The Truth about Hamas

No IDF bombing or drone attack in Gaza is carried out without the strictest approval protocols to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage to critical infrastructure that is needed for medical or basic sustenance of Gaza citizens.

For a long time now, lawyers have been embedded with IDF forces to review tactics from the standpoint of the Geneva Convention and human rights legislation and standards.

All this is diametrically opposite to the inhuman behaviour of Hamas that demonstrators in London and New York seem to cheer on. How sick are these people that their own Jew-hatred blinds them to depravity.

 

 

Divine Calculus

We had so many questions when Trump was not re-elected as the most supportive president Israel ever had in the White House. Within 100 days, the Iran talks were put back on track and Palestinian funding was restored.  What kind of Divine plan could this possibly fit??

I think we found out last week, with another big question. Why didn’t Hezbollah open a northern front with its over 100,000 missiles, especially last Wednesday when domestic rioting seemed to stretch Israel’s resources to the limit?

The answer: Biden’s election.

As last week’s missile war was getting started, the fourth session of Iran talks began in Vienna. With their economy beyond bankrupt, the ayatollahs are desperate to get Trump’s crippling sanctions lifted. Any aggression by its Hezbollah proxies over the Lebanon border would have almost certainly torpedoed the talks. Had Trump been re-elected, the mullahs would by now have had nothing to lose.

This foresight and forward planning has happened so often in our history, just as G-d told Moses, in Exodus, 33:23, “You will see Me pass before you but you will not see My face, only the back of Me.”. In other words, you may not see Me at the time, but you will know that I was there. 

Days before the Hamas blitzkrieg began, Israeli politicians were actually on the verge of forming a government coalition that would have depended on the support of Arab lawmakers opposed to the State and who’ve openly sided with terrorist groups that seek our destruction. That plan evaporated with the first 500 missiles.

Time and again it seems that the Almighty has saved Israel from the folly of its leaders. In 2008 Prime Minister Olmert was ready to give up the Golan Heights for a peace agreement with Syria. By the grace of G-d that didn’t happen. Less than 5 years later, Syria became an Iranian military base. Just imagine Iran’s Quds Force in control of the Golan – and the Jews holding a worthless piece of Chamberlain paper signed by a neutered Assad?

The game of existential chess is played out on this earth, but the Grandmaster sits in heaven. 

May He continue to protect His people and our soldiers from all trouble and sorrow, and deliver us full victory over our mortal enemies.

Chag Shavuot Sameyach. 

Am Yisrael Chai ! 

The Truth about Gaza

We vacated Gaza sixteen years ago, even taking our dead out of their graves. 

We left beautiful farms and high tech greenhouses. 

Leftist dreamers hoped it would turn the Arabs into productive and responsible neighbours - even create the building blocks of a future state.

But the people of Gaza were betrayed from Day 1 by their leaders and abused by the rabid ayatollahs in Tehran.

The greenhouses were demolished and the farms razed to form rocket launching sites for the continuing Islamist plan to liquidate the Jewish state.

The PLO leadership never wanted a Palestinian state.

They only ever wanted no Jewish state.

 

Liberman and 'The Day After'

There is no doubt that, short of sending in troops on the ground, the IDF dealt Hamas its most lethal blows in this last round of hostilities. It will take a lot more than Qatar's $15m to rebuild and a lot more time than after previous rounds of fighting.

Yes, the average Israeli taxi driver - usually the wisest of all people in Israel - will be baying for full revenge and the total flattening of Gaza or to take the strip back completely.

Isn't that exactly what the US coalition did in Iraq? They never planned for the 'day after' and now - 15 years after the allied invasion, or 'liberation' - Iraq is a basket case of terrorism and political corruption.

There is one person who wants Hamas destroyed even more than our Israeli taxi driver. That is PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas. And he desperately wants Israeli soldiers to do his work for him, and deliver him control of the 'other part' of his so-called Palestinian State.

Our mainstream Likud has always been opposed to a Two State Solution. The plain fact is that any serious notion of a viable Palestinian State is a non-starter so long as the leadership of its two parts - Abbas in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza - are in conflict with each other. Relations are now at their bitterest point, with Abbas trying the starve Gaza of salaries and other essentials needed to maintain civic life. This is why Qatar had to come to the rescue last month. Israel is not the bad boy in this game - it is merely a bystander caught in between these two terror enclaves.

It was quite understandable that Liberman resigned in frustration at a cabinet that was preventing him from carrying out the duties of Defence Minister the way he saw fit. But in our view it is not right for him to make this an election issue. This is a time for cool heads, not elections. Nothing makes Hamas and its Iranian paymasters feel more victorious than seeing their 24-hour barrage throwing the "Zionist Entity" into disarray and toppling its government.

