Mad in Israel

The Solution For The Gaza Blockade

2010-06-03T21:50:00.005+03:00

Here is my solution for Gaza. Since we, the Israelis, are in the eyes of the world the evil prison wardens, hoping to starve the population into submission, I suggest to hand the administration of Gaza's external borders over to the world. Not the whole world of course, because that would mean the UN, and the UN has yet to prove effective in administrating any border in this region (ask me about this one, if you wonder what I mean...). Not Egypt, of course, as they already share one border with Gaza and have supported the blockade nicely for the last couple of years.

No, the real expert for how to deal with Gaza, the humanitarian crisis and the Hamas is the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who has publicly cursed Israel for the "massacres" during the Gaza War of 2008 and the "humanitarian flotilla attack". So, here we have an expert on dealing with radical Palestinians, who also knows how to keep his own problem in form of the PKK in check, in cooperation with the Iranians and without the oh-so-busy-with-Israel world opinion even noticing.

Therefore I suggest to open the Gaza strip, both the harbour and the airport, under the condition that Turkish customs officers police the border crossings. I am sure they will know better how to bring everything in, except for missiles, mortars, TNT and other goodies that really don't help that much with the humanitarian crisis.

If you promise to keep me and my family alive, Mr. Erdogan, I am willing to give you the Gaza strip. How's that for a deal?

Israeli Army Saving Lifes in Haiti

2010-01-18T08:23:00.005+02:00

Israeli Jews saving Christians out of the ruins of Port-au-Prince. The army has dispatched over 200 soldiers from a medical home front unit, who have set up a field hospital with 50 beds in a socker stadium. The BBC (not exactly pro Israeli any other day) called the hospital the "Rolce-Royce" under the field hospitals and praised the Israeli search and rescue team as "the only team that knows what it is doing". Fresh wind from London?

Where are the search and rescue teams from Hezbollah, Hamas, The Muslim Brotherhood, The Islamic Jihad? Not fair? Okay, then let's think about Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Sudan (and North Korea)?

The obvious answer is: Islamic fundamentalists couldn't care less about 100,000 dead Christians. Actually, they are probably celebrating ("God is punishing the infidels"). The really crazy thing is that even many fundamentalist Christians are using God as an explanation for the Earth Quake ("They used condoms, that place is full of homosexuals, ...."). And the Jews that died over there were punished for driving on Shabbat. Yeah, sure. What a world - FUBAR (remember that one?).

I wondered how Turkey would respond to the desaster. To my relief and satsifaction there are Turkish search and rescue teams in Haiti. Maybe there is a reason deeper than cold strategic interests for Turkey being the only muslim ally of Israel?

Read Christopher Hitchens in Slate about the religious abuse of natural desaster over centuries. Nothing has changed, people.

And in any case, you can make a humanistic donation void of a missionary agenda here: Non-Believers Giving Aid: a religion-free way to help disaster victims.

Atheists donated $50,000 in the first 24h after the quake via Richard Dawkins' initiative. That is the power of the web, paired with human compassion. No religious dillusion necessary to help your fellow humans, it seems.

Time for peace now, is it? Or why Abbas will make me rich and dead.

2009-12-16T23:21:00.007+02:00

Well, it is always a good time for peace out here, but is this a realistic time for peace? The peace talk these days is very much like the talk about the imminent release of Gilad Shalit from captivity in Gaza. Every other week we read that this time it is only a question of days, maybe weeks, and just five disputed names on the Hamas list of prisoners to be exchanged for Gilad. And stupid us, every time we again believe it and get excited. Every time a little bit less, to be sure, but still, one must not loose hope, right? Poor Shalit family.

So today we read in the Haaretz that Abbas can make peace, finally, if we just stop building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem for six months. Independent of the fact that in my opinion we should stop to build in the West Bank for six years, or better yet, for ever, this new line is really pissing me off.

What is it with these people? Once more the Palestinians are blundering a chance for peace, and by all accounts maybe the last one for a long time to come. Netanyahu has been resized to human proportions by the American pressure (thank you, Mr. President, but still, you should not have accepted that Nobel Prize, at least not the one for Peace. Economy, maybe. Okay, that was just a joke for my follower(s) over at the Fox news), with some European assistance, and maybe, just maybe, a bad conscience for that freak show of a government he has assembled. Actually, his only way to fame is either a) a war with Iran, or b) peace with the Palestinians. I hope for the latter, but I have my money on the first.

So here we have Netanyahu, a solid right winger by any standard, sending the feared and fearless Border Police into the most extreme settlements to enforce a building freeze all over the West Bank, and what has Abbas to say? Not good enough, Jonathan, try harder.

While the building freeze is popular with the secular (still) majority, few members of which have voted for the Likud, it is hugely unpopular among the religious of all sorts - a central pillar in the coalition. In other words, this policy is not sustainable unless it brings a tangible benefit very soon.

Now, the hard core religious elements in the coalition will not consider serious negotiations with the Palestinians about a two state solution a tangible benefit, and may actually try to topple the government if there was a chance of those negotiations succeeding. However, in that case the Labor rebels, Kadima and Meretz would either join the government or support it from the benches, and once again a right wing prime minister was the one to make a peace agreement with an arch enemy.

I don't know what Abbas's reason for not picking up the ball is, but I have a suspicion. It seems to me that a short term tactical achievement is more important than the strategic goal of achieving statehood. This was the case in the final collapse of every serious peace initiative so far. If the Palestinians were a person one would say this guy has some nasty self-destructive tendencies and needs to see a shrink, soon.

So here is what is going to happen. Before Abbas wakes up Netanyahu's attempt will collapse under the pressure from his right wing religious coalition partners. The government will find a good reason why the negotiations are off the agenda - a few more Quassams fired from Gaza and we will be there. Abbas goes into retirement and a third intifada breaks out, terror attacks, suicide bombers, you know the drill. Now Netanyahu is really back to where he left off during his last tenure as prime minister, which is not generally considered a great success, to put it mildly. And this is when I get rich - remember the Iran option. Rich and dead, possibly.

But it doesn't have to end this way. Among the Palestinians there are reasonable voices, like Ray Hanania, the founder of Yalla Peace (http://yallapeace.blogspot.com/). Ray has announced his candidacy for the office of the Palestinian President. Yes, he has. Whatever I'll have made from the Iran option, I won't bet on Ray for President. A) He is actually an American Palestinian, married to a Jew. So much for popular support on the streets of Ramallah. And B) he is just way too reasonable and balanced. His proposal for a two state solution is more or less what will be the outcome of serious final status negotiations, should there ever be any. We know it, they know it, but we can't just agree on the reasonable thing now, can we. As Abbas put the negotiations with Olmert (from the article linked to the headline):

"The next day, we started talking about maps. Olmert showed me one map and I brought back one of ours. He showed me a new map and I brought back a map of ours. And so it went. We agreed that 1.9 percent would be with you and Olmert demanded 6.5 percent. It was a negotiation, we didn't complete it. As a shopper enters a store, that's how we held the talks."

It is the Middle East here, after all. I have a proposal for Ray: Since you are married to a Jew, you can get the Israeli citizenship if you both immigrate to Israel. And then you can run for office in Israel. I'd say your chances here are somewhat better than over there and you can keep the platform as it is.

If we are still here after that war with Iran we may need every creative mind we can get...

A Swedish Joke....

2009-11-14T21:16:00.003+02:00

Here is one that describes the kind of objective journalism covering events in Israel, especially but not only in Sweden...

An Israeli on vacation in Stockholm sees a crazy dog attacking a small, freightened girl. He orders his cab driver to stop, jumps out of the cab, struggles with the dog and kills it in the end. Bystanders call the local newspaper and a journalist arrives within minutes at the scene, where the bloodied Israeli is still holding the shivering girl. After inquiring what exactly happened the journalist tells the Israeli: "Wow, what a story! You are a hero! The headline will be "Swede saves girl from attack dog." Replies the Israeli: "But I am not Swede!" "Of course, what was I thinking, why would you speak English, and with that funny accent. Okay, so we'll write "European saves little girl from attack dog - how's that?"" Whispers the Israeli: "Well, better, but I am also not a European." "So what are you?" "Israeli." The journalist makes an astonished face, looks at the little girl, turns around and walks away without a word.

The headline the next day reads "Crazy Israeli kills loved pet of little Swedish girl".

The Taliban in the IDF

2009-01-26T14:23:00.003+02:00

Without anybody noticing, the Taliban have arrived at the Israeli Defense Forces (click on the title to read the Haaretz article). They masquerade as Rabbis and abuse the public trust into the IDF's rabbinate in order to educate Israeli soldiers to behave like Taliban, Hamas or Hezbollah warriors. "Show no mercy to the cruel" sounds a lot like "show no mercy to the infidels" to me, in my humble opinion.

The only thing that separates us and them now is that common Israeli soldiers subjected to that kind of teachings came forward and reported the intellectual garbage to the press, for all of us to read and get goose bumps. Free minds and a free press are the only thing standing between us and the final abyss.

