gets on Palestinian television, which usually shows tanks and soldiers, and celebrates attacks, like the recent shooting inside a Talmud school in Jerusalem, as acts of heroism. But now a doctor wearing a yarmulke walks into the room, says “Shalom” and asks her in English how she is feeling.

Dr. Shmuel Zangen, the director of the hospital’s neonatal unit, doesn’t care who he treats. “As a doctor, I enjoy the privilege of not having to think about it,” he says. “It certainly is odd that we take care of Palestinian children while they shoot at us. It’s the sort of thing that only happens in the Middle East.”

“NOT A JUST WAR”

In the past, Shafii saw the Israelis exclusively as perpetrators, but in Ashkelon she is encountering, for the first time, victims of the acts of terror committed by her own people. One of them is nine-year-old Yossi, who is sitting in a wheelchair. A steel frame holds his left shoulder together. It was fractured by shrapnel from a rocket that landed in the city of Sderot. “The people in Sderot are suffering just as we are in Gaza,” she says.

There was a sharp increase in the Palestinian rocket attacks after Israel cleared the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip in September 2005. The Israeli military counted 2,305 hits last year, and there have already been 1,146 in the first two months of this year. Until now, almost all of the missiles have been Qassam rockets, which are made in the Gaza Strip and have a range of about 12 kilometers (seven miles).

But the breaching of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Egypt by Hamas in January made it possible to bring in Russian and Iranian rockets with longer ranges. This means that cities considered safe in the past are now threatened. One of them is Ashkelon. On the second day after the birth of Bayan and Faisal, a Soviet-made “Grad” rocket landed on the hospital grounds. “I heard it hit, 200 meters away from me,” says Shafii. The neonatal unit was moved to a bunker the next day. “The groups that are firing the rockets are not fighting a just war,” says the Palestinian mother, adding that they are not abiding by what the Prophet Muhammad said: that wars may only be waged between soldiers, but not against civilians.

The buzzing drone in the sky over Beit Lahia has flown away to the south. The sound of an Israeli missile striking its target can be heard a short time later. Within a few minutes, there are reports that a member of the group Islamic Jihad was killed.

Ashraf Shafii describes how young, masked men repeatedly set up their rocket launchers under the cover of houses in Beit Lahia. “They shoot at Israeli civilians, which is completely unacceptable,” says Shafii. “And they put us Palestinian civilians in grave danger, because the Israelis shoot back.”

Why doesn’t he object? “They are armed,” says Shafii, “and they shoot at anyone who gets in their way.”

The father is holding the first photos of his newborn twins in his hands. He is worried about the rockets being fired at Ashkelon. He says that he would never have believed it possible that he could be indebted to the Israelis for anything. “What a confusing situation,” he says.

(Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan)

 

SAVING BABY MOHAMMED

Hamas-Israel: a tiny ray of hope
By David Byers, at the Erez crossing
The Times (of London)
March 11, 2008

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3522980.ece

It is one of the world’s most volatile borders, separating the Middle East’s most bitter of enemies. Erez – the only pedestrian crossing into Israel for 1.4 million Palestinians crammed into the Gaza Strip – has been largely sealed off since Hamas’ takeover last summer, leaving its residents in an increasingly desperate plight. But the rescue of one, dying, Palestinian baby at the concrete fortress last week threw a ray of light on a little-known humanitarian agreement between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, at a time when they are locked in a state of conflict.

In a delicate operation, which I witnessed, eight-day-old Mohammed Amin El-Taian was carried across no man’s land on a stretcher at midday by a doctor from the Gazan ministry of health and handed to his counterpart from Magen David Adom (MDA), the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross.

Mohammed – crippled by a chest infection, and heart and gastric problems – was then transferred along with his mother to the Dana specialist children’s hospital in Tel Aviv, where he was to get the emergency treatment needed to save his life. If he had been left at the under-resourced Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where he was born, Mohammed’s chances of survival would have been extremely slim.

The decision to allow him to cross the border-fortress – at the point where Hamas snipers fired at Israeli soldiers only days before – is part of a little-known humanitarian deal between health officials of the two enemies, in which a small number of the neediest patients in Gaza given emergency treatment in Israel’s more advanced hospitals.

Such co-operation is now almost the only dialogue taking place between Gaza-based Palestinians and Israelis, at a time when rocket attacks by Hamas – and bloody reprisals by Israel – dominate the headlines.

One Israeli medic told me that one of Hamas’ border-guards at Gaza, known as Ahmed, had struck up a working relationship with his Israeli counterpart to ensure transfers such as that which saved little Mohammed could take place.

“We co-operate every day. He rings me in the middle of the night, he has my mobile number. Despite the situation, we work together,” the medic says. As a result, MDA claims that around five patients a week are transferred between the two camps.

Yet human-rights groups claim that Mohammed is one of the lucky ones, and that the successful implementation of this little-known agreement is rare. One such group, the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, last November lodged an application with the country’s high court on behalf of 11 seriously ill Gazans, who it said were denied visas to leave the territory for undefined security reasons. And last May, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim Mansour, 23, a Palestinian from Gaza, died after waiting five days for an emergency medical permit that Israel had repeatedly denied on “security” grounds.

Further claims made by human-rights groups – denied by Israel – state that some needy Palestinians are having their applications revoked because they refuse to become agents for Israeli security forces.

In particular, the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs cited the case of Bassam al-Wahidi, a 28-year-old journalist from the Gaza town of Rafah, who travelled to Erez requiring an eye operation. Al-Wahidi claimed that, once at the border, he was interrogated by Israeli agents, and asked to become an informer. After refusing, he was turned back and has failed to get the permit and treatment to save his eyesight. The Physicians for Human Rights group says that this practice has been reported before, and they have complained about it.

Israel says it helps the patients it can under the terms of the deal. However, it adds that it is restricted by legitimate security concerns at a time when Hamas-affiliated militants fire around a dozen rockets a day into the Jewish state’s border towns of Sderot and Ashkelon, near to Erez. Hamas, which does not recognise the existence of Israel, also claimed responsibility for the shooting of eight students at a religious school in Jerusalem last week.