Unlike Liberman, living in the moment and wanting to pander to the masses with a show of force to match his physical stature, Prime Minister Netanyahu has much broader considerations in his calculus.

Firstly there is Iran, and the Trump sanctions which are literally crippling the 'ayatocracy' in Tehran. If and when the mullahs come to heel, Trump will almost certainly insist on their withdrawal from Syria and Gaza as two key demands for the removal of sanctions, over and above the imperatives of nuclear inspection. If Iran stops sending money, Hamas ceases to exist. Gazans may soon have to sell their rockets for fuel and food.

Then there is the unpublished Trump peace plan hanging in the firmament. As we have said above, the reality of a Palestinian State is a non-starter without reconciliation between Abbas's PLO and Hamas. We should not help that happen.

Beyond that there is the wider regional picture and our good relationship with Egypt's president Sisi who has significant influence over Hamas, not least in holding the keys to their vital smuggling routes. For the Hamas leadership the two top priorities are killing Jews and making money - lots of it.

And beyond Egypt there's the new relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states opposed to Iran's regional hegemony. A new Gaza War may kill that nascent Israeli-Arab axis in the crib.

All this is not to say that Israel can allow Hamas to fire off hundreds of rockets and then declare a ceasefire every other month. Short of launching a war that may put another 1.7m Arabs under 'occupation', it may be wiser to move a tank division to the Gaza border and keep it permanently stationed there, ready for the army to move in at the next rocket barrage. Hamas needs to know that the IDF can and will roll in and flatten them all within a matter of hours.

The combination of such visible deterrence on the ground, plus the economic pressures coming through Iran seem to be a much smarter means of dealing with the situation than firing from the hip without a clear plan for the day after.

Thank you Hamas !

Thank you Hamas !

You may have caused needless deaths and injuries to Gazans, but your border campaign has done an enormous service to Israel.

You see, until now, the peaceniks were happy to see Israel’s borders rolled right back to the pre-1967 lines. Sipping decaf lattes in Tel Aviv, they didn’t pay much mind to such details as borders. So long as there was a handshake and kumbaya with Mr Abbas, all was going to work out just fine.

That was until they saw your mob of 40,000 at the Gaza border. Through the belching smoke of burning tires, they glimpsed pure murder in the eyes of your ‘civilians’. They read about the maps and knives that you’d given to infiltrators directing them to the nearest Israeli homes with orders to slaughter anyone in sight – man, woman or child.

These Haaretz-reading elites may never have cared much for what happened down in Sderot, but right now, they are very wary of seeing your rabid mobs a lot closer to home.

Pre-1967, Israel had a tempting waistline just nine miles wide at its narrowest point and Jerusalem was surrounded on three sides by your people.

The peaceniks now have this horrible vision of returning from Pesach holidays in Turkey and flying into Ben Gurion over a pall of burning tires, just seconds away from the runway, not knowing what kind of missiles your jihadists might be aiming at the belly of their aircraft.

They worry about burning kites wafting into the fields of Hadera over the new 1967 border, which might now bring Netanya into mortar range. And they worry about what the future might hold. Perhaps cheap drones launched over the fence carrying Sarin or Novichok a few miles into Tel Aviv.

Of course we on the Right, the realists, have always known that ‘land-for-peace’ was just an illusion and that the only border acceptable to you people was always the sea, with the Jews inside it.

But your two-week show has woken up the dreamers in Israel. They’re now smelling the coffee, or the burning rubber. They will now think twice before signing up to what Abba Eban referred to as Auschwitz Borders.

So thanks for that Hamas, we on the Right are most grateful for promoting reality in Israel’s lofty circles.

How we empower Hezbollah & Hamas

On Friday Islamic terrorists attacked a mosque during Friday prayers in northern Sinai. After first bombing its children’s creche, the mosque was surrounded by some 20 gunmen reportedly carrying ISIS insignia. They left over 300 dead, some 30 of them, tragically, children.

This latest terror attack underlines the need – in Donald Trump’s words - to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth. How refreshing that statement is after 8 years of Obama not even identifying the RIT enemy that has tormented the West since 9-11.

But it also underlines the glaring truth about the so- called ‘Middle East Peace Process’.

In the 40 years since the peace agreement with Sadat, every piece of territory that Israel vacated has been turned into a terror base.

In May 2000, when the IDF vacated South Lebanon, Hezbollah guerrillas ran gleefully to the Israeli border where they have remained ever since. It is now one of the biggest rocket bases on the planet with a stockpile of over 100,000 missiles ready to be launched from a network of bunkers and tunnels which have been created as part of Hezbollah’s one-billion-dollar military budget financed mainly by Iran.