Still there are islands of reason and common sense left, but where is all of that leading us? If Rabbi Ronzki will still be the Chief Rabbi of the IDF in a couple of months from now, it is time to pack up and move to Afghanistan, I'd say. At least the property prices there are a lot more reasonable.

Israeli Humanity - Does it Exist?

2009-01-16T21:50:00.004+02:00

These days a lot is being said and written about the Israeli war machine killing innocent children with Israelis showing no remorse. Israelis have been called the "New Nazis" and the war in Gaza has been marked as the new Holocaust.

Holocaust? You must be out of your mind to write such bullshit. 6 Million Jews perished in an industrial killing machine. We would need to fight the war in Gaza 6,000 times over in order to reach that kind of magnitude, and even then there is a difference between victims of war and exterminated people because of what they were.

But that is not what I wanted to tell you today. I want to give the human perspective of the war, which is not being reported in the media at all, and I wonder why that is.

A relative of mine came to visit from the US the other day and developed symptoms of a heart attack a day after the flight. She was admitted to Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv and remained under observation for a couple of days. She shared her room with one other Israeli woman and a woman from Gaza, as quite many patients do these days. We have heard about children being transferred to Israeli hospitals, but this story is different. The woman from Gaza suffers from a head and neck cancer, which had been treated in Gaza for years and finally had reached a stage where the doctors there gave up and send her home to die. That was shortly before the start of the war. A few days later Israeli troops reached her neighbourhood and her husband was brave enough to go out and ask the Israeli medic of the unit operating near his house for help. The medic called the units surgeon, who checked the woman and told the family that without treatment she would die very soon, but that he knows that surgery could be performed at Ichilov hospital. If they agreed he would try to arrange for a transfer. They agreed and the woman was evacuated in an Israeli army ambulance under Hamas fire to the Gaza border, where she was picked up by a civilian ambulance. She was operated on shortly after and was recovering from the surgery when my relative was admitted.

You see, that is the real face of Israeli humanity. Yes, there is war, and yes, innocent people die in wars, but Israelis don't fight the war in order to exterminate the Palestinians. They fight to defend their country and their way of life from maniac terrorist who have managed to take 1 million Gazans hostage.

As for the Nazis, the only surgery they performed on Jews was either experimental or aimed to sterilize young women, so they would have a longer productive phase in slave labor before going to the gas chamber.

If you still need to compare modern Jews to Nazis your are either totally ignorant or plain stupid.

A Response to Mr. Bishara (Al Jazeera)

2009-01-12T00:39:00.006+02:00

Marwan Bishara is a senior political analyst for the Al Jazeera English network and has published an opinion piece about Israel's motivation to go to war in Gaza in the International Herald Tribune of December 30, 2008. I sent the following reponse, which this time did not get published, so I do it here.

Experiencing democracy and observing it are not the same. Mr. Bishara's writing about Israeli motivation to go to war against the Hamas proves him to be an observer only, like the overwhelming majority of his Middle Eastern compatriots. When Israel's political leaders bow to overwhelming public pressure and come to the help of the Israeli citizens in the south, they finally do what they are supposed to do: Listen to their people first and the international community second, and there is nothing cynical about it. Being a democratic country at the very core, Israel also did not punish the Gazans for electing Hamas, as Mr. Bishra believes. Many Israelis even hoped that the new strongmen would fulfill agreements, once negotiated, more reliably than the chronically defaulting Palestinian Authority. Gazans started to suffer the siege once Israel tried economic sanctions against the continued rocket fire, before finally resorting to an all-out war against the terrorists-turned-rulers-remained-terrorists.

The most serious misunderstanding however is the question why Israel choose to go to war in the end. Just like the second Lebanon war did not start because of two abducted soldiers, the Gaza war did not start because one Israeli prisoner and a few rockets fired since the end of the cease fire, as Arab and most European media consistently claim in order to condemn the disproportionate use of force. Both wars started because the Israeli population living near the borders having been subjected to random rocket fire for years, which turned hundreds of thousands of lives into nightmares and the entire city of Sderot into a ghost town. One week of targeted strikes seem a very proportionate response for years and years of indiscriminate terror when you live in Sderot or Kiriat Shmona.

If Hamas' agenda was to create a state in Gaza and the West Bank, all they had to do was nothing. When Hamas took power in Gaza Israel was already set to withdraw from most of the West Bank as well. But pre-state sponsored terrorism proved the true agenda - the destruction of Israel, never hidden from those who wanted to know. Terror turned Israeli public opinion against concessions and delayed the creation of a Palestinian state once again for indefinite time, like several times before. The truly cynical outcome of the Palestinian's first experiment with democracy is to be left with two governments, one irrational and one incompetent, both being incapable of fulfilling their national dreams alongside Israel.

Why Israel needs to fight Hamas.

2008-12-30T23:32:00.013+02:00

Long time, no hear. Have been too busy - yes, really - and maybe a bit lazy, but most of all too depressed about Israeli politics in the last two years to find the muse, sit down and write something beyond the obvious.

However, the war in Gaza does need some explaining, I believe, although in general I find the official reporting a lot better than during the Second Lebanon War - this how our unfortunate encounter with Hezbollah is meanwhile officially being called. Nevertheless, fundamental analysis is rare, and so I'll try to explain what is actually going on around here.

The very basic question underlying the whole mess in Gaza is the following. After the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the subsequent Hamas election victory, why did Hamas not concentrate on building a better life for the Gazans and show the world that they can be responsible rulers (if inconvenient at times)? The PA was in so bad shape at the time that any reasonable administration would have made a better impression on the world than the corrupt and incompetent competition in the West Bank. Any Hamas member would answer on CNN "Because our brothers in the West Bank are still living under the Zionist occupation, and we need to resist that occupation overall, even if we in Gaza have managed to beat the Zionists out of our territory." We have heard this line a thousand times, and some people actually believe it. Well, I don't, and you'll soon know why.

If that line was the true, then the solution would be very clear cut. Withdraw from the West Bank unilaterally, just like we did it in Gaza, risk a civil war with those demented settler fanatics, and everything will be just fine. In the short period of quiet right after we left Gaza there was a clear consensus that this is the way to go, and Olmert won his election with a promise to do just that - the Israelis suspected Olmert to be a corrupt crook (they knew him well from his years as mayor of Jerusalem), but the majority of them wanted to do the final step and get out of the West Bank as well, most of it anyway, and the faster the better. So they swallowed the frog and voted Olmert back into office, which he had entered initially only by Ariel Sharon falling into coma (see the joke a few posts down).

And then Hamas did two things. A) They started to get the chaotic Gaza life under control, instilled some law and order, and all-in-all proved to be indeed a better alternative to the Palestinian Authority. Quite good. Okay, they used some unconventional methods along the way, like throwing Fatah members of the highest roofs they could find, leaving their bodies for the families to scrap off the pavement. But then again, this is Gaza, not Tuscany, so let's not be too picky. B) They used every opportunity to attack Israel, with terror attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel, and countless missiles fired at the Israeli communities around Gaza. Not so good.

For Olmert and all peace loving Israelis this was a very nasty surprise, which eventually forced Olmert to change course and postpone the withdrawal from the West Bank due to rapidly evaporating public support. "Why are those Morons in Gaza not getting it? All they have to do is to behave reasonably for a year or two and it will all be over, they have their state and we can live peacefully ever after." This was the most commonly asked question in the public debate.

The answer to that question is what our Hamas member forgot to mention on CNN. Hamas' national aspiration goes far beyond Gaza and the West Bank. There is no place for Israel alongside Hamas' vision of Palestine. Hamas has consistently refused to recognize Israel - on the contrary, Hamas declares the destruction of the Zionist entity as their primary political goal at every opportunity, in Arabic and even in Hebrew (believe it or not, Hamas spokespeople love to give interviews for Israeli TV, no idea why they even bother). Everything in this world has to serve this one purpose, the life of every Hamas member and his family, the quality of life in Gaza in general, and yes, also the very life of regular Gaza residents. So indeed, when this is your worldview it doesn't make sense to put too much effort into developing Gaza, other than to make it a launching pad for the next stage on the path to the final solution (pun intended).

Everything happening around us makes perfect sense when you look at it from that perspective. Of course it is okay to kill Israeli civilians, and really, why not? Hamas is willing to blow up their own people in suicide missions (they are even dying to do so), and to destroy the lives of over a million regular Gazans along the way, to keep them dirt poor, to use them as human shields and to murder them in the most barbaric ways imaginable if they object, so why should Israeli civilians enjoy any special consideration? Muslims go to heaven and the infidels go to hell, so everybody ends up where they belong (I don't really know if there is the concept of hell in Islam, but for sure the infidels are not headed for a 5 star hotel). If that is not a final solution, then what is? Every missile fired from Gaza into Israeli cities is aimed at civilian targets and loaded with a war head designed for maximum damage to soft targets - translated from military lingo that means hundreds of small pieces of shrapnel to kill every unprotected human being in a radius of 30 meters from the point of impact.