Israeli border guards at Erez also tightened restrictions after a recent Hamas-led co-ordinated breach against one of the two other Gaza borders, the Rafah crossing with Egypt, which led to Palestinians flooding over the border. Standing in no-man’s land with baby Mohammed, Yonni Yogadovsky, of the Israeli MDA, said that the child’s transfer showed a glimpse of Israeli-Palestinian co-operation that should provide some hope even at a time of conflict, in the region.

“Nobody talks about it, people only ever talk about the violence,” he says. “But this is an established procedure and people from the hospitals [in Gaza] and Hamas know about it.

“We are neighbours and it happens that we don’t like each other very much. But when it comes to emergencies that save human lives, this is beyond political disputes.”

Despite doubts over how effectively this extraordinary agreement has been implemented, for baby Mohammed – being treated by his country’s historical enemies – this smallest of compromises between the most bitter of foes is likely to have saved his life.

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HA’ARETZ COLUMNIST: TO THE WESTERNER WHO “UNDERSTANDS” THE TERRORIST

To the Westerner who “understands” the terrorist
By Bradley Burston
Ha’aretz
March 7, 2008

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/960745.html

Spare us the explanations.

Spare us the learned, sociology-drenched justifications.

Spare us the reasons why you “get” Palestinians when they gun Jews down in cold blood.

Spare us the chapter and verse on how the plight of the Palestinians is at the root of Islamic terrorism the world over, and if the Palestinians were to receive full justice, Islamic terrorism would pass from the world.

Spare us.

You may well believe, with the blind faith of the hopeful and the fear-stricken, that when these people are through with the Jews, they won’t come for you.

Think again.

Spare us the post-modernism and the radical chic and the guff.

Open your eyes.

When a gunman walks into a Jewish religious seminary at the main entrance to that part of Jerusalem which has been Jewish since 1948, and which was stolen from no one, pay attention.

When he opens fire on religious students hunched over books in a library, firing and firing until blood soaks holy book bindings and open pages of Talmud and the whole of the floor, pay close attention to the reactions of the self-styled people of faith who run Hamas.

Spare us the conclusion that the only reason Hamas kills Jews, and that its underlying motive for encouraging others to do the same, is to force Israel to agree to a cease-fire.

Spare us the “Israel’s policies are responsible for the bloodshed” and “the seminary is, after all, an ideological bastion and symbol of the religious right” and all the other scholarly, arrogant, condescending and amoral ways of saying “they had it coming to them.”

Spare us the understanding for the motivations of the mass murderer who kills with God on his lips. Spare us the understanding of the words of the Hamas official who says that after all the Israeli killings of Palestinians, the Jerusalem killings are “our only joy.”

Spare us the sight of the thanksgiving prayers for the great victory, prayers that began in Gaza City mosques just after the slaughter of the Jews. Spare us the sight of the sweets being handed out by little children to motorists in passing cars in the Strip, sweets to celebrate the young Jews dead on the floor, the young Jews dead at their desks, the Jews killed for the crime of being Jews in that place of study and worship.

Spare us the righteousness of those who condemned Baruch Goldstein for entering a holy place with an assault rifle and murdering Palestinians, but who can understand why a Palestinian might do the very same thing,

Open your eyes.

Last week, when Israeli forces drove into Gaza, and some 120 Palestinians were killed, many of them were gunmen, but with children making up another sixth of the total, one grieving father spoke with quiet eloquence, saying “Other places in the world, when this happens, there is a great outcry. When this happens here, the world is silent. No one cares.”

He’s right. The world has grown content to let Palestinians die. The reason is not simple callousness. And it is not, as Hamas proclaims to its followers in Gaza, that the Jews control the world media and world finance, and thus Western government as well.

The reason is terrorism.

The world has grown weary of the Islamist’s creed, that only the armed struggle can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the only proper resolution is the end of Israel.

Even the Israeli left, which for decades championed the Palestinian with courage and determination, has, in large part, had it with the Palestinians. The reason is terrorism. The reason is murder. The reason is that the rulers of Gaza are people who see an intrinsic value in the killing of Jews for the sake of increasing the number of dead Jews in the world.

The rulers of Gaza cannot bring themselves to accept the concept of sharing the Holy Land with the Jews.

The best that the rulers of Gaza can do, is to bring an end to hope among their own people and ours as well.

They believe that the Jewish state is temporary, and that they Jews will soon abandon it to Islamic rule.

After all this time, you’d think they’d know the Jews a little better.

 

“HISTORY HAS SHOWN TIME AND AGAIN THAT MILITARY CONFRONTATION DOES WORK”

Israel’s No-Win Strategy
By Daniel Doron
The Wall Street Journal
March 8, 2008

The massacre of rabbinical students Thursday at a Jerusalem seminary highlights the failure of the powerful Israeli military to stop the assaults of Palestinian terrorists. It also reveals serious deficiencies in Israel’s strategy and tactics.

These have cost Israel dearly. They also harm the world-wide war on terror, of which Israel is on the forefront.

You can’t stop every suicide bomber of course. But for seven years now, Hamas terrorists have been rocketing southern Israeli towns from Gaza. Israeli governments headed by Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert have all vowed to put an end to the attacks. Despite Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, its governments have failed to do so.

Israel has scored some impressive victories in its fight against terrorism, especially from attacks originating in the West Bank. Numerous attempts by Fatah and Hamas to dispatch bombers into Israel were frustrated by a combination of excellent intelligence, daring special operations, and the ability of the army to enter Palestinian-ruled areas in hot pursuit or for preemptive strikes. Not so in Gaza.

There, a radicalized population has elected a Hamas government determined to eliminate Israel. After Israel unconditionally retreated from the northern Gaza strip -- hoping that the Palestinians would concentrate on state building -- the territory was immediately used for attacks on Israel. Why has Israel failed to stop them?

Governments here -- behemoths whose budgets consume about a half the nation’s $160 billion GDP -- are generally dysfunctional. They are hamstrung by constant internal squabbles and Byzantine bureaucracies. As became evident as early as the 1973 Yom Kippur War, their dysfunction has infected the Israeli defense establishment. In that year, a totally surprised Israeli cabinet and military leadership reacted with confusion and ineptness that almost led to the country’s ruin. The recent Winograd Commission of Inquiry report on the Second Lebanon War indicates that these faults are endemic to the over-centralized yet disorganized Israeli system of governance.