Until 2000 Hezbollah was just another Arab terrorist group, attacking airplanes and embassies, and the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. But it was Israel’s Lebanon retreat which launched Hezbollah into the big league. Now they are part of the Lebanese parliament, holding 57 of the 128 seats. And yet America continues to supply massive military assistance to Lebanon’s armed forces, effectively arming the same Hezbollah which truck-bombed 241 US marines in 1983.

In 2005, Israel vacated the Gaza strip only to see it taken over by Iran’s other proxy, Hamas. With its own stockpile of rockets and tunnels, Hamas has tormented southern Israel for 12 years, drawing it into two ugly wars and evoking anti-Semitic demonstrations in capitals and campuses across the world.

And now we see the wages of our Sinai sin. Another Israeli vacuum filled with terror. The Sharm-el-Sheikh I used to drive to in the 1970’s is now a ghost town, desperate for the tourists scared away by aircraft downed by ISIS missiles. Northern Sinai now a terrorist enclave which the Egyptian military government struggles to control.

This latest terror attack, beyond its toll on human life and the suffering of hundreds of bereft families, poses a real and present danger to Israel. With each attack, Egypt’s military rulers request ever more reinforcements to be brought into what was supposed to be a demilitarised Sinai. The agreement with Sadat was that Sinai would be a demilitarised buffer zone, so that there could be no surprise attacks like Yom Kippur 1973. But by now, Netanyahu’s repeated concessions to President Al-Sisi – for armoured forces to combat ISIS - has worn down that treaty. 

The danger is that, if Sisi is overthrown, a Muslim Brotherhood government will have easy mobilisation of an attack force against Israel.

So, the lesson in all of this is to ensure that Judea and Samaria, on the West Bank of the Jordan river, do not become the next vacuum for an Iranian proxy to fill. The very idea of this is national suicide.

Ironic that Friday’s heinous attack is attributed to the Islamic terror group Ansar Beit Al Maqdis.

Translated this means:  “Supporters of the Beit Mikdash”

We all know what that means.

It was always ours.

Let’s keep it that way.

Every inch.

Tisha B'Av - 2014

I return home from shul and Eicha to a very quiet house  … no TV, no phone callers, just silence.

It’s just me alone with my PC checking on the past day's events in the only place in the world I really care about. 

I’ve watched many wars play out in Israel, but never felt as involved and joined-at-the-hip as this time. Maybe it’s the sheer impossibility of fighting an enemy which shoots from hospitals, hides behind children and counts its own civilian casualties as war gains. Maybe it’s because of the anti-Semitism it has unleashed here once again in Europe.

I am reading an article about the Hamas charter and its absolute and explicit commitment to the murder of all Jews, and how this was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood’s collaboration with Hitler in the Second World War.

‘Gong-gong’ breaks the silence in the house. 

It’s the Code Red app on my smartphone.  

The readout says two towns in the south of Israel are again under rocket fire.

I see it’s 1 a.m. Israel time and I think of kids being dragged out of their beds into shelters for the umpteenth time.

It gongs again. More rockets. No peace even on our saddest national day.

A third gong goes, and I realise that it’s not the asymmetry of the war or the local anti-Semitism that has us all so much more closely involved in this conflict. It’s the app!

That Code Red that’s been gonging away for over three weeks now, at all times of the day and night. Each one jolts us out of the complacency of our diaspora life and daily pursuits, and reminds us that our brothers and sisters are under fire and that their children are being traumatised night after night. 

And why?  Simply because they are Jews.

The Hamas charter seems so clearly to be just a continuation of Hitler’s work, along with the fascism in the streets of Paris and London.

And I wonder about something else.

Imagine if there had been such an app in the Holocaust?

Imagine all those American Jews hearing a gong every time a single Jewish life was extinguished half a world away in Europe.

Six million gongs.

At one a minute, it would have taken eleven and a half years.

על אלה אני בוכיה -  עיני עיני ירדה מים כי רחק ממני מנחם משיב נפשי

For these I weep -  mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me.

Hamas - their most powerful weapon

7 a.m.  Day 5. The commander awakens, bathed in sweat, his throat raw from a long night of chain-smoking.

He sees the empty corner where the portable air-conditioner stood and gutturally curses the strident nurse who keeps taking it back to the children’s ward. Rolling out his prayer mat he feels the thud of a missile in the street, three floors above his head. Sounds like one of their own. He frets about these misfires hitting today’s Israeli shipment through the Erez Crossing. His third wife’s Teva medication is due in today.

Now desperate for some sunlight and fresh air he cracks open the door and barks a command to summon his driver and fetch the kids.  His minders clear the way upstairs and through the yellowed corridors of Gaza’s main hospital. His dark glasses dim the pitiful scene of gurneys parked end-to-end and the blur of their heaving cargo, but he cannot block out the sounds of pain and wretchedness which follow him out into the entrance lobby.

