Around our troubled planet, constructing an apartment for a Jewish family in a vibrant veteran Jewish neighborhood – an indivisible part and parcel of the Jewish state’s capital – is decried as an unpardonable a sin against all the kind-heartedness and fair-mindedness that the international community purports to effuse.

This isn’t just the clichéd consensus of conformist correspondents and stale statesmen overseas. Sunshine friends too can’t resist the warm ambiance of group-think.

Irish filmmaker Nicky Larkin, for example, was feted here for his seemingly maverick pro-Israel stance. But now he finds that “increasingly difficult” because he “can’t accept the expansion of settlements on land the international community considers illegal, under the Fourth Geneva Convention.” In an op-ed for The Irish Independent, he just about equates settlement with suicide-bombing. Continue reading →

Jewish culpability always was – and apparently still remains – a key element in lending moral authority to any contentious cause.  Jews have known this for millennia but the dispiriting fact of our existence is that it still goes on, unabated, in the 21st century and that it motivates not only declared and implacable enemies but also forces of supposed enlightenment and liberality in the West.

As it was from time immemorial – it’s just not a marketable story without that eminently salient Jewish connection.

The blood-soaked internecine turmoil convulsing the Arab realm – from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia – has nothing to do with Jews, with Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement or with Israel, the Jewish state. The carnage is spawned by internal Arab ethnic, religious, clannish and political conflicts. Each side reinforces its case by recruiting throngs of volatile and violent demonstrators. This rent-a-mob fest is palmed off to clueless foreigners as democracy-in-action. Continue reading →

Was it really meaningless coincidence that just as an alarmed American administration closed down some 20 embassies throughout the Mideast – including the one in hardly unfriendly Tel Aviv – Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan delivered his opening court-martial statement?

Although superficially unconnected, these events are inextricably linked. Both expose the shoddy sham that US President Barack Obama struts out as enlightened policy. This should send cold shivers down the spines of those hoodwinked Israelis who still think Obama deserves even a modicum of our trust, to say nothing of actual sacrifice.

Hasan’s coldblooded murder in 2009 of 13 and the wounding of a further 32 underscores Obama’s obsessive obfuscation.

As Hasan callously mowed down fellow servicemen, he yelled Allahu Akhbar (God is great). It later transpired that long before Hasan launched his attack, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was aware that he maintained steady contact with terror mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki, inquiring, among others, about religious martyrdom. But forewarned isn’t necessarily forearmed. Following whatever logic, the authorities preferred to do nothing. Continue reading →

In practically two post-Oslo decades, Ramallah’s negotiators haven’t budged a fraction of a millimeter from their initial positions. In that span of unfortunate time, Israel had continually slipped back and now accedes to what would have been unthinkable for our mainstream in 1993.

The current two-state sine qua non – an ostensibly indispensable and unquestionable ingredient of any just Mideast deal – would have been a clear non-starter in Israeli public discourse pre-Oslo. But recurrent concerted assaults – both from overseas and from our domestic left-wing – on the very cornerstones of what were Israel’s self-evident truths, left us shaken and demoralized.

As a result, the traumatized citizenry began rationalizing the deviations from our fundamental postulates as feasible moves towards a doable peace. Israel’s Left pulled our entire political arena fitfully ever farther leftward. The more its predictions crashed against the hard wall of reality, the more the fantasy-merchants insisted that their premise wasn’t wrong but that we just didn’t give in enough. Continue reading →

Almost five years ago the foreign ministry, then under the aegis of Tzipi Livni, published the following official press release:

On 25 August 2008, Israel released 198 convicted Palestinian terrorists. Israel undertook this risky measure in the hope of promoting dialogue with the pragmatic Palestinians who reject terrorism and are engaged in diplomacy with Israel.

It is never easy for Israel to decide on the early release of convicted Palestinian terrorists. The issue is one fraught with emotional overtones, for Israelis in general and the families of terrorism victims in particular.

In these instances, Israel’s decision-makers have been faced with both political and moral dilemmas. All the while, they remain fully cognizant of the security risks posed to the Israeli public by such measures. Continue reading →