Without Portfolio - Without Sense

This weekend the Olmert government approved the appointment of its first Arab cabinet minister. What a magnanimous and grown-up gesture.

Something to get the doves in every Western legislature fluttering their wings in adulation.

The reward was not long in coming.

Here are pictures of the tomb of our prophet Samuel and the ancient Jewish cemetery in Hebron both of which were ransacked and desecrated the same weekend.

Ghaleb Majadle was appointed Minister without Portfolio.

He may not have a portfolio, but his people clearly do.

That is to treat every act of humanity, magnanimity and trust as a sign of weakness and an invitation to kill and maim Jews everywhere and erase every vestige of Jewish existence in the Land of Israel.

We gave them land and rifles in Oslo and they repaid us with an Intifada.

We gave them autonomy and they repaid us with suicide bombers.

We released their terrorists and they sent them right back to kill again.

We vacated South Lebanon and they filled it with Iranian missiles.

We gave up our prize-winning tomato fields in Gaza and they planted Katyushas.

We handed $100 million to Abas only to see him kowtowing to Hamas’s supreme leader.

We shipped Abbas 2,000 automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips and 2 million bullets across the Karni crossing only to hear him repeat the same incitement against Israel.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

With the help of the UN’s French peacekeepers, Hassan Nasrallah should easily be restocked with missiles and new human shields by this summer. When the new Iranian missiles start raining down, will our new Arab minister be welcome in the cabinet’s bunker?

Tommy and the Barbarians

Ranting in the Jerusalem Post, former Shinui party leader Tommy Lapid takes a swipe at the Jewish residents of Hebron over an altercation with their Arab neighbors. Entitled “Stop the Jewish barbarians in Hebron” the anti-religious Holocaust survivor compares our settlers to the neighbors who abused and spat at him as a child in pre-war Hungary.

I am sure the Lapid family never stabbed Hungarians in the streets, shot their infants with sniper rifles or sent little Tommy into school with a bomb strapped around his waist.

Lapid’s choice of the term ‘barbarians’ is rich since Hungarians trace their origins back to Attila the Hun in the 4th century.

In contrast, our valiant Jewish families in Hebron have returned to the hometown of Abraham and King David.

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Nobody There

My grandfather, of blessed memory, was a much loved rabbi in Pressburg (Bratislava) before he was taken to be killed in Auschwitz. After my father was liberated from the concentration camp after the war, he returned to find little left of the old home. But in the backyard he found the charred remains of weekly speeches my grandfather gave to his congregants on the weekly Torah reading.

These manuscripts are the only remnant of my grandfather’s life, and I like to read them on a Friday night at the Shabbat table.

This week’s Torah portion tells of the birth of Moses and how, as a young prince in Egypt, he saw an Egyptian beating a Jewish slave. The verse says: Moses “looked this way and that, and saw that there was no-one there” before killing the Egyptian and burying his body in the sand. The assumption was that Moses was just checking that there were no witnesses. Other commentators say that Moses was looking forward through the generations to check that the Egyptian he meant to kill would have no descendants of any importance to the world.

But you have to be a Holocaust Jew to come up with the commentary that my grandfather came up with for that week’s sermon.

He said simply that Moses “looked this way and that”, but could find no-one paying attention as the Jew was being beaten.

Just as is has been throughout the generations. When Jews are being beaten and oppressed, no-one pays any attention. Whether it is by the hand of Romans, Greeks, Crusaders or Cossacks. Whether in the fires of the Spanish Inquisition or the ovens of Nazi Germany it is always the same. You can look this way and that, but there is never anyone there. No-one to speak up for the Jews. No-one to defend us but ourselves.

And it’s every bit as true today as it was in those last precious weeks of my grandfather’s life as a free man and a leader of a once thriving community.

A community which was reduced to ashes.

Because, no matter which way they turned.

There was no-one.

And there never will be.

Failure is the only option

It’s reported that PA chairman Abbas may be proposing a new idea to Condoleeza Rice on her imminent visit to the region. That a temporary Palestinian state be set up in the existing areas up to the line of the security fence.

I don’t think this will ever happen, no matter what great headlines such an announcement will make to boost the flagging ratings of Bush, Blair and the discreditable Olmert. That is because the creation of a Palestinian state is anathema to the puppeteers of this eternal conflict who call the shots from Teheran, Cairo and Riyadh. The struggle must continue to ensure their own survival as tyrants, despots and rulers in their own countries. Without the diversion of this conflict, and the portrayal of Israel as a mortal threat, the Iranian and Saudi proletariat would start asking the ruling mullah’s and sheikhs about their lack of jobs, housing and education and why their national oil wealth has been squandered on nuclear centrifuges and elaborate palaces.