Now, even the most fundamentalist Muslims understand that since the Renaissance the Western World has developed different values, and they use those values daily for their propaganda machine. So while their indifferent targeting is justified by the Divine purpose, Israel's surgical strikes are genocide, even a Holocaust, what have you. And the absolutely shocking truth is that 95% of all Europeans and maybe 80% of Americans actually believe this bullshit. Israel has dropped so far about 200 tons of explosives on well selected targets, with some 400 causalities, among which they are some 100 unfortunate civilians, which by any military standard is a very impressive ratio. (Civilized Britain, today the biggest critic of Israel in Europe, bombed German cities in WWII for maximum impact on the population, killing 20,000 civilians and basically no military personnel in a single bombing raid on Dresden, just to name one example.) But the Hamas propaganda machine declares a Holocaust, and the world is demanding an immediate cease fire. Even the Israeli left wing had enough and is joining the calls to end the war now, while Hamas is firing 80 missiles a day into Israeli cities.

If Hamas had the possibility to deliver that amount of explosives into Israel, where they want it and how they want it, 90% of the Israeli population would be where they belong by now - in hell, remember? And let there be no doubt, not a single Hamas member would even think for a second that maybe this was disproportional use of force. There would be endless thank you prayers, gigantic feasts and fireworks all over the Middle East. Allah is great! Oh right, I forgot to mention Iran. One more thought experiment before we get there.

What would happen to the 10% surviving Israelis? Would they get medical care in Hamas hospitals, allowed visits from the Red Cross and communication with their relatives abroad? You bet... Civilian casualties from Gaza are treated in Israeli hospitals, international help organizations are allowed to ship some 100 truck loads of medical supplies and food to Gaza almost every day. If you want to compare Hamas attitude just watch what is happening to Gilad Shalit - but that is another topic for another time.

Having said all this, Hamas is really our smallest problem. That is as long as they don't have the means to deliver something like 200 tons of explosives. Unfortunately Iran will have those means very soon, and as Ahmadinejad has declared over and over again, it is God's promise that Israel will be wiped off the pages of history (not off the map apparently, this translation is disputed), but who in the West cares, other than the otherwise strangely incompetent Bush administration? The holy warriors of Islam need to fulfill that promise, and therefore, given the means, they will deliver the nuclear strikes on Israel. And kill the Muslims living in Israel in the process, you might ask? Of course! They will go to heaven as martyrs, and what could be better than that? Remember the bus loads of Iranian children that were sent into the Iraqi mine fields to clear those mines by triggering them with their bodies? That was islamist humanity then, and nothing has changed. (Not that modern ideologies like communism or fascism were much better in that aspect, but they did reserve their most most terrible abuses for their enemies, and in any case, they just didn't last that long.)

It does not take a lot of fancy interpretation to predict the future behaviour of a nuclear Iran from Hamas' current behaviour, or Hezbollah's behaviour. Essentially these are all entities driven by the same value system. I suggest you have a look at the link in the headline and hear about Hezbollah and PA in Lebanon first hand from a Lebanese journalist. If you don't take it from me, take it from her!

How will it all end? Well, the only possible scenario I can see is that eventually Israel will make Hamas understand that they can not achieve their ultimate goal by terror, and that a prosperous, well-developed state is necessary to develop the military might to get rid of those Zionists after all. This insight can only be generated by military defeat, again and again, but once Hamas reaches that point, they will agree to a long term cease fire (hudna) and stick to it. Developing that powerful state will take a couple of decades, and we can only hope that they forget along the way what they set out to do from the start.

This is why Israel has no choice but to fight Hamas back into reality, and isolate them from Iran's military resources, so they can not continue that proxy war for Iran any longer. It doesn't look good on TV, but it has to be done.

Shall we laugh or cry?

2007-01-04T19:58:00.000+02:00

..is the title of a sort of funny EMail I got today, which I have to share with you. We have gotten used to the continuous stream of scandals in the political and administrative leadership, but when I read this mail my heart stopped to beat for a few seconds. Is it really that bad? Judge for yourself:

It is a rainy night and we are at the hospital.
Only one assistant is around, named Shmiel. He is on night duty
tonight in the room of "sleeping" former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Everybody, but Sharon himself, knows he is no longer the
Prime Minister of Israel. Shmiel is sitting peeling an apple and G the
Israeli Secret Service ( Shabak) agent is nodding off.

Suddenly, all the machines start to beep. The PM is waking
up!

Sharon says, "I haven't slept like that for a long time! Get
me my strategist, Reuven Adler, I have some ideas for a new
direction."

Shmiel says, "Good morning, sir. How do you feel?"

Sharon answers, "I am dying of hunger. Where am I?"

The Shabak agent continues to sleep while Shmiel explains to
Sharon what had happened to him.

Sharon does not take him seriously and says, "So tonight you
fooled the PM, eh Shmiel?"

Shmiel says, "Sorry sir but you are really no longer the
PM."

After a few minutes Sharon asks, "So who replaced me?"

Shmiel answers, "Ehud Olmert."

Sharon reacts, "Olmert? That Jerusalemite potz? What will
happen if war breaks out, he does not know how to run the army! At least
Shaul [Mofaz] is still there!"

Shmiel answers, "Mofaz is the Minister of Transportation."

"So who is the Defense Minister?" Shmiel says, "Peretz."

"That old man is still alive?!" asks Sharon in wonderment.

Shmiel whispers trembling, "Not Peres, Peretz. Amir Peretz."
"What? Are you crazy? I close my eyes for a minute and you
guys let a Labor leader take over the defense of the country?! Not all
the factories in Dimona are the same. Does he know that? Listen,
get Omri here right away. He will fix everything."

"Sorry sir, Omri is on his way to jail."

"Jail?? For that nonsense? I do not believe it. So get me my
lawyer quickly. Get Klagsbald."

Shmiel responds "Klagsbald is on his way to jail."

Sharon calms down and says, "I knew I could count on
Klagsbald. He will get Omri out of it."

Shmiel corrects him "No, sir. Klagsbald is also on
his way to jail. He was driving and not paying attention and caused an
accident unintentionally killing a young woman and her son."

Sharon said, "So bring me [Avigdor] Yitzchaki. He always
knows how to fix these situations."

"Sorry, sir. Yitzchaki is under his own investigation for
tax fraud. He's fixed a few things too many this time."

"Can't be. I know Yitzchaki. They must be framing him. So
get me the Head of Police."

"Sorry, sir, but Karadi is in an investigation for
corruption."

"Of course he is. He is the head of police. I am sure he is
in the middle of a number of investigations!"

"No, sir. This is an investigation against him!"

Sharon takes a deep breath. "It can't be. The whole justice
system has been ruined! We must get them out of this. Get me the
minister of Internal Security, Tzachi [Hanegbi]."

"Sir, Hanegbi has been indicted for fraud, bribery and job
fixing. He is not a minister anymore."

"So get me the Justice Minister. Who did Olmert appoint?"

"Haim Ramon."

"So get him here!"

"Sorry sir. I can't. He has been indicted and is on trial
for sexual harassment."

"What? So get me the president. That is still Katzav,
right?"

"Yes, sir, for now. But Katzav is under investigation as well, for
sexual harassment AND wiretapping."

"So get me the Chief of Staff, Boogie [Moshe Ayalon]. Ah, wait,
that is Halutz, right?"

"Sir, he got into some trouble in the Lebanon War. Nothing
criminal, really. But he sold some stocks with very odd timing.
He will soon be giving testimony to an investigative committee."

"Halutz?? He was a young Piper pilot during the Lebanon
War!"

"Sir, that would be the second Lebanon War, it happened
while you were sleeping. We... how should I say, kind of lost
the war but the Prime Minister said we should be patient, victory is coming."

Sharon looked around his room. "What is your name and what
is your position?"

"Shmiel, sir. I am a hospital attendant."

"Ok, Shmiel. Do not tell anyone about this conversation."

"You can count on me, sir."

"I'm going back to sleep."

Yes, I guess he would not like what has happened since he fell into coma.... I apologize for not mentioning the author, I just don't know who wrote this cruel summary.

Thank you, Hezbollah!

2006-08-20T00:05:00.000+03:00

Why for haven's sake would we have to thank Hezbollah? For almost 200 Israelis killed? For 23 billion NIS damages to the Israeli economy? Well, obviously that is not what I had in mind... We have to thank Hezbollah for a wake-up call, which may have been delivered at the very last moment.

I really don't want to join here the tired old criticism of every decision any government has ever taken. Israelis love to criticize, and they always know everything best. Every cab driver had a better plan for this war, every journalist knew from day one that we are not going to win, bla, bla, bla. Sickening.

