Archive for December, 2009
It should have been expected! Israel removed a number of check-points on the roads to make life easier for the Arab population in the territories, so they exploited that, drove a car next to an Israeli one and shot and murdered an innocent civilian driver, Rabbi Meir Avshalom Hai. Many blamed the removal of West Bank roadblocks for the attack. According to a report, one of our ministers had claimed “past experience shows that the removal of roadblocks as part of the easements granted to Palestinians has led to attempts to carry out terror attacks against Jews.” And this is just one example.
But that wasn’t the end. Our forces through underground means, discovered who the perpetrators of this murder were and went to Nablus to arrest them. The three men refused to surrender, and were shot. Many weapons were found in their building, amongst them the gun used for shooting the rabbi. And now as always, Israel is blamed for shooting them, wheras no voice was raised when they shot the Israeli.
Yesterday evening, the cabinet held long talks on the proposed Gilad Shalit (our kidnapped soldier by the Hamas organisation) swap, and senior defense officials and IDF officers admitted that a mass release of security prisoners to the West Bank would give Hamas a substantial boost and create major operational challenges and danger for the State of Israel. One of the main issues that reportedly remains at the core of the cabinet’s debate is whether Israel will allow some of the released terrorists, many of them real cold-blooded murderers, to return to the West Bank. Hamas would naturally want some prisoners - particularly the senior ones - to return to the West Bank, where they would likely try and rebuild the terrorist group’s infrastructure, which has been significantly damaged by continuous IDF operations in recent years. “A massive release to the West Bank could alter the balance,” said one IDF officer. And as before, no decision has yet been made. It’s evidently up to Prime Minister Natanyahu to decide what to do with those terrorist prisoners, a difficult ruling if ever there was one. Maybe today we’ll know more.
And now for something different. I’ll write about a local but humane deed which occured a few days ago. During the Hanukah week, when schools were closed and certain places of work sent their workers on holiday, a family with a number of children went on an excursion in one of the forests near Jerusalem. Suddenly they noticed that one of their sons, an 8 year old boy suffering from autism, was missing.
Posted in Life in Israel, Observations, Palestinian conflict, State of Israel, anti-semitism | 
Tags: Auschwitz sign stolen, bad, Gilad Shalit, good, Prisoner swap, recent events, the ugly
I have already mentioned Professor Ada Yonath who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry before in a previous blog, but a few days ago she actually received the prize in Stockholm in a festive ceremony attended by the Swedish royal family. Yonath received the golden Nobel medal from the hands of King Carl XVI Gustaf himself, to the sounds of a trumpet and thunderous applause. Yonath, born in Jerusalem 1939, is the first Israeli woman to win the prize.We are all very proud of her in Israel, and I especially so, not only for her academic achievements, but also for her great sene of humour. In an interview with an Israeli reporter she described how she had been taught how to behave at the ceremony - how to bow, to whom to bow and things like that, and she had us all laughing.
There is now apparently a European plan to unilaterally declare Jerusalem as the Capital of a Palestinian State.The plan will reportedly be proposed at a monthly meeting of European Union ministers today in Brussels by Sweden, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Since when do foreign countries decide the destiny of another State? And it seems that it is always Israel which has its fate decided on - no other country that I can think of.
Knesset members from across the political spectrum condemned this Swedish led plan by the European Union. “Jerusalem must never be divided, because it would only enhance the conflict and not solve it,” said Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, ” Dividing the capital would create a volcanic eruption that would not be easy to stop. Splitting sovereignty would bring about complete chaos,” he said, adding that Israel had proven that adherents of Judaism, Islam and Christianity could live together in Jerusalem.
In a speech last week, Minister of Defence Ehud Barak spoke about the extremely large number of long-range rockets which the Hizbulla terrorist organisation in Lebanon now posseses, and which they threaten to use against Israel. Barak warned that he holds the Lebanese government responsible for any kind of attack against our country, and that in the case of an attack we will respond accordingly. (And then, I’m sure, as always the world will blame only us).But talking of rockets, I must add that nearly every week a number of them are fired into Israeli territory from Gaza. Luckily they haven’t caused any damage or loss of life lately, but we can never know what will be the next time. Our usual reaction to these attacks nowadays is to bomb one of the many “smuggling tunnels” leading from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. If someone gets hurt, there is of course a great outcry from there - and even if no one is involved they pretend otherwise.