More than in most countries, Israeli politicians are preoccupied with political machinations designed to buy support from powerful interest groups by distributing government largesse. This causes not only the factionalization of politics and growing corruption, but consumes time and energy that leadership should use to address life and death issues. As the Winograd Commission attested, Mr. Olmert’s government initiated the Second Lebanon War without proper discussion or preparation. During the relatively long war government and military leaders failed to define their objectives. They issued vague and contradictory directives, causing repeated failures and unnecessary loss of life. Only the exceptional bravery and tenacity of Israel’s soldiers and field commanders and of the rocketed Israeli population saved the day.

Israeli governments have done little to stop the massive rearmament of Hamas in Gaza with Iranian weapons, bought with Saudi money and transported into Gaza with the connivance of Egypt. Israel did not even press its great ally, the U.S., to lean on Egypt and put an end to this flagrant violation of its peace agreement with Israel -- a peace agreement for which Egypt is rewarded by billions in U.S. aid.

But the worst failures stem from adoption of a no-win strategy. Many in Israel’s top political and military echelons have convinced themselves that terrorism cannot be defeated by force, that to stop it one must compromise and accept some of its demands. But how do you “compromise” with a terrorist organization sworn to destroy you?

The Israeli leadership’s lack of determination to win, and its chronic political weakness, have prevented it from resisting pressure from Europe and certain American circles (mostly the State Department and the CIA) to accommodate Hamas and strengthen the allegedly peace-loving Palestinian Authority. Amazingly, Israel keeps supplying Hamas, for “humanitarian reasons,” with subsidized electricity and materiel including the steel and chemicals needed to produce the rockets that attack it. It keeps providing money and weapons to prop up the hopelessly corrupt Palestinian Authority.

So what is the one strategy that can win? History has shown time and again that military confrontation does work. Israel could achieve military victory by eliminating or incarcerating Hamas’s leadership, not two or three a month (so that they are replaceable) but a few hundred at once. By breaking its command structure and its logistical apparatus, Hamas can be rendered inoperative.

But for this to happen, Israel and Western democracies must treat the terrorists’ mortal challenge as a war for survival, not as a series of skirmishes. And in war, you must fight to win, by all traditional means.

ARTICLE

“DOES YOUR ORDER INCLUDE THE BODIES OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN FRANCE’S CEMETERIES?”

The Myth of America’s Unpopularity
By Michael Gerson
The Washington Post
March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The one goal that unites and explains the Democratic approach to foreign policy is this: America must try – urgently and desperately – to be more popular in the world.

“The world was with us after 9/11,” explains Hillary Clinton. “We have so squandered that good will and we’ve got to rebuild it.” Barack Obama has said that the “single most important issue” of the current election is picking a leader who can “repair all the damage that’s been done to America’s reputation overseas.”

This argument depends on three premises – all of which are questionable.

First, listening to the Democrats, one would assume that America in the Bush era is universally despised. The reality is more complicated.

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the United States is very popular in sub-Saharan Africa, where President Bush has just finished a triumphant tour. (People in Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Ghana have a more favorable view of America than Americans do.) India and Japan are strongly pro-American. America remains popular in parts of “new Europe,” as well as in Mexico, Peru and even Venezuela – though there has been some erosion in both Latin America and Europe in recent years.

Pew’s general conclusion is that anti-Americanism has grown “deeper but not wider.” And it is deepest in “old Europe” and the broader Middle East.

The second premise of this Democratic argument is that American popularity in these regions could be increased, easily and permanently, by overturning Bush policies.

It is worth noting that American relations with European governments have rebounded strongly in the last few years with the elections of Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France. And the next president, Republican or Democrat, is likely to close Guantanamo and sign legislation to restrict American carbon emissions, mollifying two justified European criticisms.

Yet the tensions between American and European worldviews ultimately have little to do with specific policies. Europe is an increasingly pacifist continent – which is an improvement upon its bloody history, but a source of inevitable tension with a superpower that must occasionally enforce world order. European governments generally view international institutions as a way to constrain American power. Any future American president will continue to view those institutions as a way to amplify our influence in keeping the peace.

And the broader Middle East is an even more difficult case. A close look at the Pew poll shows that appeasing public opinion in this region would require not merely leaving Iraq but also leaving Afghanistan, abandoning the war on terror and ending our support for Israel.

The third premise of the Democratic argument is that global popularity translates directly into global influence. Here the historical evidence is thin.

Few American presidents have enjoyed a warmer embrace than John Kennedy visiting France in June of 1961. French newspapers swooned at the first lady’s perfect French and the better Parisian shops sold silk scarves embroidered “Jackie.” But President Charles de Gaulle remained more interested in the cultivation of French self-esteem than in trans-Atlantic unity. Having withdrawn the French Mediterranean fleet from NATO in 1959, he later ordered the removal of NATO troops from French soil. President Lyndon Johnson (in one of his finest hours) instructed his secretary of state to ask de Gaulle: “Does your order include the bodies of American soldiers in France’s cemeteries?”

Few American presidents have been more reviled in Europe than Ronald Reagan, who responded to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 nuclear missiles by deploying Pershing II nuclear missiles. In West Germany, millions of people marched in protest. American soldiers were surrounded by hostile demonstrators shouting, “We don’t want you in our country.” But Reagan’s unpopular “cowboy” determination helped end the Cold War and lift the nuclear threat from Europe.

And we have seen a good example in our time. The January 2007 decision to surge American troops in Iraq was clearly at odds with world opinion. But retreating from Iraq in failure would have earned global contempt for American weakness instead of global popularity. And the turnaround in Iraq has restored at least some of our standing and leverage in the Middle East.

The real lesson in the years since 9/11 is different from what the Democratic candidates imagine: It is easy to be loved when you are a victim. It is harder to be popular when you act decisively to protect yourself and others.

A successful president should strive for America to be liked – and expect, on occasion, for America to be resented in a good cause.

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WHAT DOES “PROPORTIONATE” MEAN? INDISCRIMINATE TERROR AGAINST CIVILIAN POPULATIONS?

The Sderot Calculus
By Bret Stephens
The Wall Street Journal
February 26, 2008

The Israeli town of Sderot lies less than a mile from the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the intifada seven years ago, it has borne the brunt of some 2,500 Kassam rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian terrorists. Only about a dozen of these Kassams have proved lethal, though earlier this month brothers Osher and Rami Twito were seriously injured by one as they walked down a Sderot street on a Saturday evening. Eight-year-old Osher lost a leg.