Beyond the glass entrance doors what used to be a street is now a bombsite, the buildings opposite in a grotesque repose of charred concrete and exposed steels, with shop signs hanging only by their electric wires. The kids are already out in the street, admiring the commander’s shining SUV. It started out as a brand new UN vehicle, but was quickly stolen and re-sprayed in a Hamas rocket foundry.

At the sound of a clap and a “Yallah!” the kids rush to the entrance and form a scrum around the emerging commander. As they escort him to the car, he looks up at the unseen drone he knows is watching his every step. He smiles at the thought that he is this morning’s star attraction for the enemy’s best and brightest all glued to their screens in a Tel Aviv bunker.

The scrum of kids reaches the open rear door, the commander steps in and three of the boys jump into the tailgate. The rest step back before the SUV races off in a cloud of fresh debris.

An ambulance of the Red Crescent pulls up sharply into the empty space. Two veiled women step out of the back, and call to the remaining kids to gather round. The hospital doors swish open and two men in green gowns wheel a covered trolley out to the ambulance. There is a jangling of metal beneath the tarp, sounding like oxygen cylinders but they are not. Two more trolleys follow and, once loaded into the ambulance, the women order three of the youngsters to pile in before slapping the doors shut. The ambulance makes off toward the forward launching site, siren blaring.

Meanwhile the commander has arrived outside his home. More kids are waiting at what’s left of a kerbside. He looks up at his building to the figures peering over the roof parapet. There are well over 50 of them up there, mainly women and children, in their second week of sleeping nights on mattresses to keep his family safe.

As he is escorted towards the embrace of his wives, the commander looks up again at the unseen drone in the sky. He is smiling again.

His rockets may soon be spent and his men killed or captured. But his most powerful weapon will never run out.

The humanity of his enemy, Israel.

Message to London's Useful Idiots

Pro-Israel groups are staging a solidarity rally in London this Sunday afternoon. It’ll be another opportunity to trade chants with the useful idiots of the Jihad who protest Jewish self-defence against incessant rocketing as a ‘war crime’.

Here I am referring not to the baying Muslims in the crowd but to their Anglo-Saxon supporters. You guys who chanted “we are all Hamas now!” during the last round of Gaza hostilities. 

You people who never got off your backsides whilst over 150,000 people have been killed in Syria and you who’ve sat silently through the 10-year genocide in Darfur.  

I have a message for you.

Take a good look around you on Sunday. I don’t mean at the Chassidic buffoons of Neturei Karta – but to your comrades in keffiyehs and hijabs. The ones with spittle running off their chins chanting: “Hamas, Hamas … Jews to the gas!”

Do you even know who they really are?

Let me introduce you.

These are the people who brought you 9-11, whose ideology is the same as those who bombed London, Madrid and Mumbai.  In calling for death to the Jews, they distort the same religious teachings as those responsible for the massacre of kids in the Beslan school and the audience of a Moscow theatre.  All told there have been over 23,300 deadly terror attacks by Islamists since September 11 2001*.  

  

These militant friends of yours are followers of the same religious perversion as the barbarians who decapitated soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on a London street in a grotesque show before horrified witnesses.

This is the brotherhood which tries to blow people up at 30,000 feet with explosives hidden in shoes, underwear, water bottles and inkjet cartridges. Whose footsoldiers even now are developing new methods of murder in the skies. They are the reason why all passengers have to take off shoes and belts to go through all that scanning and frisking before getting on a plane. Without these new friends of yours, air travel might still be the enjoyable experience it used to be before another of their brothers,Yasser Arafat, brought terrorist hijackings into our peaceful world in 1969.

For those of you in academia: know that the folks you join hands with on Sunday are in the same tent as those who bullied English headteachers out of their jobs in order to radicalise the next generation in Britain’s own state schools.  The ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal is thought by investigators to be just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.

And to those of you who work in the media: spare a thought for the 100 and more journalists imprisoned in Islamic countries. Mr Erdogan’s brotherhood government of Turkey (a NATO country!) holds top spot for the 3rd year running, with more jailed reporters than even Iran. 

And do you even remember the name Daniel Pearl?  He was the Washington Post reporter who was decapitated on camera by the same brotherhood you stand with.  I don’t recall any of you media hacks protesting against that outrage on one of your own people. Maybe that’s because he also happened to be one of our people.

Make no mistake chaps – these agitators are all of a piece. They are not the decent Muslims I happily work with or like the vast majority of Israeli Arabs who enjoy more freedom in the Jewish state than exists anywhere else in the region.

No, your rabid friends are perverters of a faith who feed nightly on gory incitement videos. They marvel at the progress of the new Islamic standard-bearers in ISIS as they butcher their way to the grand caliphate and vow the subjugation of kuffars like you by the sword.