Side track: All this bitching in the media reminds me of a totally unrelated story. A few years ago, at the height of the second Intifada, the quality control people of the public water company "Mekorot" discovered a milky pollution in water pipeline connecting the center of Israel with the Sea of Galilee, Israel's only fresh water reservoir. Not being able to identify the chemical fast enough, and not knowing exactly how far the stuff had traveled in the system already, they decided to close the valves near the end of the pipeline and flush the whole line with clean water. This meant thousands and thousands of cubic meters of scarce water literally went down the tube. Shortly afterwards it was discovered that the chemical was a relatively harmless fertilizer, which was sucked into the water system by a defect reflow protection valve on somebody's agricultural watering system. The Mekorot managers were almost lynched for wasting so much water and creating a public panic. Of course, at that time more than ever, there were very good reasons to assume that terrorist could poison the water. Therefore, in the absence of any solid data on the pollutant, the Mekorot managers took the gutsy decision to dump all that water and alert the public. Had it been a terrorist act, they'd come out the saviors of maybe thousands of people. Since it was not, everybody and their grandmother knew better and criticized them for their decision. This is Israel, you can never do anything without somebody claiming in public he or she could have done better. I have to admit, it is tiring at times.

Back to the Hezbollah. Having talked to reserve soldiers returning from Lebanon, I come to the following picture. No, we did not loose this war, Hezbollah has been hit hard and it will take them some time to lick their wounds and recover from the blow. Iran will have to spend a lot of money to replenish Hezbollah's stock piles, money they would need to buy equipment for their dangerous nuclear program, maybe. Na, I guess they'd rather save a little on education....

But we also didn't win this war. Although the threat was known and the IDF trained ever since we left Lebanon for this possibility, when the war broke out nothing worked as planned. Olmert, Halutz and Peretz ignored all the existing planning and reinvented the war as it unfolded. Instead of an immediate massive call-up of well trained and prepared reserves, and an overwhelming blow with boots on the ground and vastly superior fire power all over the South within a couple of days, Halutz went about it with the motto "let the airforce win this war", while Olmert, Peretz and Livni were worried more about European public opinion than our soldiers lifes. We were able to watch on TV bloody battles being fought about a single house in some Lebanese village, when a single artillery shell could have finished the job in a second and with zero casualties on our side. There were quite a few attempts to win a war like this with surgical strikes delivered from the air in the last 20 years or so, and none of them have been engraved as great success stories in military history - it just doesn't work. Only when this approach failed also here in front of a horrified Israeli public, did the leadership finally allow the "green" generals to operate according to established principles of ground war. They got two days to make up for the blunders of one wasted month. And so Hezbollah got away, limping and bleeding, but alive and encouraged, Israel can be beaten! being their message to all our enemies.

A gigantic opportunity to deliver a devastating blow to Hezbollah and friends has been missed. With a rare consensus among the Israelis regarding the justification for this war and it's goals, with extremely high motivation all through the IDF, only a mediocre result has been achieved. No, it is not a devastating loss, there are gains on the ground as well as in the political arena, but altogether everybody understands that one day we will have to go back and do it all over again. Already now the UN resolution regarding the demilitarization south of the Litani as well as the weapons embargo are being broken every single day, with nobody in the UN giving a damn, as usual. So at some point the whole mess will flare up again, no doubt about it.

Nevertheless, imagine the extend of the disaster if all of this had happened a few years later, with Hezbollah having added hundreds of Iranian long range missiles to its arsenal, further improved the fortified infrastructure in the South and maybe even added non-conventional war heads to their missiles. Not only would we have seen many more Israeli casualties, also the chance of this leading to a direct war with Syria and maybe even Iran would have been much higher.

Now, that we narrowly avoided a bigger disaster, we will surely be prepared much better next time, right? Well, maybe. If the self cleaning mechanism of the Israeli democracy finally starts to kick in, if incompetent military and political leaders are finally forced ONCE to take responsibility for their failures and if a minimum level of ethics and professionalism is restored to the ranks of Israeli leadership, in that case we will be prepared.

Israelis, wake up! Incompetence, corruption and other unethical conduct of our leadership must not be tolerated any longer. Has there ever been a country where the prime minister, the president and several ministers are under police investigation for misconduct at the same time? Ever? One?

Hezbollah is our crystal ball to see the future. If things don't change around here, the next time around we won't get away with just a bloody nose.

So, thank you Hezbollah!

What it all boils down to....

2006-08-08T19:09:00.000+03:00

Found this one on Flickr. It is too good and too true to be missed, so here is the pic instead of my usual links. Don't know who is the author, so I apologize for the copyright violation right away.

"The War with Israel Is Over" - A Letter to the Palestinians from an Australian Arab

2006-08-06T16:59:00.000+03:00

Youssef Ibrahim's letter was all over the internet. If you have seen it, forgive me, I needed to include this here for the sake of completeness. There are some sane voices in the Arab camp. Not many, but they do exist. This one is a must read if you haven't done so already (click the title).

Secular/Rational Lebanese, where are you?

2006-08-06T16:11:00.000+03:00

One of these days I suddenly remembered one of my many plane trips to Europe, some ten years ago, that time from Tel Aviv via Athens to Frankfurt. During the last leg I was sitting in the middle section of the coach, trying to work. In the back a party was going on. People were changing seats all the time, loud discussions from row to row, distribution of home made food, blocked aisles, annoyed flight attendants, a picture not uncommon in flights in this corner of the world...

I was too far away to understand anything, but there was no doubt in my mind that those were fellow Israelis on their way to some organized vacation in Europe, also taking advantage of the cheap connection via Athens. Since it was just impossible to work I got up after a while to check out the home made food (try that one on an United Airlines flight...). Once I came closer I realized that the people were speaking Arabic, not Hebrew. I was puzzled, because they were not looking like Israeli Arabs, actually they were not looking like Arabs at all, at least not to me being a newcomer to the region at the time. I sat down in the vicinity and observed the happy crowd. It became clear after a while that this was a couple going to honeymoon, and some of their friends or relatives (ever thought of taking your buddies along with you on your honeymoon...?). I closed in and asked one of the happy people where they are from and what is going on. It turned out that the wedding party was from Beirut. A Lebanese group behaving exactly the same way Israelis would behave in a similar setting.

I also recall stories from Israeli soldiers who had been to Beirut in the first war, making friends despite their status as enemies, and feeling pretty much at home. Most of them are just like us, they said.

Well, I guess that is true for the secular Lebanese, for the Christians and some of the moderate Moslems. It is certainly not true for those fanatics which sacrifice their children in order to give shelter and international legitimacy to the Hezbollah terrorists bombarding Israeli cities.

Still, with all that is going on now, I wonder where are the voices of those Lebanese people, with whom we could make peace so easily. I would love to travel one day to Beirut, which was once called the Paris of the Middle East, sit in a cafe and have a croissant with some Lebanese friends. Is this so far fetched?

It didn't seem to be back then.

What an American-Arab Intellectual Thinks About Islam

2006-08-02T17:22:00.000+03:00

Wafe Sultan, an Arab-American (or American Arab, which way would she prefer?) psychologist gave a short but very exciting interview on Al Jazeera. This is a must see for everybody trying to figure out what the heck is going on in the Middle East (click on the title).

I would like to thank Mrs. Sultan for her frank words, and I wish her that she will stay alive long enough to hopefully witness some changes for the better. Her reaching pension age would be one of those changes in the today's Islamic culture the future of all of us depends on.

Open letter to S. Faramarzi / Associated Press

2006-08-02T16:29:00.000+03:00

Dear Mrs. Faramarzi,

I'd like to express first that although a certain anti-Israeli bias is visible in your work, to my opinion it is still within the limits of what one can expect from a professional journalist. This gives me a glimmer of hope that you may find some value in my following comment.

You keep repeating the statement that Israel started the current fighting as a response to Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, which is indeed the common opinion outside of Israel. This is a superficial and extremely misleading interpretation of the events.

If the public opinion outside Israel is shaped by such a totally wrong understanding, a peaceful solution to the current crisis, and indeed to the Middle East problem overall, will only move further out of reach. I believe that we both share the wish to avoid such a bleak future.

What is usually omitted from interpretations of Israel's motivation for the current fighting are the events since the withdrawal from Lebanon, and even more so since the withdrawal from Gaza.

In both cases the withdrawal to an internationally recognized border has not increased the security of Israel's citizens. In the North Hezbollah has pledged to "liberate" the so-called Sheba Farms, a meaningless shred of dirt, the future of which could easily have been settled in a wider regional peace agreement with Lebanon and Syria. However this provided the justification for a massive military build-up right at Israel's border fence, regular cross-border raids, and worst of all, occasional bombardment of Israeli townships and villages with Katjusha rockets, bluntly targeting the civilian population.

The same picture emerged after the withdrawal from Gaza. Instead of providing the critics in Israel with proof that the formula "Land for Peace" works, Hamas and other organizations proved to the Israeli public that loss of control means loss of security. In the months from the withdrawal and widely applauded razing of the Israeli settlements to the day the hostilities in the North broke out, Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip absorbed over 600 Qassam rocket attacks.

Hezbollah crossed the border to ambush an Israeli patrol, initially killing 3 soldiers and abducting 2 more. At the same time a barrage of mortars and Katjushas was fired into Israel, wounding several civilians. Those Katjushas, being numbers 601-751 of missiles fired at Israeli civilians recently, triggered the Israeli response.