It is no stretch to say that life in Sderot has become unendurable. Palestinians and their chorus of supporters – including the 118 countries of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, much of Europe, and the panoply of international aid organizations from the World Bank to the United Nations – typically reply that life in the Gaza Strip is also unendurable, and that Palestinian casualties greatly exceed Israeli ones. But this argument is fatuous: Conditions in Gaza, in so far as they are shaped by Israel, are a function of conditions in Sderot. No Palestinian Kassams (or other forms of terrorism), no Israeli “siege.”

SHOULD ISRAEL FIRE 2,500 ARTILLERY SHELLS AT RANDOM AGAINST CIVILIANS IN GAZA?

The more vexing question, both morally and strategically, is what Israel ought to do about Gaza. The standard answer is that Israel’s response to the Kassams ought to be “proportionate.” What does that mean? Does the “proportion” apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams – to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a “proportionate” Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams – an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?

Surely this isn’t what advocates of proportion have in mind. What they really mean is that Israel ought to respond with moderation. But the criteria for moderation are subjective. Should Israel pick off Hamas leaders who are ordering the rocket attacks? The European Parliament last week passed a resolution denouncing the practice of targeted assassinations. Should Israel adopt purely economic measures to punish Hamas for the Kassams? The same resolution denounced what it called Israel’s “collective punishment” of Palestinians. Should Israel seek to dismantle the Kassams through limited military incursions? This, too, has the unpardonable effect of resulting in too many Palestinian casualties, which are said to be “disproportionate” to the number of Israelis injured by the Kassams.

By these lights, Israel’s presumptive right to self-defense has no practical application as far as Gaza is concerned. Instead, Israel is counseled to allow goods to flow freely into the Strip, and to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas.

But here another set of considerations intrudes. Hamas was elected democratically and by overwhelming margins in Gaza. It has never once honored a cease-fire with Israel. Following Israel’s withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements from the Strip in 2005 there was a six-fold increase in the number of Kassam strikes on Israel.

THE HAMAS CHARTER IS EXPLICITLY ANTI-SEMITIC

Hamas has also made no effort to rewrite its 1988 charter, which calls for Israel’s destruction. The charter is explicitly anti-Semitic: “The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” (Article Seven) “In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad.” (Article 15) And so on.

It would seem perverse for Israeli taxpayers, including residents of Sderot, to feed the mouth that bites them. It would seem equally perverse for Israel merely to bide its time for an especially unlucky day – a Kassam hitting a busload of schoolchildren, for instance – before striking hard at Gaza. But unless Israel is willing to accept the military, political and diplomatic burdens of occupying all or parts of Gaza indefinitely, the effects of a major military incursion could be relatively short-lived. Israel suffered many more casualties before it withdrew from the Strip than it has since.

Perhaps the answer is to wait for a technological fix and, in the meantime, hope for the best. Israel is at work on a missile-defense program called “Iron Dome” that may be effective against Kassams, though the system won’t be in place for at least two years. It could also purchase land-based models of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, used by the U.S. to defend the Green Zone in Baghdad.

THE MEXICAN WAY

But technology addresses neither the Islamic fanaticism that animates Hamas nor the moral torpor of Western policy makers and commentators who, on balance, find more to blame in Israel’s behavior than in Hamas’s. Nor, too, would an Iron Dome or the Phalanx absolve the Israeli government from the necessity of punishing those who seek its destruction. Prudence is an important consideration of statesmanship, but self-respect is vital. And no self-respecting nation can allow the situation in Sderot to continue much longer, a point it is in every civilized country’s interest to understand.

On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson ordered Gen. John J. Pershing and 10,000 soldiers into Mexico for nearly a year to hunt Villa down, in what was explicitly called a “punitive expedition.” Pershing never found Villa, making the effort something of a failure. Then again, Villa’s raid would be the last significant foreign attack on continental U.S. soil for 85 years, six months and two days.

 

LIVING IN THE MOST HEAVILY BOMBED PLACE IN THE WORLD

Code Red in Sderot: Living in the most heavily bombed place in the world
By Philip Jacobson
The Mail on Sunday (UK)
February 15, 2008

* Click on the URL for pictures.

On a parched strip of the Israeli/Palestinian border, a dustbowl frontier town has a unique boast: per head of population, it is the most heavily bombed in the world. Philip Jacobson spends time in Sderot

A bright winter’s morning, and nothing is stirring in the barren stretch of no-man’s-land that separates the little Israeli town of Sderot from the turbulent Gaza Strip one mile away.

On the Palestinian side of the frontline, sunlight glints off the windscreen of a truck parked beside a crumbling farmhouse where the washing has been hung out to dry.

Twittering birds circle above a nearby reservoir. A gust of wind sends dust devils whirling across the sandy track used by Israeli army jeeps for round-the-clock border patrols.

I have been here before and I know what is about to happen. Nonetheless, my guide has insisted on talking me through the local ground rules again:

1. I am not to fasten my seat belt. This is the only place in Israel where seat belts are forbidden. Buckling up prevents drivers and their passengers getting out of a vehicle quickly.

2. I am not to play my car radio. It may drown out the warnings.

3. I am not to have a shower if there is nobody else in the house to hear the alarms. Last month, a woman who ignored this rule was washing her hair when she was blown off her feet.

4. Be extra vigilant when it’s misty. It can confuse the laser-activated warning systems.

And suddenly it comes, a noise like the slamming of a heavy door as a sleek, six-foot-long Qassam rocket bursts into the cloudless blue sky. Its trajectory is marked by a trail of white smoke as it curves towards the town. Almost simultaneously, sirens begin to wail.

A woman’s urgent voice repeats the words, “Tseva Adom, Tseva Adom,” over public address loudspeakers. In Hebrew this means, “Code Red”. It signifies a missile is on its way. Sderot’s jittery residents have no more than 15 seconds to take cover before the rocket hits.

On this occasion, they will have to wait there for a long time. For the next 72 hours Code Red alerts will sound almost continuously; Islamic militant groups in Gaza have begun raining the first of more than 100 rockets on to the town during a terrifying three-day attack.

Most miss or fizzle out. But there’s always a few that find a target.