And by the time all the demos and boycotts are over and they have no further use for you, they’ll have taken over more than just your schools. They will move on to all the other things you hold dear, from alcohol and miniskirts to gay rights. And you will truly wish you had been on the right side all along. The side that cherishes life with the same passion as they glorify death. The side that respects freedom of all religions and champions personal liberty, democracy, a free press and women’s rights.

But here’s the really important message I have for you guys.

History has shown that what starts with the Jews ends with all the rest of you. Read up on Hitler and WW2.  As the initial targets of terrorism, the Jewish state has adapted very well. Whether it’s the passenger profiling you’re still too shy to introduce, or the protection of malls, restaurants and public transport. And then there is the Iron Dome, a brilliant Israeli invention not a moment too early for its calling.

So, whilst you are paralysed by your own pathetic political correctness, we’ve been calling out evil by its true name and we have taken this war right to the enemy’s door. As their leaders cower in the basements of hospitals and UN schools, we flatten their houses and destroy their weaponry. We were the first to engage this Islamist evil and, with all your heads buried in the sand, we may well be the last.

But if you think by taking sides against us we Jews will again walk quietly into the night, you are gravely mistaken. We are a nuclear power and as children of the Holocaust, we have more reason and right to have that ultimate deterrent than just about any other nation on the planet.

As the sign on the lithium battery says: “Dispose of Carefully”.

.
[* Source: www.thereligionofpeace.com ]

The Answer to “Why?”

Where there is faith there are no questions … without faith there are no answers.

The only thing more striking than the savagery of this event is the spontaneous outpouring of prayer and tehillim that took hold across the entire Jewish world for 18 days. There has hardly been a precedent on this scale in living memory.

On the first day even secular Israelis came to the Western Wall looking to join or at least associate with the swaying masses of praying Haredim from whom they were so recently alienated in the debate on army service.

We are told that the Almighty needs our prayers to reassure Him that we have not forgotten that there is a father in heaven. How sad that such terrible things need to happen to mobilise us to prayer.  But a father’s primary purpose is to teach his children and guide them in the right path.

This Father sent us the Yom Kippur War to warn us not to be complacent and that we could easily be taken by surprise. He sent us the Carmel fire to teach us that in a missile war we couldn’t afford to be without firefighting aircraft. And this event has also been a lesson. That that we must never release killers, least of all for the ‘privilege’ of sitting down with our enemies and negotiating away parts of our blessed land and our security.

They came to pray at the Wall because it is the last remnant of the Temple and it is where every Jew feels closer to G-d than anywhere else in the world.

And to those asking “Why did this happen?” – that Wall also provides the answer.

We could have been left many remnants of the Temple.  An arch, or maybe a pillar or a piece of a stone altar.

Instead we were left with a wall.

A simple but strong structure of partition.

We know that behind that wall lies the nemesis of our people and all that we stand for. Not far removed from the murderers of 9-11 or the barbaric beheaders of ISIS, they deny our Temple, our Shoah and our very right to exist. By their own admission they glorify death just as we cherish life.

Just as people forget that there is a father in heaven, many of us also forget - or refuse to accept - that there is true evil in this world. And so, things like this happen to wake us up and bring us back to the Wall in search of answers. To remind us never to lower our guard. Never to trust or build bridges with these forces of pure evil, under whatever guise they present themselves or for whatever short-term gains or plaudits are promised from the wider world.

The realists in Israel have recognised this and extended the Wall with a security fence across many hundreds of miles. Our detractors refer to it as a ‘separation barrier’ and, in this context at least, maybe they are right.

It’s no accident that we were left with just a wall.

After 2,000 years it’s now very old and cracked in many places.

What better way to insulate us from such a parallel universe of hate and brutality than with the thousands of notes squashed into those cracks, each one carrying the pleas and prayers of decent people who share and cherish our simple humanitarian values.

עַל־אֵ֣לֶּה ׀ אֲנִ֣י בֹוכִיָּ֗ה עֵינִ֤י ׀ עֵינִי֙ יֹ֣רְדָה מַּ֔יִם כִּֽי־רָחַ֥ק מִמֶּ֛נִּי מְנַחֵ֖ם מֵשִׁ֣יב נַפְשִׁ֑י הָי֤וּ בָנַי֙ שֹֽׁומֵמִ֔ים כִּ֥י גָבַ֖ר אֹויֵֽב׃

“For these I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.”

Obama's Playbook

Hamas proudly claims responsibility for 10 out of the 31 rockets launched against Israeli civilians in the past 24 hours.

It is time that Israel resumed targeted killings of the terrorist leadership.

America is doing this weekly in Pakistan without its own homeland being under attack - let alone such relentless rocket fire.

For all his faults in the latter years, Ariel Sharon at least had the balls to obliterate Yassin and Rantisi in 2004 within weeks of each other. Professor Alan Dershowitz says it's perfectly legal.