What we are now witnessing is the final collapse of the ailing "Land for Peace" doctrine and the forced return to a doctrine of "Deterrence First". Misrepresenting the Israeli response as a maniac's head rush over two miserable soldiers could well be the last nail in the coffin of hope for peace.

(Formalities omitted from the original letter sent directly to AP)

Qana - A Nightmare Repeated

2006-07-31T19:44:00.000+03:00

For the second time Israel has lost a war in the Lebanese village of Qana. As in 1996, some kind of mistake lead to the bombing of a place filled with civilians. The public outcry lead to a halt of the military operations then, and it seems it is the beginning of the end also this time.

But why is that? Sure, it is terrible when civilians get killed, and even more so when it is children. I am a father of three, and seeing the pictures of those little bodies dragged from the ruins made me sick to my stomach. It is very easy to imagine that this could happen to my kids, too. After all, we are not living in Switzerland. And, unlike the Swiss, we are surrounded by neighbors who want nothing more than exactly that: Kill my kids, and celebrate it. Celebrate it to the silence of the UN and a probably not very deeply distressed Annan, as we have seen when 400 Israeli civilians were blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in 2002 and 2003.

And that is the difference between Israel and Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and all the other medieval warrior societies around us. We kill because we are fighting for our survival, and because the Hezbollah tactics leave us no choice. Hezbollah kill - for what? For the Sheba Farms, a small piece of dirt not even viewed as occupied by the UN? Bullshit.

Nobody other than the idiotic Al-Jazera (et al) propaganda can believe that Israel wanted to kill those Lebanese kids. (By the way, were there ever images of Israeli kids killed on a bus by a suicide bomber on Al-Jazera? Ever? Well, I didn't think so. Although, on second thought, there actually might have been - with victory music and a heroic poem about the martyr who just slaughtered them...)

I don't believe in the intentional killing because I live here, I know the people, the same people that make up the army, and they are not like that. My kids are drawing peace doves in the kindergarten, they learn that people come in different colors and with different cultures. At the same time kids in Palestinian kindergarten learn to hate Israel and the desire to become martyrs. A thin strip of land separates two cultures who are actually 500 years apart from one another. No wonder that some Arabs still talk about the crusaders when they refer to the West. They haven't yet realized that crusaders are an extinct species, and they themselves have turned into modern day crusaders. I just hope they will last a lot less than their medieval ancestors.

Where is the Diaper Truck?

2006-07-27T12:09:00.000+03:00

I start to hate reading the Israeli newspapers. Apart from a few stories about heroism of individual soldiers, it is all just one big whining. Daily pictures of wounded soldiers being evacuated, soldiers crying over fallen comrades, articles about soldiers afraid to go into combat, mothers worried for their sons. The purpose of a heroic battle always seems to be rescue of casualties, not whacking Hezbollah's behind. This may all be very touching and human, but the IDF is not a congregation of social workers, it is a war machine that should make the enemy tremble from fear.

The only thing missing (so far) is a diaper truck bringing urgently needed supplies to the front line!

Israelis always know better than anybody else what has to be done. This is in particular the case with journalists. Now every commentator is a better general than those who serve in the IDF, so nothing the army does is right, they should have done this or that. Worst are the "we won't achieve the goal" articles. This kind of bullshit could very easily turn into self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecies.

I can see the Hezbollah shmocks sitting in their bunker, or hidden among Lebanese civilians in some village, and browsing the internet for Israeli publications, having a big, fat smile on their faces.

It is time military censorship kicks in. The news media cause a serious damage to the war effort. They can and even should show what is happening on the home front, but please, no more images of crying soldiers - or I will send the diaper truck!

Finally the Truth: From an UN Official!

2006-07-25T18:05:00.000+03:00

The western press is slowly picking up the following statement made by the UN Humanitarian Chief Egeland, published after his visit to Beirut:

"Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending ... among women and children," he said. "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men."

Apart from explaining to the world why there are so many civilians victims in Lebanon, the statement is also most noteworthy from an Israeli point-of-view, as it is the first time ever any UN official is (at least indirectly) blaming anything happening here on Israel's enemies, not on Israel. There is hope!

I am dying to know if there is even a single publication in the Arabic or Muslim world citing this statement. Just one, maybe????

And all this because of two soldiers?

2006-07-24T17:39:00.000+03:00

This is the most stupid sentence I have heard in a long time, and one can hear it a lot on TV these days. Very few of the journalists flown in to cover the new Lebanon conflict apparently take the time on the plane to read up a little before they go live with nonsense of that sort.

Of course it is not because of the two kidnapped soldiers, just like the army's return to Gaza was not because of one kidnapped other soldier. Those were just triggers. The current war on two fronts means that we have finally been forced to realized that "Land for Peace" is a formula which does not work. It has been the guideline of most governments in the last 15 years, but it has failed. Every time we have ceded territory we got punished for it, rather than rewarded.

Example Lebanon. The UN-verified Israeli withdrawal to the international border has created a certain lull in the daily small intensity fighting that was the routine ever since the creation of the buffer zone in South Lebanon, but in fact it did only produce an illusion of security. And, the final result was written on the walls for a long time, we just didn't want to know it. Israeli intelligence knew that Hezbollah was amassing missiles, hiding them among the civilians in South Lebanon. We knew they are building bunkers and observation points right on the border. We may not have know the full extent of those efforts. But that those efforts are not meant as confidence building measures was also clear from the frequent violations of the border by Hezbollah raids and occasional Katjusha fire into the towns and villages of Northern Israel. On the day of the kidnapping the North was hit by 150 Katjushas. At some point it had to boil over.

The same thing in Gaza. Instead of getting busy with building the first part of their anticipated State after the total withdrawal including the destruction of the Israeli settlements, the Gazans were busy producing Quassam rockets, and digging tunnels to smuggle more weapons in from Egypt. From the day we left Gaza for good (or so we thought) to the decision to reenter Gaza with ground forces, the Israeli towns and villages near the border were hit by 600 Quassam rockets. At some point it had to boil over.

I have heard this argument from the Israeli right many times and never believed it: "The Arabs will interpret such a withdrawal as weakness and result of their terror tactic. They will use the new freedom to intensify the terror rather than to lessen it." Well, I have to admit, they were right on.

Hamas and Hezbollah have convinced one more Israeli dove. There can not be peace without the total destruction of their capability to terrorize the Israeli population. Only once those organizations have been totally destroyed, by all means and whatever the cost in terms of Israeli and Arab casualties, only then the remaining forces among the Palestinians and all other current enemies will have learned the lesson: Israel can not be defeated by violence. Only then they will be ready for peace.

This also means that Olmert's plan of further unilateral withdrawals has no future - unless it is backed up by the credible threat of total destruction of any entity daring to attack Israel from any territory returned, whatever the cost may be. I hope Olmert has the stomach to build that lost credibility now, once and for all.

May the force be with you, Ehud!

Home, sweet Home!

2006-07-20T18:34:00.000+03:00

Made it back home, not just in time, well in time. Very well in time, actually. This war in the North is quickly becoming part of the status quo. I start to suspect that I will be going and returning a couple of more times, before there will be a dramatic change in the news.

Oh yes, the news. While in Germany I was starving for news. The hotel deep in the forests of the "Schwaebische Alp" had neither cables nor satellite TV, so I could get only the local and two national German stations. The good souls have news in the morning and twice or three times during the evening program, that's it. Well, there is not much to talk about, is there. How many times can you look at a traffic jam caused by vacationers going south? Or see the dropping water levels in Lake Konstanz?

News in Israel are something else. For starters, there usually is something new to see, every day, every hour, somewhere somebody is trying to kill somebody else. Or gets killed. Or could have been killed. Whatever. So whenever you turn on the national channels, it will be only a few minutes before you get some news update thrown at you. Soap - commercial - news - commercial - news - promo - commercial - news - soap. That is roughly the typical programming sequence. This is how Israeli TV manages to spread a single episode of "24 Hours" over 24 hours actual viewing time.

Well, the thing is that even when it occasionally happens that there simply are no news whatsoever, how much news can 6 Million people generate after all, the pattern continues unchanged. When poor Ariel Sharon had his stroke all we could watch on TV for a full week were commercials and news bulletins. By the end of the week TV news crews had managed to interview every person Sharon ever talked to in his entirely life, and many more he hadn't, including hospital cleaning staff and random patients in other wards. Waiting for the next 30 seconds of "24 Hours" I had to watch Moshe from Moshav Galia, telling live about his abdominal pain, which is not entirely unlike the feeling Ariel Sharon must have had at the beginning of his stroke, being finally relieved by the same capable doctors, even with somewhat similar probing instruments. When Sara from Kfar Saba started to talk about the traffic jams on the way to the hospital, I changed channels for the 67th time that evening, only to return to the recorded version of Moshe's abdominal thriller.

It won't take long and the current news will decay to the same level. That will be the moment to finally go on summer vacation without the fear of missing another historic moment.