LATER, HE WILL TELL ME HOW HE FOUND HER COVERED IN BLOOD

The streets empty as families hunker down under the bombardment. The emergency services can barely cope.

One veteran paramedic, Haim Ben-Shimol, is on duty when he hears that his five-year-old granddaughter, Lior, has been wounded as she and her mother scrambled for cover.

Later, he will tell me how he found her covered in blood. “I had to wash her face to see where she was hurt, then I bandaged her and raced to hospital in the ambulance,” he recalls.

Doctors removed shards of metal from Lior’s body and put a cast on her fractured arm and leg.

When the attack finally peters out, people emerge from the shelters, some deep in shock, to discover wrecked homes, shops and offices, freshly cratered streets and jagged lumps of shrapnel embedded in the concrete “life shields” that double as bus stops.

Miraculously, nobody has been killed. Yet, as they count their blessings, many residents wonder aloud how much longer they can endure life under fire in what some describe, with gallows humour, as “the biggest bull’s-eye on the map of Israel”.

Because of its proximity to the border and the concentration of Hamas-led amateur bomb-makers on the other side, Sderot has a unique civic claim: on a rocket-per-head-of-population basis, it is the most targeted town in Israel, indeed the world.

It is more than six years since the first rocket was launched from Gaza. Since then, well over 2,000 Qassams – named after a fiery Muslim preacher – have landed in or around the town killing 13 people (including four children) and injuring several dozen more.

Since the beginning of this year, at least 300 rockets have been fired.

TEN-YEAR-OLDS RECEIVE DAILY TRANQUILLISERS

Last Saturday, two brothers were badly wounded when a rocket caught them in the open in the centre of town. Eight-year-old Osher Twito lost a leg, and Rami, 19, suffered multiple shrapnel injuries.

To be sure, over the same six-year period, a lot more innocent blood has been shed in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other communities, as Palestinian suicide bombers strike at crowded buses, hotels and cafés.

Even the brief war in Lebanon during the summer of 2006 claimed the lives of some 40 Israeli civilians along the country’s northern border.

But beyond the grim arithmetic of body counts, Sderot is a special case because nowhere else in Israel do ordinary people face the draining pressure of coping day in, day out with the fear that a rocket could fall at any moment.

“Everybody here lives on the very edge of their nerves,” says Noam Bedein, a young Israeli journalist who moved to Sderot several years ago.

“The peak time for Qassam attacks is while people are going to and from work and at the beginning and end of school. Believe me, that really grinds you down, mentally and physically.”

While the psychological fall-out from the rocket attacks affects young and old, poor and prosperous alike, the cruellest impact has been on Sderot’s children.

A recent survey concluded that almost one-third of those aged between four and 18 now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, while many more exhibit the symptoms of severe anxiety and feelings of helplessness that warn of more serious problems to come.

The fact that ten-year-olds receive daily tranquillisers demonstrates how they are being robbed of a normal childhood.

ONLY IN SDEROT WILL YOU FIND SCHOOL RUNS CONDUCTED WITH MILITARY PRECISION

Only in Sderot will you find school runs conducted with military precision, as security guards rush children to and from coaches and parents’ cars at staggered intervals to guard against a Qassam falling among a crowd.

Such a disaster was narrowly averted late last year at the Haroeh School, a two-storey building covered by an enormous metal “umbrella” protecting the roof.

At 8am one day, as pupils were filing into the school for assembly, the Code Red alarm sounded. Footage shot by a video crew who happened to be there showed terrified children running for their lives towards the school entrance.

Seconds later a rocket slammed into a clump of trees beside the school, narrowly missing a kindergarten. “We just heard a big explosion next to us and the glass in the windows shattered,” says music teacher Asia Weissenberg.

Aware that Qassams are often fired in salvoes, she and colleagues quickly shepherded the shaken children into the school’s reinforced shelter with a minimum of fuss.

“They do get scared, of course,” Weissenberg says, “but if they can see that we are calm, that helps to reassure them.”

For many, this precarious existence has become too much: at least 3,000 of Sderot’s population of 24,000 have already left, most of them for good. Many more would do so if they could sell their houses.

The sensation of living in and moving about Sderot is unique. At the open-air market, there is none of the cheerful hubbub found in other Israeli towns, no blaring radios or raucous stallholders.

An underwear salesman who used a megaphone to advertise his bargains has been silenced by popular demand.

“Almost every time I come here, rockets have fallen really close,” says Esa, a nonchalant Bedouin youth presiding over a blanket spread with cut-price household goods.

CHILDREN SPRAYED WITH SHRAPNEL

The recent attacks, which knocked out power supplies, have done wonders for sales of torches and candles. “Nobody wants to have to shelter in the dark,” he says.

As we pass a square where people are taking advantage of unseasonally warm weather to dawdle over pavement coffee tables or gossip on park benches, Noam Bedein points out how nobody has strayed more than a few yards from the nearest shelter.

“Everyone’s nightmare is being caught in the open when the alarm sounds,” he observes. “You find yourself calculating how long it will take to get to safety.”

If you can’t make it, he advises, head for the nearest stairwell or kneel beside a solid-looking wall, your head down and hands behind your neck.

Since Qassams sometimes arrive in salvoes, it is risky to get up immediately after one has exploded.

Bedein explains how the Code Red system, triggered when a network of lasers detects the sudden increase in heat generated by a rocket launch, is by no means infallible.

In certain weather conditions, particularly heavy ground mist, attacks can go undetected.

In May last year, 32-year-old Shirel Feldman died of her wounds after a Qassam that fell without warning riddled her car with shrapnel.

At the height of the recent three-day bombardment, Shlomi Argon’s house was hit just as the alarm began to sound. His wife and a five-year-old boy who had been playing with his son were both sprayed with shrapnel.

“Neither was badly hurt, as it turns out, but it’s like Russian roulette around here,” Argon recalls shakily. “Who knows if we’ll be so lucky next time?”

“PEOPLE ARE SMOKING LIKE CHIMNEYS”

You can tell from the pile of cigarette butts in Dr Adriana Katz’s ashtray that it has been another difficult day at the Hosen Centre, where she is in charge of treating victims of shock in Sderot.

Every Qassam attack brings a batch of new patients to her cluttered office, many in tears, shaking uncontrollably, barely able to get their words out.