Bibi - it's time to step up the the plate.

"Arise and scatter your enemies and see them flee before you." (Numbers 10:35)

An Irish Convert

I got this by email. Apart from the fact that there was never any 'massacre' in Gaza, it makes interesting reading....


ISRAEL IS A REFUGE, BUT A REFUGE UNDER SIEGE
Through making a film about the Israeli-Arab conflict, artist Nicky Larkin found his allegiances swaying
by Nicky Larkin
Independent (Ireland)
March 16, 2012

I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right -- as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?
Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel's incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.
Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions -- and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.
I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish -- from a country which is one of Israel's chief critics -- and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.
Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn't a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks -- neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.
These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.
But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. After all, the Palestinian mantra was one of "non-violent resistance". It was their motto, repeated over and over like responses at a Catholic mass.
Yet when I interviewed Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian government member, she sat forward angrily in her chair as she refused to condemn the actions of the suicide bombers. She was all aggression.
This aggression continued in Hebron, where I witnessed swastikas on a wall. As I set up my camera, an Israeli soldier shouted down from his rooftop position. A few months previously I might have ignored him as my political enemy. But now I stopped to talk. He only talked about Taybeh, the local Palestinian beer.
Back in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, I began to listen more closely to the Israeli side. I remember one conversation in Shenkin Street -- Tel Aviv's most fashionable quarter, a street where everybody looks as if they went to art college. I was outside a cafe interviewing a former soldier.
He talked slowly about his time in Gaza. He spoke about 20 Arab teenagers filled with ecstasy tablets and sent running towards the base he'd patrolled. Each strapped with a bomb and carrying a hand-held detonator.
The pills in their bloodstream meant they felt no pain. Only a headshot would take them down.
Conversations like this are normal in Tel Aviv. I began to experience the sense of isolation Israelis feel. An isolation that began in the ghettos of Europe and ended in Auschwitz.
Israel is a refuge -- but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.
The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.
An Irish artist is supposed to sign boycotts, wear a PLO scarf, and remonstrate loudly about The Occupation. But it's not just artists who are supposed to hate Israel. Being anti-Israel is supposed to be part of our Irish identity, the same way we are supposed to resent the English.
But hating Israel is not part of my personal national identity. Neither is hating the English. I hold an Irish passport, but nowhere upon this document does it say I am a republican, or a Palestinian.
My Irish passport says I was born in 1983 in Offaly. The Northern Troubles were something Anne Doyle talked to my parents about on the nine o'clock News. I just wanted to watch Father Ted.
So I was frustrated to see Provo graffiti on the wall in the West Bank. I felt the same frustration emerge when I noticed the missing 'E' in a "Free Palestin" graffiti on a wall in Cork. I am also frustrated by the anti-Israel activists' attitude to freedom of speech.
Free speech must work both ways. But back in Dublin, whenever I speak up for Israel, the Fiachras and Fionas look at me aghast, as if I'd pissed on their paninis.
This one-way freedom of speech spurs false information. The Boycott Israel brigade is a prime example. They pressurised Irish supermarkets to remove all Israeli produce from their shelves -- a move that directly affected the Palestinian farmers who produce most of their fruit and vegetables under the Israeli brand.
But worst of all, this boycott mentality is affecting artists. In August 2010, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign got 216 Irish artists to sign a pledge undertaking to boycott the Israeli state. As an artist I have friends on this list -- or at least I had.
I would like to challenge my friends about their support for this boycott. What do these armchair sermonisers know about Israel? Could they name three Israeli cities, or the main Israeli industries?
But I have more important questions for Irish artists. What happened to the notion of the artist as a free thinking individual? Why have Irish artists surrendered to group-think on Israel? Could it be due to something as crude as career-advancement?
Artistic leadership comes from the top. Aosdana, Ireland's State-sponsored affiliation of creative artists, has also signed the boycott. Aosdana is a big player. Its members populate Arts Council funding panels.
Some artists could assume that if their name is on the same boycott sheet as the people assessing their applications, it can hardly hurt their chances. No doubt Aosdana would dispute this assumption. But the perception of a preconceived position on Israel is hard to avoid.
Looking back now over all I have learnt, I wonder if the problem is a lot simpler.
Perhaps our problem is not with Israel, but with our own over-stretched sense of importance -- a sense of moral superiority disproportional to the importance of our little country?
Any artist worth his or her salt should be ready to change their mind on receipt of fresh information. So I would urge every one of those 216 Irish artists who pledged to boycott the Israeli state to spend some time in Israel and Palestine. Maybe when you come home you will bin your scarf. I did.
Nicky Larkin's 'Forty Shades of Grey' will premiere in Dublin in May;

Deliverance in Beersheva

From under the hail of over 100 rockets indiscriminately fired by Gaza terrorists into Israeli towns, comes this story was emailed to me ...