A peaceful weekened to our soldiers in the North, to frightened families in damp shelters, and to the poor Lebanese civilians who have nothing to do with the Hezbolla shmocks and get into the way of the IAF by bad luck only. May God watch out for all of you.

At War!

2006-07-14T16:36:00.000+03:00

This is my ultimate nightmare. I don't mean the mini war going on in Israel at this very moment. I mean that I am not there! My family is preparing the shelter and I am traveling in Europe, green and summary, one big, peaceful Disneyland. Filled with people utterly clueless about what is going on in the Middle East, now more than ever. Besides being a bit worried for my folks, but not too much really, I have this tendency of missing the historic moments. The fall of the Berlin wall I experienced glued to the TV in an Israeli student dorm, instead of climbing over the wall myself. By the time the Iraqi SCUDs fell on Israel in the first Gulf War I was back in Germany and talked to people in Israel who were wearing gas masks during the conversation. When Rabin was shot I was in Hong Kong, stunned and sad about not being able to be with all the mourners on what is now called Rabin square in Tel Aviv. I did experience the return of the British colony Hong Kong to China, better than nothing, I guess.

And now this. Israel is finally getting tough with the maniacs, who have fired over 600 missiles into Israel since we have withdrawn entirely from the Gaza strip, and I am having croissant for breakfast - but good ones, I have to admit. The rightists in Israel were proven right - instead of getting less terror we got more. And now the Katjushas raining down on the North, with Syria and Iran getting a good show for their money.

However, I don't think we are doing the right thing with bombarding bridges and air strips in Lebanon. Of course Hezbollah has to be turned into dust, whatever it takes, but at the end of the day Hezbollah is just a group of demented Mafiosi, who live off the Lebanese people like blood sucking insects. They could do nothing without the support from Teheran and Damascus. And this is exactly where we have to go to stop the madness. If Assad has to witness the whole military and administrative apparatus of his governing clique turned into trash by the IAF, he will probably be smart enough to understand that a few Katjushas on Israel are not worth this price, as much as he may enjoy them. The same is true for Iran. The mullahs think they are out of reach and therefore they can support terror and call for Israel's destruction without any risk. This is the time to show them that Israel's arm extends all the way to Teheran. And, by the way, it is an excellent opportunity to finish their crazy nuclear ambitions. But whom am I telling this - Olmert and Peretz, do you read me?

I just hope I'll make it home before it is all over, once again.

You people out there, have a nice and peaceful weekend.

Italy, finally!

2006-03-30T15:30:00.000+02:00

Not exactly a happy day in Israel's history is behind us. The election results are in and we are starting to realize that nothing is as we expected.

The front runner Kadima disappointed with 28 seats instead of the 35 expected, and will have to yield important ministries to the needed coalition partners, probably Labor, two religious parties (Shas and UTJ) and the Pensioners - who appeared out of nowhere to claim 7 seats. This coalition will control 74 of 120 seats in the Knesset, enough to push through Olmert's plan of further unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank. But this is where to good news end.

34 seats of that coalition have the reversal of the current economic policies as their main goal ( policies that have saved Israel from bankruptcy after the burst of the hitech bubble), and they will extort Olmert at every and each opportunity. For every settler leaving the West Bank they will demand a million Shekels to stuff the pockets of their clientele, the weak segments of society as they are called, and the Ultra-Orthodox. Millions and millions, which the so-called rich middle class will have to earn, and what can not be earned will increase the budget deficit and simply be left for our children to deal with. The money will not be invested into infrastructure, education, R&D or other drivers of economic growth, it will be distributed in form of unproductive hand-outs, unconnected to personal commitment, effort or performance. The necessary result will be higher taxes, slower growth, higher unemployment, inflation - it is all soooo predictable and yet Israel is falling into the old trap once again. How depressing. And on top of all that, we'll be back at the polling stations in 2 years max. That kind of coalition will disintegrate over the first real crisis. We may not have managed to copy Italy's quality of life, but we sure have mad great progress in achieving Italian sort of government survival times. (Thinking about Italy - we are also nowhere near Italian style in fashion. Too bad.)

By the way, you can think about Netanyahu what you want, and I am by no means a fan of his political maneuvers, but his leadership as Finance Minister and iron guard of the budget will soon be missed - note my words.

However, in my opinion the biggest damage to the country will be caused by the failure of the secular parties to keep the religious out of the government. The return of the inherently anti-democratic ("who votes for us goes to heaven") and chronically corrupt Shas party is going to cost us more than all the security measures against the Hamas terror together. As Sam Harris ("The End of Faith" - a must read!) says: If iron age philosophers hold power over modern society, things can only change for the worse.

Shinui (="change"), my personal pick, was the secular watch dog in the last government (at least for the first two years or so), keeping religious sticky hands out of the public coffers. This time they didn't even make the minimum number of votes to send a representative into the Knesset. Their demand to audit the reports from religious schools with the subsequent discovery of tens of thousands of bogus students saved the public 500 million Shekels every year! With Shas running the show those reports won't even be reviewed - note my words. You have 80 students called Moshe Levy in a school of 100? What a strange coincident. Shas already now demands control of the Ministry of Communications, so they can ban access to porn via mobile phones and the internet, and have sermons of their "spiritual leader", Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, distributed via public TV stations. Worse yet, their anticipated control of the Ministry of the Interior will allow them to meddle also in the future with the secular public's wish to marry or divorce in a civil act without the consent of the rabbinical court. Reminds you of Iran? It should!

An interesting news bit is the low voter turn-out, only 67%, the lowest in Israel's history. Everybody has offered a different explanation, I believe many Israelis concluded correctly that this election will return mostly corrupt, self-centered and incompetent politicians to power and do nothing good for the country.

So why even bother to vote? It was such a nice day to BBQ on the beach...

A Winter Day

2006-02-21T22:36:00.000+02:00

Browsing through my last posts one could get the totally wrong impression that I don't like Israel all that much. Well, here is a short one from a totally different perspective.

This afternoon I had a meeting in Herzelia Pituach, a trendy HiTech center on the Mediterranean coast, a bit north of Tel Aviv. Before the meeting I had lunch in the Herzelia Marina, sitting in the sun - 23 deg C in the middle of February, people! - and watching the yachts. After the meeting I went down to the beach, bought a beer, dropped into the sand and watched the sun set. Two hours like that and a lot of the daily hassle just dissolves into background noise.

Could have been a worse day.

Ever feel really, really sick?

2006-02-16T13:48:00.000+02:00

Omri Sharon was sentenced yesterday to 9 months in prison and fined 300,000 Shekel for his central role in raising and hiding illegal campaign contributions in the 99 Likud primaries. Nobody expected a serious sentence, and the shockwave went through all layers of society. Serious is relative here though, since the maximum sentence is 5 years, but hey - it's a beginning.

Anyway, all afternoon I had to listen on the radio to Omri's fellow politicians whining about the severe sentence, about the judge overstepping her mandate, about the heartless legal system not taking into account the tragedy surrounding the Sharon family, bla, bla, bla. What a load of bullshit. Not one had the guts and/or the character to say "he got what he deserves for doing what he did". Not one.

Not that Omri's crimes were in any way unusual for the political establishment. To take just the latest examples, Naomi Blumenthal (Likud) was convicted of bribery during the 2002 Likud primaries (remember the political joke?) and Tzachi Hanegbi (now Kadima) is under investigation for having filled up the ranks of the Ministry of the Environment with all kind of cronies during his term as (Likud) minister. And every year the State Comptroller's report is full with stories like these, conveniently ignored by most.

The real scandal is however that not a single soul in the Likud or Kadima is even suggesting that those dubious characters should not run for the Knesset, be expelled from the party, or whatever self-cleaning measures one might think of.

That is the message: No matter how much shit you have on your hands, as long as you are buddies with Bibi Netanyahu (Likud), Ehud Olmert (ex-Likud, now Kadima) or the Shas Torah Sages (kind of the Shas central committee), you are going to be okay.

I had enough. I think I will vote for Meretz. They are hopeless dreamers, but at least nobody there can be seriously corrupt, as they never had the power to do anything for anybody. No power, no corruption. And dreams are a rare resource these days.

Reminds me of a lawyer joke, which I will modify a little bit:
Q: "How do you call a hundred Likud central committee members chained together on the bottom of the ocean?"
A: "A good beginning."

The Banana Republic, Part II

2006-02-09T10:42:00.000+02:00

Couple of days ago I picked up the "flag joke", and then I saw the Haaretz article (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/679578.html) - see for yourself. Reality can get pretty wierd our here.

Well, we have a nice little winter storm outside, electricity in parts of the country is down and it will take several hours to get fixed. Ample of time off work to get a few words out on the state of the affairs.