This is why Arafat turned down the Clinton plan. To many it is still a mystery why he would turn down Barak’s offer even to hand over Jerusalem (as if it were his to give away!). The old and sickly Arafat may have been sorely tempted, but his masters nixed the whole deal. If Arafat had defied them and signed up, he would not have lived long enough for the celebration on the White House lawn. The same bullet awaits Abbas, who is tolerated as long as the internecine feuds and gunfights continue in Gaza and the cauldron continues to boil. But the day he looks to be accepting a statehood deal with Israel, he becomes a dead man walking.

Arafat could have declared a Palestinian state in Ramallah or Gaza any time he wanted. Within minutes of that announcement, world leaders would have been falling over each other to be the very first to recognise the new state with offers of aid, embassies … the lot.

So why didn’t that happen? Simply because the overriding agenda is of course as it has always been: not two states, but one single Arab state standing in place of Israel.

For Israel and its supporters, peace has always been the only option.

For the Islamic powers that be, failure is the only option.

Never a moment's peace

This sobering list appears on Wikipedia's entry on the Arab-Israeli conflict and attests that Jews in Israel have hardly had a moment's peace in over 80 years. Check out any of the links for details of what happened at the time .....

1920 Palestine riots
1921 Jaffa riots
1929 Palestine riots

1936–1939 Arab revolt
1947 Jerusalem riots
1948 Arab-Israeli War
1950's Terrorism against Israel
1953 Qibya massacre
1956 Suez Crisis
1967 Six-Day War
1968–1970 War of Attrition
1972 Munich Olympics massacre
1972 Operation Wrath of God
1973 Operation Spring of Youth
1973 Yom Kippur War
1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War
1976 Operation Entebbe
1978 Operation Litani
1981 Operation Opera
1982 Lebanon War
1982-2000 South Lebanon conflict
1985 Operation Wooden Leg
1987–1990 First Intifada
1991 Gulf War
1993 Operation Accountability
1993-present Palestinian suicide attacks
1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath
2000–present Al-Aqsa Intifada
2002 Operation Defensive Shield
2003 Ain es Saheb airstrike
2004 Operation Rainbow
2004 Operation Days of Penitence
2006 Israel-Gaza conflict
2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict

By the same token, this further list on the same site attests to the fact that we - and other nations - have never stopped seeking a peaceful end to the troubles.

1917 Balfour Declaration
1919 Faisal-Weizmann Agreement
1920 Sanremo conference
1922 White Paper
1939 White Paper
1947 UN Partition Plan
1948 Establishment of Israel
1948 UNGA Resolution 194
1949 Armistice Agreements
1964 Palestinian National Covenant
1967 Khartoum Resolution
1967 UNSC Resolution 242
1973 UNSC Resolution 338
1973 UNSC Resolution 339
1974 UNSC Resolution 350
1978 UNSC Resolution 425
1978 Camp David Accords
1979 UNSC Resolution 446
1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty
1979 UNSC Resolution 452
1980 UNSC Resolution 478
1981 UNSC Resolution 497
1983 Israel-Lebanon agreement
1991 Madrid Conference
1993 Oslo Accords
1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty
1998 Wye River Memorandum
2000 Camp David Summit
2001 Taba Summit
2001 UNSC Resolution 1373
2002 Beirut Summit and Peace Initiative
2002 Road Map for Peace
2004 UNSC Resolution 1559
2004 UNSC Resolution 1566
2005 UNSC Resolution 1583
2005 Sharm el-Sheikh Summit
2005 Israel's unilateral disengagement plan
2006 Palestinian Prisoners' Document
2006 UNSC Resolution 1701
2006 Franco-Italian-Spanish Peace Plan

$63 billion buys no loyalty

This picture appeared in a mainstream Egyptian newspaper last week, supporting an article calling for Americans to hang their president for killing vastly more people than Saddam.

I should have thought that such a picture would sicken every American citizen, down to the wettest most liberal and leftist of Bush opponents in the Congress.

Last year alone Egypt received 1.7 billion dollars in US aid. Since the creation of the State of Israel Egypt has received a total of 63 billion dollars in military and economic aid.

Yet Egypt is still host to the world headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood and the main source of the most virulent anti-Semitic incitement circulating in the world today. And just as the Mubarak regime condones the printing of blood libels and the airing of a TV dramatisation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it also failed to veto this betrayal of its American benefactor.

Ehud Olmert has trusted Egypt to re-enter Sinai to protect Israel's security. Hopefully US congressmen will not be so stupid and shall put an end to the aid given to these duplicitous ingrates in Cairo.