My daughter gave birth on Friday, three weeks earlier than expected. The little baby still does not have a name and she is not even 48 hours old. My wife and I live in the Galil, my daughter with her husband and 2 year old grandchild live near Beersheva.

Last night, Saturday, we were all visiting her when the warning alarm that an incoming Grad Missile from Gaza was targeting the region. The drill is that everybody has to move within not more than 15 seconds from their Maternity room which has windows, to the closest corridor that has fewer windows. (15 seconds do not permit to go any further to an underground shelter)

So my wife and I helped my daughter get off the bed, put on her slippers and begin to push the cart where the newborn baby was sleeping and we walked out of the room… Believe it or not, it was not easy due to the traffic in the corridor, all the mothers, almost like dressed in uniform, were pushing their carts in the same direction. Most of them were alone, because it was shortly after Shabbat and after the Ramadan fast period ended, so they were valiantly doing this on their own, a few hours after a very, if not one of the most significant and meaningful moments in their life. Some of the women were Arab, others were Bedouins, Russian Olim, Ethiopian Olim, other people in the corridor were hospital staff, security, doctors and visitors… Oh yes, some were just veteran Israelis like my daughter, who is a 7th generation Israeli, pushing an eighth generation baby who was not yet given a name…

My reflection while this was all happening was: Here we are in Beersheva where 4000 years ago, Abraham made a wise and generous truce to avoid rivalry and conflict; yes 4000 years ago… and here we are being given 15 seconds to try and avoid danger caused by rivalry and conflict… I am sure that many books can be written by tapping into the minds of all of us gathered in a crowded corridor in the hospital.

Today is another day and I am writing my reflections after experiencing three more “Tzeva Adom” “Color Red” alarms, while holding my grandchild in my arms and he is only two years old, but old enough to ask: Ma zeh? What is this?

P.S. Oh yes, I forgot to share with you one more thing: Last night after the above description, visiting hours ended and we left the hospital with Ziv our grandchild to go home. While we were walking out of the Hospital building, Ziv began to play in the parking lot with a little Bedouin 1.5 years old, when suddenly again the siren went off and again we had 15 seconds to be ushered to the safe area. This time we were all ushered into a corridor of the Delivery Ward of the Hospital. There were no babies in little carts. This time we found ourselves in between dozens of women who were about to give birth, one of them was sitting in a wheel chair experiencing very strong contractions… This time we heard the explosions very close to us, people were just counting 1,2,3… 7. Yes 7 grad missiles were targeted to Beersheva, four of them fell in an open area, two of them were hit by our anti grad missile system “Iron Dome” and one hit a building injuring 7 people and killing one man, Yossi Shushan, (38) who happened to be there to pick up his 9 month pregnant wife… He will not be in the delivery ward where I happened to be, at the very same moment he was killed…

I can only commend the behavior and bravery of every single person (who will most likely not meet again), with whom we shared a few minutes that will remain with us for a lifetime…

Victor
Beersheva, Israel, August 2011

How Israel needs to respond to de-legitimisation

Another outspoken interview by Melanie Phillips.

Picture that tells it all....

I came across this cartoon while searching on Land for Peace.

Can't read who the cartoonist is, but full credit to them.

Go South Mr Solana !

Without yet having formed a viable coalition for his new government of Israel, Netanyahu is already being threatened by the EU that they will no longer be ‘Mr Nice Guy’ if he fails to make a commitment to a Palestinian state within Israel’s borders.

"Let me say very clearly that the way the European Union will relate to a government that is not committed to a two-state solution will be very, very different," says its foreign affairs secretary Javier Solana.

With its reckless funding of Gaza terrorists, ‘engagement’ with Hamas and Hezbolla, tolerance of anti-Israel boycotts and hypocritical censure of the security fence and any other measures take to protect Jewish citizens, it’s hard to imagine what the EU could be doing do make things much worse.

Solana has been the EU’s foreign policy chief for 10 years and is the main architect of the stalled ‘Road Map’ peace plan. One would have thought after all this time and exposure to the cut and thrust of the conflict, Solana would have understood exactly why Jewish citizens of Israel have fears about committing to a Palestinian State sandwiching a quarter of its population to within 9 miles of the Mediterranean Sea.

It’s not that Jews are reluctant to sign a peace agreement and cede territory. By far the most maddening thing for me has been the endless prattle by leaders like Olmert about how much land and ‘painful concessions’ they are prepared to offer just for that illusion of peace.

And it is truly nothing more than an illusion. We have seen what our unilateral withdrawal and the voluntary uprooting of 8,000 residents of Gush Katif have brought us: no less than 4,000 rockets launched from Gaza since we left. An average of 3 rocket attacks per day over a period of three and a half years!