The election is approaching and with it the same old question: Shall I vote for the party that can maybe fix the trouble with the Palestinians (Kadima), or shall I punish my only possible choice for selecting Ehud Olmert as replacement of Ariel Sharon? Olmert is politically correct (literal meaning) in the sense that he will continue the path of unilateral separation from the Palestinians, which is the only way forward (hence "Kadima") feasible at this time, and with the emergence of a Hamas-controlled PA this time will last at least another 5-10 years. But Olmert also continues in the path of shameless mingling with criminals and is suspected to be even more corrupt than his precessor. Having much less of a track record to lean back on, Olmert can not afford to be arrogant about this. He was criticized twice by the attorney general for connections with and intervening on behalf of the Gavrieli clan, a known organized crime family, a fact which he bluntly denied two days ago in a TV interview - lying into the public's face about an established fact, how stupid can one get? This blunter cost Kadima 2 seats in the polls and it is going to get worse as more and more dirt is uncovered about Ehud Olmert, a man without a Teflon layer, unlike Ariel Sharon. Arik will be remembered as the man who founded a new centrist main stream to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Olmert as the man who sank it.

A few more words about the Gavrieli clan. Long suspected to be in the illegal gambling business, a number of family members were finally arrested this week (see link in the head line). The really disgusting thing about this is that the family is very well connected to the Likud leadership (see "A Political Joke" in http://madinisrael.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_madinisrael_archive.html) and thus even managed to send their daughter into the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament). Of course Inbal had no problem to use her immunity in order to protect her parents' home from a police search related to the gambling investigation. Abusing their immunity to cover up dirty business has become a common theme among political thugs and low lives in the current Knesset. The really disturbing thing about all of this is that not a single Israeli public servant has resigned from his or her job for being associated with corruption scandals, connections to organized crime or other severe misconduct. I can not think of a single western democracy with so low standards of responsibility and honor among the political elite. Israel, the Banana Republic. Sad, very, very sad.

Interesting Times

2006-02-06T00:16:00.000+02:00

Well, at least we can not say that things are boring around us. Since I last wrote basically everything has changed. Sharon is out of the game, which is too bad, the peace loving Scandinavians are getting whacked by Muslims all over the place, and even the weather is going nuts - Kibbutz Eilot (near Eilat), where I just spent a couple of nice days, is now covered with 40 cm of mud after the heaviest rain falls since 1956 or so. Gee, cool stuff, but I am a bit busy right now with other things, so for today only a nice joke I picked up today:

Arab shopper in the store: "I'd like a Danish, a Norwegian and a German flag, please."
Shop keeper: "No problem, I just got a load of really nice ones. Shall I pack them as a present?".
Shopper: "Oh, no thank you, too kind. But I think I'll burn them on the spot!"

You've got to love them...

Kadima! (Forward!)

2005-12-01T22:28:00.000+02:00

Arik the Bulldozer had finally enough. He quit the Likud and started a new party - "Kadima", which means forward. His main objective, or so he says, is to achieve a peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, and the echo in the Israeli population is overwhelming: 47% want to see Ariel Sharon form the next government. Wow! The new star of the newly socialist Labor Party, Amir Peretz, only made 28% in the same poll. By the way - so much for "the disengagement has no majority", and "Sharon will get punished in the next elections" bullshit the right wing has been trumpeting for months.

But something isn't right. There is no way to achieve a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at this time. The Palestinian Authority is a useless bunch of corrupt apparatchics, getting whacked daily by Hamas et al. There is no way Abu Mazen can broker a peace deal with the Israelis, because he would get blasted to hell the next day. And powerful Hamas is not interested in an official deal, although some high profile Hamas members have indicated lately that a change of policy could be possible in a far future.

So how can Arik deliver on his promise? Only by keeping the military threat very credible and at the same time dictating de-facto final borders by a number of further unilateral withdrawals. It has worked before, and it will work again. Not exactly the cozy side-by-side Olso had in mind, but apart from some individuals very out-of-touch with reality, nobody believes in that kind of deal anymore, anyway.

Well, to my Palestinian readers (anybody out there?) I say: Time for you guys to wake up. If you don't get your act together and start delivering the (roadmap) goods, Arik will take away 1/3 of the West Bank for the big settlement blocks, complete the neat wall around the rest and then you can do in your sand box whatever you want. He will just ignore your sorry existence.

Cool stuff, I almost feel obliged to vote for Arik in the next elections. There is only one problem: He is the head of maybe the most corrupt family in politics today. His son cut a deal with the prosecution, took the blame and will eventually go to jail for his father's filthy business, but hey, we all know who is pulling the strings in this soap opera. In the good old times a minister with that kind of PR problem had only one way out: A bullet through the head. But we are not living in those good old times anymore, and half of the Israelis are willing to vote for a "Godfather", as long as he gets rid of the Palestinians.

So, here I am left with a terrible dilemma. What is worse - external terror or internal decay? I'll let you know some other time.

The Real Terror

2005-10-10T16:39:00.000+02:00

.. is on the roads. This weekend a maniac with 19 previous traffic offenses killed four people and created in the process five orphans. This is the third accident with multiple fatalities in the last few months being caused by a reckless driver known to the authorities as such.

Here is what I wrote to the Ha'aretz editors in response to their report (see the link above).

Quote from Ha'aretz:
Central district police superintendent Yigal Hadad said yesterday it was "a grave and very serious accident. The driver is a lawbreaker who killed four people and left five orphans. Such a man must stand up to the law in all its severity," he said.

The value of such post-mortem statements is cosmetic at best. As a police volunteer I can attest that I frequently encounter drivers with revoked licenses during traffic patrols, who are not even afraid or ashamed to admit right away that they are driving without a valid license. The willingness of the administration and courts to deal with rogue drivers in an effective way is minimal and limited to public relations damage control once a serious accident has happened.

The basic fault is in the ideology of a populist law enforcement. There are laws against every imaginable offense, but effective prosecution is limited to cases of "high public interest" - and traffic offenses short of manslaughter are not in this category. Too many people commit them regularly and changing this would mean to step onto the toes of the general public, something our usually spineless politicians are not prepared to do. But without political back-up also the courts and even more so the police are afraid to do the right thing and ending up scapegoats for the resulting public anger.

Every parent knows that you can not tell a child that stealing is bad, but if you steal only small things, then never mind, I'll look the other way. You will get punished only for serious theft.

Nevertheless, this is exactly how Israeli drivers are being educated - never mind about the speed limit within the cities, never mind about parking in a red-white zone or on a pedestrian crossing, never mind even about overtaking a car stopping at a pedestrian crossing, and so on, and so on. All these are traffic offenses which can get people killed, but as long as you don't run a stop sign or a traffic light (defined as serious offenses because they frequently cause serious accidents) nothing will happen to you.

What drivers learn very quickly is as long as you don't kill anybody, we don't really care about you being a crazy maniac.

Therefore the police force on the roads is generally unmotivated to even try to catch repeat offenders. This has nothing to do with insufficient resources, as police commanders usually claim. The prove is in the story: The killer of Highway 1 was caught 19 times before his final atrocity destroyed two families. We know exactly who they are, and they are nothing else but ticking bombs, randomly taking the lives of innocent bystanders.

We will continue to see terrible accidents caused by rogue drivers until politicians, courts and police commanders move from lip service to action and put a repeat offenders behind bars. I pray for the day to come, when a driver smiles at me saying "I don't have a license anymore" and I can smile back, put him into handcuffs and know that from here on it is straight to an express court hearing and jail. Until then we will loose more people in traffic accidents than due to terror attacks every single year.

This one I didn't write to Haaretz (because they wouldn't print it anyway): My suggestion for immediate and drastic improvement of road safety: Use targeted killings for serious repeat offenders, just like we do it in Gaza with the other terrorists!

Okay, okay, I agree, no can do, don't kill them, but imagine the look on the face of a traffic maniac stepping out of his house in the morning and finding his car blown to pieces by a missile fired during the night from a IDF helicopter! Now that would be an effective measure...

Happy New Year!

2005-10-05T23:35:00.000+03:00

This October is heaven for workers and hell for employers. Three major holidays fall into this month, and none of them is on a weekend. The New Year (Rosh Ha'Shana), Atonement Day (Yom Kippur) and Thanks Giving (well, kind of, anyway, Succot) cocktail will create havoc in the economy and on the roads.

It starts with the traffic jams. All highways, especially those leading from the center towards the Galilee, are totally blocked from the second the kids get to leave school until 4 AM next morning. I will never understand why everybody has to spend the holidays up north. Somebody's relatives have to live in the south!

Then comes the festive dinner. A living room packed with people beyond the structural limit of the floor, an endless flow of dishes from the kitchen onto the plates, kids shouting, dogs barking, parents trying to outscream the kids. Occasionally a short moment of civilized silence, and then the battle noise starts again. At some point things slow down a little, the guests are just too stuffed to show normal vital signs. Then the crucial decision: Skip desert, run to the car and maybe make it back home before the traffic jams start again, or hold out until 4 AM and return after the jams. In other words, can you keep eating until dawn?

Then comes the bad conscience. Again we eat much too much. Why can we not skip first dish, soup, bread, salad and whatever else comes before the main course? How long will we fight to loose that needlessly acquired ballast? Thank God for Yom Kippur - this year we will actually want to fast! How would we otherwise be back in shape for Succot? Gosh, just think of all that food...