A middle-aged woman in the waiting room sits with her head in her hands, legs trembling.

When I met her last year, Dr Katz, a striking figure with a mane of grey hair and rings on every finger, confided gloomily that the mental-health situation in Sderot was deteriorating fast.

Today, she says, it is “catastrophic and getting worse”.

The symptoms of distress don’t change, but become more intense with every direct hit. “Mobile phones start ringing after each attack and in this little place bad news spreads fast.”

The greatest challenge Dr Katz faces is preventing shock victims developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. “The text-book treatment is group therapy or one-on-one counselling that will prepare patients for a return to some sort of normality,” she says.

“But all we can do here is send people back to their houses and offices to await the next Qassam, which just creates fresh circles of despair.”

It’s hardly surprising, Dr Katz suggests, that many people in Sderot opt to get by on heavy doses of tranquillisers and “of course, smoking like chimneys”. (Israel’s ban on lighting up in public places is comprehensively flouted by the people of Sderot.)

Many of the mothers waiting to collect children from the school tell strikingly similar stories of regular nightmares, bed-wetting and a pervasive sense of insecurity caused by the attack.

Hava Gad’s son Yanai, nine, was a bright and forward child, out of nappies before his second birthday, but he is now paralysed by fear whenever the Code Red alert sounds and insists on sharing his parents’ bed.

“Imagine what that does for a normal married relationship. He won’t leave the house without us, even to play with friends next door, because he thinks a rocket will hit him.”

“MY SON BEGAN TO HYPERVENTILATE, THEN HE SOILED HIMSELF”

During a recent attack, a Qassam exploded not far from Gad’s home. “My son began to hyperventilate, then he soiled himself,” she recalls. “That happens almost every time now.”

Yanai’s anxiety was compounded when another rocket hit the factory where his father, Tsfania, works. “He worries about being too far away from the protected safe room in our house or something terrible happening at his school.”

Unsurprisingly, Gad, 42, has herself been affected by the constant tension and uncertainty, taking Valium regularly and attending Dr Katz’s clinic for therapy.

Dina Hoori, 44, head teacher at the local primary school for the past ten years, knows all too well how the dangers affect Sderot families.

“It’s particularly tragic that parents often feel they’ve failed children because they can’t do anything to stop the rockets,” she says.

Located in an area where rockets have struck quite often, the school is only partially protected against Qassam attacks and the playground is usually out of bounds.

“The Government won’t provide funding to reinforce the entire structure,” Hoori observes with a grimace.

On one occasion, a Qassam fell close by just as the school opened in the morning, injuring one of the youngest girls.

“Happily she’s back with us, but you feel it’s only a matter of time before there’s a direct hit when the children are in the open.”

“MAMA, I THINK I WANT TO DIE”

Another head teacher, Liora Fima, finds it heartbreaking to watch pupils gradually becoming “normalised by terror”, seemingly resigned to a life under the rockets.

“One five-year-old girl who suffered panic attacks told her mother, ‘Mama, I think I want to die.’ The poor woman was crying her eyes out in her child’s classroom.”

I asked Fima if she ever spoke to her pupils about the suffering of school children in Gaza, whose lives are constantly distorted by bloody clashes between rival Palestinian factions and terrifying raids by Israeli troops.

She was silent for a moment, then said: “I know there are good people in Gaza who dream of peace as we do, but their leaders are fanatics, happy to sacrifice the lives of their own children. The school books over there are full of hatred for the Jews.”

In the courtyard of Sderot’s police station, where scores of rocket casings are stacked on shelves, each numbered and dated, a young woman officer of Ethiopian descent displays the scorched and twisted remains of a Qassam launched the previous day.

Sara Vavshet points out the slogan in Arabic painted on its fuselage, explaining that “each of the terrorist organisations uses its own colours and emblems, and they sometimes send threatening messages in Hebrew” (the Hamas faction that now rules Gaza favours the red, green and white of the Palestinian flag).

Vavshet was friendly with the families of two children, aged two and four, who were killed by Hamas rockets within a few days of each other in 2004.

Most Qassams are assembled in Gaza’s little machine shops, using lengths of iron drainpipes or lampposts (including, it has been rumoured, a consignment donated by the EU) with crude metal fins soldered on to provide stability in flight.

Propelled by a combustible fuel blend of oil, raw alcohol, sugar and fertiliser, early models had a maximum range of five miles and packed just one pound of explosives to scatter the payload of nuts, bolts and scrap metal.

Launched from metal racks and lacking a guidance system, they were highly inaccurate, but served the purpose of keeping Sderot’s residents permanently on edge.

According to journalist Noam Bedein, the rockets’ destructive capacity has steadily increased over the past couple of years.

“We know the terrorists experiment continually with fuel mixes and shrapnel payloads. That’s already led to the development of missiles that pack more than 20lb of explosive and can travel more than 15 miles.”

“HAMAS LEARN FROM ISRAELI RADIO REPORTS AND THEN ADJUST THE ANGLE OF LAUNCH NEXT TIME”

Several such rockets have already struck the industrial city of Ashkelon, which contains one of Israel’s largest oil terminals.

“Qassams are also becoming more accurate,” Bedein says. “The militants learn from Israeli radio reports where a particular rocket has landed, then adjust the angle of launch next time.”

Despite heavy electronic surveillance of the border zone and regular strikes, Israel’s military still cannot prevent hit-and-run attacks.

From a vantage point on the edge of Sderot, Bedein once watched a Qassam team setting up on the roof of a Palestinian apartment building.

“Those guys were really slick,” he recalls. “By the time I heard the explosions, they were already making a getaway.” After ducking into a police station during yet another Code Red, I visit a family living nearby whose home was hit the previous day.

“Luckily we were at a friend’s party when it happened,” Shlomo Ben-Zaken, 46, tells me, “but the effect this had on my son Eliran was disastrous.”

A gangling, expressionless 22-year-old, Eliran seems to be lost in a world of his own, padding silently behind us from room to room as we inspect the damage.

“He had psychiatric problems before the Qassams began to fall, but over the past 18 months he has become deeply depressed. He spends all his time on the computer and is scared stiff of leaving the house.”

A TREASURED MANCHESTER UNITED REPLICA SHIRT

Encouraged by his father, Eliran produces a treasured Manchester United replica shirt, whispering something in Hebrew.