These rockets continue to be launched by the same Hamas that Mr Solana and his EU comrades seek to ‘engage’ with. The same Hamas that continues to enrich and arm itself with the billions in EU funds sent in open checks to Gaza . The same Hamas that wants only a one-state solution and insists that it will never ever recognise the Jewish State.

Most significantly, it’s the Hamas that drove out Mahmoud Abbas and his ‘moderate’ Fatah from Gaza in a fest of violence and butchery.

Does not Mr Solana realise, that by empowering Hamas with recognition, funds and ‘engagement’, he works only to ensure that the Quartet’s only legitimate ‘peace partners’ Abbas and Fatah are doomed to be gunned out of the West Bank as well?

So, wow can he possibly expect Israelis to cede yet more territory so perilously close to its vital arteries, when the terrorists his EU emboldens and enriches are so certain and utterly committed to repeat the Gaza operation and fill the vacuum with another Iranian rocket base?

So Mr Solana: you wanna make things ‘very very different’ for Israel?

Go talk to some Israelis in Sderot and other Negev towns.
Or, better still; spend the night in one of their bomb shelters.

You’ll probably learn more in that one night than in the 10 years you’ve wasted conducting a no-string Quartet from Brussels.
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Palestinian Media Watch

I'm reproducing this full page I've received from that great organization, Palestinian Media Watch regarding the internecine murders in Gaza which are bound to gain pace as Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party try to take advantage of the vastly weakened Hamas forces, to regain control over Gaza. The page is reporduced with all its video links which are worth watching.

If this is how Arabs treat Arabs, what future is there for infidels and us Yahuds in any Two-State solution?

Gaza Update 14 Jan. 18, 2009 Palestinian Media Watch

Hamas gangs kill Fatah members in Gaza Hamas has murdered "dozens of Fatah members" in the Gaza Strip for merely violating the Hamas-imposed house arrest. According to the Palestinian daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida the atrocities, which also included shooting people in the legs, has created a backlash in the West Bank and caused "anger, which influenced the level of popular activities carried out in solidarity with the Gaza residents in the towns Ramallah and El-Bira." In addition, the popular Palestinian singer, Jamal Najar, condemned Hamas as "gangs of anarchic security forces," describing how Hamas murdered his cousin right in front of his children for simply stepping outside. [PA TV (Fatah)] Click here to see the video. The following are excerpts from the article in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and the transcript of the words of Jamal Najar: Headline: "Reports of persecutions and liquidation of Fatah members by Hamas members evoke anxiety and condemnation in the West Bank." Reports mentioning liquidations of Fatah members in the Gaza Strip by members of Hamas evoked popular condemnation which was added yesterday to the erupting anger, which influenced the level of popular activities carried out in solidarity with the Gaza residents in the towns Ramallah and El-Bira. The reports from Gaza pointed out the death of dozens of Fatah members caused by Hamas members. A prominent leader stated that isolated random incidents of murder have occurred, but ruled out that this is a case of organized persecution. Wafa A-Najar, Gaza resident who lives in the town El-Bira, said that her father was killed the day before yesterday and nine of her family members were injured by shooting by Hamas, among them were three small children and two young people in critical condition... According to the family's story, a squad belonging to Hamas came to her family's house in [the] Sheikh Radwan [neighborhood] in Gaza and shot at the legs of young Badran A-Najar, claiming that he was violating the house arrest which was imposed on him, at the time when he was sitting with his cousins in front of the house... A prominent leader in the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip, Ibrahim Abu A-Naja, ruled out that this is a case of persecution by some organization, which aims at Fatah, however he pointed out that "a number of isolated incidents [of murder]" had occurred, as has been reported by the Israeli media... Abu A-Naja called for Hamas to halt any step which provides Israel the opportunity to attack us... Groups within the Fatah movement in the West Bank estimated that more than a hundred of its people in the Gaza Strip had been exposed to persecution, shooting, and liquidation." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), Jan. 9, 2009] Jamal Najar, popular Palestinian singer: "I express my condolences to my cousins, some of them were killed yesterday by the gangs of the anarchic [Hamas] security forces in the Gaza Strip... The father was killed right in front of his children, because he didn't stay at home, after they placed him under house arrest, he and everyone who belongs to Fatah." [PA TV (Fatah) Jan. 6, 2009]

To support the work of PMW, donate by credit card, check or wire VISIT PMW VIDEO ARCHIVES Incitement of children to Shahada Teaching hatred with music Children as combatants in PA ideology Denying Israel's right to exist Hamas in its own words Support for terrorism Understanding Shahada Mothers joy at sons' Shahada Hatred of America and the West Holocaust denial Clarifying history Arab world TV Contact Palestinian Media Watch: p:+972 2 625 4140 e: pmw@pmw.org.il f: +972 2 624 2803 w: www.pmw.org.il