Game set and match to the patriarchs!

This past Shabbat’s Torah reading was Chayei Sarah, in which Abraham comes to Hebron to buy a burial place for his wife Sarah. That burial place is the Cave of Machpela, in which the patriarchs and their wives are all buried, and is the second most sacred shrine in Judaism after the Temple Mount and its Western Wall.

As in most years, I spent this special Shabbat in Hebron with tens of thousands of my Jewish brothers and sisters to have the enormous privilege of hearing the Torah reading and story of the burial of Sarah in the exact place where it actually happened 3,800 years ago. If you’re looking for a means of really “earthing” yourself to Jewish history, this time and place never disappoints.

I returned to Jerusalem after Shabbat to hear of the crowd forming in Tel Aviv to mark the 23^rd anniversary of the murder of Prime Minister Rabin z’l  in the same square as he had then held a rally in support of the Oslo peace accords.  Rather than ‘mark’ the anniversary, it seems the demonstration was held more to ‘politicise’ it. Failed prime ministerial aspirants like Avi Gabbay (Labour) Tzachi Hanegbi (Likud) and Tzipi Livni (no fixed abode) jumped at the chance to make themselves relevant on the podium. No surprise that Hanegbi got booed while far left Meretz leader Tamar Sandberg got the biggest applause. This is after all Tel Aviv!

The biggest story the following morning was about someone who was not there. Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein. He reportedly declined to attend because a “settler in a kippa” would not be welcome to speak at such a gathering. The headlines made a meal of his comment that Rabin’s assassination had “no historical impact” on the peace process. That is of course true. The Oslo process didn’t die at Rabin Square, but collapsed 5 years later at Camp David. Israelis still live with its deadly legacy of thousands of Jewish lives ended or disabled, along with the empowerment of the PLO and the advent of Hamas.

I have a better reason why Speaker Edelstein was not in Tel Aviv. That’s because he was in Hebron, where I spoke to him Friday night in the Cave of Machpela. This is a place where settlers in a kippa are very welcome indeed. Their interest is in deepening their roots to the Jewish homeland and heritage, rather than negotiating it away to Arabs in hopes they will stop stabbing our people in the supermarkets and stop machine-gunning families by the roadside.

And whilst Rabin’s left-wing exploiters managed to garner just a few thousand in Tel Aviv, Abraham and Sarah pulled in 40,000 for Shabbat.

  

Game set and match to the patriarchs!

Government in waiting

Article for Likud-Herut Newsletter

If anyone was in any doubt of the imminence of the Likud’s return to power they will have been reassured by last month’s media attack on Israel’s prime-minister-in-waiting, Bibi Netanyahu. To have sat on an August 2006 story for so long means the media leftists had a powerful reason to wheel out the libel only now, when they see the last rotten timbers of Olmert’s coalition crumbling away.

In those last 20 months, since the end of the “Disengagement War” (for that miserable surrender is surely what emboldened our enemies to risk the Lebanon conflict) the Israeli media hasn’t even pretended to adhere to the prime directive of all journalism: to report the truth. The odious David (wet dream - rape Israel) Landau even boasted that his newspaper had "wittingly soft-pedalled" alleged corruption by Israeli political leaders including prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, when, in the opinion of his paper Ha’aretz, the policies of those leaders were advancing the peace process.

If the media had not protected the Sharon family there would have been no disengagement. If they had not protected Olmert standing for election on a further platform of surrenders, there might not have been a Second Lebanon War, least of all a conflict so mismanaged by Olmert (who declared himself “tired of fighting , tired of winning”) and Amir Peretz, truly a laughing-stock of a defense minister.

Likud’s government-in-waiting is ready to roll back all the reverses and restore the State of Israel to its former deterrent status amongst the enemies that surround our people. We are stocked full of talented front-liners like (l to r) Gideon Saar, Yuval Steinitz and Yuli Edelestein who have so much to offer in terms of their uncompromising commitment to the safety, security and integrity of the citizens of Israel and its future as a Jewish state.

Our winning team is ready to roll back the miserable reversals of Kadima.