“He wants to know if you can help him attend a game at Old Trafford.” For 15 years, Ben-Zaken worked side-by-side with Palestinians in Gaza’s industrial zone, making several close friends.

One saved his life when he fell into a diabetic coma. Terrorist attacks ended cross-border economic co-operation, but Ben-Zaken still keeps in touch by mobile phone. “They’re ordinary working guys, just like me, and they also suffer when Israel retaliates.”

With few exceptions, Sderot residents believe that their Government couldn’t care less about their plight.

“If Qassams started hitting Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it would be a national emergency,” says one shopkeeper, whose business is clearly failing. The politicians drop in for a quick visit, tell us to stay brave and resolute, then disappear.

“They don’t want to know about the 800 houses that still lack properly protected safe rooms, or the endless problems people have claiming compensation for rocket damage.”

When the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, came to town in his armoured limousine last month, accompanied by TV cameras, he was greeted by posters declaring: “Olmert’s Government. No Security. No Protection. You’ve Failed. Go Home.”

Yet for all that, something akin to the spirit of the London Blitz persists in Sderot, whether it is the elderly Russian immigrants drinking tea in the cafés and insisting that they will stay put, or the proprietor of the Shufan Ladies Hair Salon, whose latest creation resembles a Qassam rocket.

One afternoon while I was in Sderot, a battered truck pulled up in the town centre and disgorged several Orthodox Jews in their trademark long black coats and broad brimmed hats.

A sound system was quickly erected and started blasting out Israeli folk songs at top volume while they capered around on the pavement, curly side locks swinging.

Pausing for breath, their leader told me that it was their mission to bring a little light relief to Sderot’s residents.

“Aren’t you worried that the music is so loud you could miss a Red Alert?” I asked. He smiled broadly, then said: “We leave that in the hands of the Almighty.”

And then there is the mayor, Eli Moyal, a fast-talking lawyer who was born and bred in the town and likes to recall that when he took the job a decade ago, “I thought I’d be dealing with stuff like schools, leisure centres and rubbish collection.”

An accomplished self-publicist, Moyal announced his resignation last December in protest against Government inaction, then allowed himself to be persuaded to stay.

He has staged “Solidarity with Sderot” demonstrations all over Israel, and once led a march of residents to the border with the Gaza Strip to brandish mocked-up Qassams at the Palestinian side.

When a TV reporter informed him that Hamas leaders had threatened to drive the Jews out of Sderot, he seized the microphone and announced: “I am Eli Moyal, looking straight into the eyes of the terrorists to tell them that we’ve been standing firm against their rockets for the past seven years.

“We will do so for the next seven hundred.”

 

GAZA CHRISTIANS ON VERGE OF BEING DRIVEN OUT BY HAMAS

“Endangered” Gaza Christians mull flight amid deaths, firebombs
By Daniel Williams
Bloomberg news agency
Feb. 26, 2008

The stone walls of St. Porphyrius church in Gaza were raised in the fourth century, a reminder of Christianity’s long role in the Mediterranean city’s history.

The saga may be coming to an end. Christians, a minority of 3,000 among the Gaza Strip’s 1.2 million Muslims, are increasingly menaced by Islamic fundamentalists in this besieged Palestinian territory. Christians say they are on the verge of being driven out.

“Never in Palestinian history did we feel endangered until now,” said Archimandrite Artemios, the Greek Orthodox priest who heads St. Porphyrius. “We face the question of whether we are part of this community or not.”

Insecurity intensified last June when Hamas, the Muslim-based party at war with Israel, ousted the secular Fatah party, which favors peace negotiations, from control of Gaza. Fatah continues to control the West Bank.

While there are few indications Hamas itself is trying to intimidate Christians, the change brought to the surface underground Muslim groups that are actively hostile to Christians, said Hamdi Shaqura, 46, an official with the independent Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

“One problem is one that affects all: a state of lawlessness that lets extremism raise its head,” Shaqura said.

On Feb. 15, arsonists firebombed a library operated by the Young Men’s Christian Association and destroyed 10,000 books, police and YMCA officials said. Last fall, kidnappers killed a Christian bookstore owner and the shop was blown up twice. In August last year, vandals damaged a Catholic church and school.

UNDER THREAT

Christianity, along with other minority religions, is under threat in several Middle Eastern countries. In Iraq, Christian churches and residents suffered assaults in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul since the March 2003 U.S. invasion, and thousands fled to Syria and Jordan.

Against the backdrop of political turmoil in Lebanon, Maronite Christians are migrating. In Egypt, Copts, an ancient Christian denomination, complain of discrimination. Public Christian worship is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, where foreign workers have been jailed for holding prayer services in private homes, according to Saudi Arabian press accounts.

According to a 2006 survey carried out by the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, the West Bank’s Christian population has grown little in recent decades: from about 40,000 in 1967 to an estimated 45,800 in 2006.

PHYSICAL ISOLATION

In Gaza, Christians and Muslims share a walled-off, physical isolation from the outside world, unemployment over 30 percent and anxiety about periodic Israeli armed assaults. Israel has sealed off Gaza in its effort to contain Hamas and keep it from launching rockets at southern Israeli towns.

John Holmes, United Nations undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and relief coordination, said during a Feb. 16 visit to Gaza that 80 per cent of residents depend on food aid.

“If the current state of affairs continues, there is a real risk that what is left of the Christian Palestinian community will opt to go somewhere else, ending centuries of indigenous Christian presence in that part of Palestine,” said Bernard Sabella, a sociology professor at Bethlehem University.

Christian fears, and attacks on Christian property, pre-date Hamas, said Artemios, 31, the priest at St. Porphyrius.

Street gun battles between Hamas backers and Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, created a climate of anarchy even before the takeover, he said. Periodic Israeli embargoes on the Gaza Strip also occurred under Fatah rule.

UNEMPLOYMENT

“The lack of work has long been the main problem,” said Artemios. “If young people get out, they don’t come back.”

The Oct. 7 murder of Rami Ayyad, 30, who operated the Palestinian Bible Society Bookstore in Gaza, was the first time that a Christian was killed for religious reason, Artemios said. Five Christian families have fled to the West Bank since, he noted.

Three months before Ayyad’s death, a pair of bearded men warned the bookseller, who was a Baptist, to convert to Islam or die, said his mother, Anisa Boutros Francis, 55.

“On the day he was killed, he called home and told his wife, `I’m busy with some people. I will be late home,”‘ Boutros Francis said. “That was the last we heard, until the next day when his body was found.”

Ayyad’s body was punctured by stab wounds and bullet holes. No one claimed responsibility for his death. After four months, Gaza authorities have found no suspects, said police spokesman Islam Shahwan.

“Before, Israel was the only enemy. Palestinians were together,” said Ayyad’s mother. “Now, you don’t know who is who.”

Names of freelance fundamentalist groups roaming Gaza include Sword of Righteousness and Sword of Islam, said Shaqura, the human-rights worker.

Whoever is at fault, the bonds linking Christians to Gaza are breaking, Artemios said. He observed that, according to legend, the old columns in his church were from a temple destroyed by Samson after his haircut at the hands of Delilah. “The edifice of tolerance is crashing down over our heads,” he said.

 

AL-QAEDA INFILTRATES GAZA WITH HELP OF HAMAS, SAYS ABBAS

Al-Qaeda has infiltrated Gaza with help of Hamas, says Abbas
By James Hider in Jerusalem
The Times (of London)
February 28, 2008

Al-Qaeda militants have infiltrated the Palestinian territories with help from Hamas, according to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President.

The charges are the most serious yet in the war of words between Mr Abbas, who controls the West Bank, and Hamas, whose Islamist guerrillas expelled his Fatah-dominated security force from the Gaza Strip last summer.

“Al-Qaeda is present in Gaza and I’m convinced that they [Hamas] are their allies,” said Mr Abbas in an interview with al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. “I can say without doubt that al-Qaeda is present in the Palestinian territories and that this presence, especially in Gaza, is facilitated by Hamas.”

Israel has long accused al-Qaeda of infiltrating the Palestinian territories. The Israeli army’s intelligence chief said this week that more al-Qaeda members had entered the Gaza Strip after Hamas blew up the wall on the Egyptian border in January.

Mr Abbas’s comments were the first time that such a senior Palestinian statesman has added his weight to the charges.

The accusation came as Hamas fired rockets into a southern Israeli college campus yesterday, killing an Israeli man. Israeli forces carried out a series of strikes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, killing at least seven suspected militants, including several Hamas senior commanders. Last night Israeli jets struck the offices of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister, and the nearby premises of his interior ministry. He was not there at the time.

Hamas, a nationalist Islamist organisation whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, has been at pains to distance itself publicly from the fanatical al-Qaeda. “There is no truth in these allegations,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman, in turn accusing Mr Abbas – regarded as an Israeli stooge for his faltering peace negotiations with Jerusalem – of “seeking to mobilise international opinion against Hamas”.

Last year a group calling itself the Army of Islam kidnapped Alan Johnston, a BBC reporter, in Gaza and held him for more than three months while claiming to have links to Osama bin Laden’s organisation. The kidnapping took place before Hamas seized control in June, and the Islamist organisation – which had previously conducted anti-Israeli operations with the Army of Islam – forced it to release Johnston.

Hamas said that the Army of Islam had been financed by Muhammad Dahlan, the hated Fatah security chief in Gaza, who is close to Mr Abbas.

In January, another group calling itself the Army of Believers, Al-Qaeda in Palestine Organisation, ransacked the private American International School. A Christian bookseller was also recently murdered in Gaza, while a gunman shot up a YMCA centre. Western journalists have been alerted to possible kidnap threats.

Some independent analysts believe that al-Qaeda – losing ground in Iraq as local Sunni insurgents reject its ultra-violent tactics – may be seeking to establish itself in new areas. Osama bin Laden said that he was focusing on the protracted Israel-Palestinian conflict in comments disseminated on a jihadist website in December. “We will not recognise a state for the Jews, not even one inch of the land of Palestine. Blood calls for more blood and demolishing calls for further demolishing,” bin Laden said.

The man believed to be the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, this month described Israel as an “evil germ that has infected the body of the Umma [Islamic motherland] and must be extracted”.

 

BENNY MORRIS WRITES

The Irish Times
Letters Page
February 21, 2008

Madam, Israel-haters are fond of citing – and more often, mis-citing – my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections.

The Palestinian Arabs were not responsible “in some bizarre way” (David Norris, January 31st) for what befell them in 1948. Their responsibility was very direct and simple.

In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947 (No. 181), they launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.

It is true, as Erskine Childers pointed out long ago, that there were no Arab radio broadcasts urging the Arabs to flee en masse; indeed, there were broadcasts by several Arab radio stations urging them to stay put. But, on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22nd, plead with them to stay, to no avail.

Most of Palestine’s 700,000 “refugees” fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramla, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops.

The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became “refugees” – and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee) – was not a “racist crime” (David Landy, January 24th) but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.

There was no Zionist “plan” or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of “ethnic cleansing”. Plan Dalet (Plan D), of March 10th, 1948 (it is open and available for all to read in the IDF Archive and in various publications), was the master plan of the Haganah – the Jewish military force that became the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) – to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state. That’s what it explicitly states and that’s what it was. And the invasion of the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq duly occurred, on May 15th.

It is true that Plan D gave the regional commanders carte blanche to occupy and garrison or expel and destroy the Arab villages along and behind the front lines and the anticipated Arab armies’ invasion routes. And it is also true that mid-way in the 1948 war the Israeli leaders decided to bar the return of the “refugees” (those “refugees” who had just assaulted the Jewish community), viewing them as a potential fifth column and threat to the Jewish state’s existence. I for one cannot fault their fears or logic.

The demonisation of Israel is largely based on lies – much as the demonisation of the Jews during the past 2,000 years has been based on lies. And there is a connection between the two.

I would recommend that the likes of Norris and Landy read some history books and become acquainted with the facts, not recycle shopworn Arab propaganda. They might then learn, for example, that the “Palestine War” of 1948 (the “War of Independence,” as Israelis call it) began in November 1947, not in May 1948. By May 14th close to 2,000 Israelis had died – of the 5,800 dead suffered by Israel in the whole war (ie almost 1 per cent of the Jewish population of Palestine/Israel, which was about 650,000).

Yours, etc,
Prof. BENNY MORRIS, Li-On, Israel.
February 21, 2008