And finally, the New Year's resolution: Next Year we'll behave like responsible adults and say no to the Gefillte Fish!.

Yeah, sure. Happy New Year!

Finally! A Comment!

2005-09-26T02:02:00.000+03:00

After months and months of nothing, the other day I got the proof that somebody is actually reading the stuff I am writing here occasionally. I got a comment! And an interesting one, too - see for yourself under "Blame Israel for the London Terror Attacks".

I thought one idea raised by Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous deserved a response. He or she writes "Wouldn't it have been much more fair for Germany to surrender part of its land to create a homeland for the Zionists?".

Great idea! I could be living in the "Jewish Black Forest Reservation", surrounded by green, lush mountains, cool springs and lots of Black Forest cakes! So why did those Zionists come up with the crazy idea to move to the Ottoman Empire, or later the British Protectorate, buy worthless lands from the laughing Arabs, dry up swamps, have 8 out of 10 kids die from Malaria, and even farm the desert without knowing anything about it?

The answer is simple: History. The German reservation proposal may sound logical at first, but only if you ignore the history of the Jewish people. This is a very, very long story, but in a nutshell it goes like this. Somehow -a few thousand years ago- the Jews emerge as a people in this area. They adopt that strange monotheistic religion, which later becomes the inspiration and common denominator for two spin-offs, first Christianity and then Islam, never mind. They build two gigantic temples, marvels of architecture at the time, only to have them torn down, first by the Greek and then by the Romans. The Romans not only destroyed the second temple, they massacred most of the population and the rest dispersed in all directions. End of story. Or could have been, was it not for that stubborn attachment of those Jews to their culture, and yes, to their homeland. This is of course what got them into trouble with two world powers in the first place, and it continued to do so for the next 2000 years. Once the Romans had vanished from the stage, some Jews trickled back to Israel, but the majority had found it a lot more comfortable to settle abroad, say in the Black Forest and some other attractive locations. But somehow the general hospitality of the Black Forest farmers was interrupted every now and then by the occasional progrom, usually when their communities were stricken with the Black Death, Pestilence, war, or other undeserved disasters. After two millennia the Jews finally had enough and decided that it is time to go home. Zionism was born end of the 19. century and slowly the numbers of returning Jews climbed, especially after WWI, when the British administration supported the idea of a new Jewish homeland in "Palestine" for a short while. Appeared Hitler and tried to finished the job the Romans blew. End of story. Or could have been, was it not for the pioneering spirit of the Jewish refugees escaping the horrors of WWII, which meanwhile had build enough of a viable economy and self administration to trigger the acceptance of a reborn Jewish state on the original land by the international community. Israel was reinstated in 1948 on about 1/3 of the historic territory. Happy end of story. Or could have been, was it not for the Arabs, which by now were not laughing anymore and decided to end the Jewish adventure right here and then. But that is really a long story.

It seems history is the problem. Things were a lot easier if everybody would just forget about their past and their culture, and live happily ever after. That may be an acceptable way of living, but then we all have to do it. One can not ask one people to forget about their very roots and at the same time sanctify the historical rights of another people. Can one?

One last thing. My commentator called Israel "the last obvious European colonial enterprise". The absurdity of that claim should be clear by now. The idea of a modern Israel was born by the Jews calling themselves Zionists, but their romantic dream became possible only due to the bad conscience of the Europeans for not having stopped the slaughter of 6 Million of their unwanted citizens, and the lack of motivation to reintegrate the surviving refugees. As absurd as it may sound, without Hitler there would be no Israel today. The Israeli desert was a convenient place to dump those Jews, and anyway the Arabs would take care of the rest, and finally, end of story. Or so you think!

Construction Issues Revisited

2005-08-28T21:52:00.000+03:00

I never finished the sad story about our home construction. Trying once more to make a long story short, just when we were about to loose all hope, the construction company kicked into gear and things started to move so fast we couldn't keep up.

After a short period of relief I started to get really, really stressed when I saw the subcontractor for the concrete construction: The guy was soo fat all he could do was to sit on an old leather couch (!) his workers had placed into what would one day become our living room. From there he directed his crew with occasional shouts like "Don't put so much steel into the ceiling, stupid!", or "Measure? Why measure? I can see from here that this is the right angle!", or "Concrete is made from sand! Understand? Mostly from sand!" These are free translations from Arabic, which I don't understand at all, I confess. But even if he didn't actually say it this way, the effect his encouragement had on his teenage workers can not be denied. Not a single wall without a belly, not a single 90 degrees angle in the whole house. The representative of the construction company, who obviously had developed a liking of me, saw me standing in the middle of the concrete cave almost in tears and muttered the following notable words: "Never mind, it looks a bit strange now, but once you have some paint and pictures on the walls you will just forget about all those angles." I felt like drinking his blood then, but you know what? The guy was right. Four months after living in my first partly-self-owned house I almost started to like it.

Almost, until I went on vacation to Germany and came to visit the new house of my old buddy Andreas. Same kind of house, same kind of neighborhood (okay, four times as expensive, but everything is relative, right?), and not a single defect to be found under the whole damn roof! I looked for the better part of a day, accidentally sneeking into every corner ("What? Ahh, nothing, just lost a coin here somewhere..."), even krept under the stairs ("Gee, that coin must have rolled all the way in here!") and couldn't find one thing that had gone wrong. Just when I got ready to throw myself out of the bed room window ("How do you open these windows???"), I found a piece of rubber on the shutters that had softened a bit in the August sun and left a black mark on the white window seal. Ha! Gotcha! ("Ahh, did YOU see THIS?") Man, they screwed you too, didn't they? Yeap, this is how it goes, people. Everywhere! Forget about building your dream house! Ha! Haha! Haaarrrrrggghhh!

We Have Disengaged!

2005-08-28T21:27:00.000+03:00

Or haven't we?

While the actual withdrawal from Gaza went faster than expected and was mostly free of the much feared violence, my predictions (and those of almost everybody else here) have become reality. We already had one more suicide bombing, this time in Beersheva, and rockets were fired from the Gaza strip into Israel "proper".

Remember my other prediction? This was the last attempt at progress in the Israeli-Palestinian arena for a number of years to come. I think I better stop watching the news for a while...

Civilized Right Wing Protest?

2005-08-07T13:51:00.000+03:00

In the autumn of 1983 half a million people demonstrated against the NATO decision to station Pershing nuclear missiles in West Germany, as a counter balance to the Russian SS20 missiles in Poland and the DDR. The protests were lead by radical left wing students, claiming to be concerned for world peace, and frequently turned violent. I was a first year student in Goettingen that year and witnessed the utterly senseless destruction hundreds of radicals would bring upon downtown Goettingen every weekend, smashing all shop windows in the pedestrian zone and battling a helpless police force with showers of stones, bottles and steel balls from sling shots. The peace loving students had no ideological problem with the outright war they were waging against people with a different opinion, the "establishment" and bystanders alike.
Fast forward to the year 2005 and the mass protests against the disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank. For the second time in as many weeks tens of thousand of right wing protesters gathered near the Gaza strip to demonstrate against the government's plans. They faced off against 30,000 police and army for three days and you know what happened? Nothing. Yeap, that's right, nothing. Let's say apart from some collateral damage to the environment and the infrastructure of the communities hosting the demonstrations (just image the sewage treatment facilities build for 5,000 people having to deal with 60,000). But violence? No such thing, although the issue is lot closer to the hearts of the protesters than the Pershings ever were to those brain-amputated militants in Germany.
While I still think that we have to leave Gaza, I can't help but to express my respect for the way the protests have been managed so far, apart from some hickups at the beginning (the useless road blocks). It is probably true, right wingers are law abiding citizens for the most part, except for the very extremists. I just hope that Natan-Zada's idiotic act of killing four Israelis of Druze ethnic background does not draw the movement into a bad direction via a cycle of violence and revenge. The ultimate test will of course be the evacuation of the first settlements in a week from now. Keep tuned.

The Mayor Answered!

2005-08-03T20:15:00.000+03:00

Surprise, surprise. The Mayor of London did indeed answer my slightly provocative EMail - not personally, of course, but at least a public relations assistant of his sent a standard letter condemning all forms of violence against civilians - whether committed by suicide bombers or the Israeli military. Thank you so much, Mr Mayor.

London once more....

2005-07-26T15:53:00.000+03:00

Needless to say, Mayor Livingstone has not answered the EMail I wrote him with more or less the same text as in the last post. Never mind.

But somehow I can not help but feel strangely amused by the headlines from London. One more round of attacks (failed, thank God) and the Londoners don't show anymore the great resolve not to be intimidated by terror, but start to walk or bike to work instead of using the tube, and are irritated by the sound of ambulance sirens (IHT headline, July 26). The oh-so-civilized British police is adopting a shoot-to-kill tactic to stop terrorists, killing a harmless electrician with 5 shots to the head in the process - and I thought they didn't even have guns... Here is my forecast: One more attack and there will be checks of all MELTS ("Middle-Eastern looking terror suspect") at the entrances to public transport facilities. Then one more and the MELTS will be allowed to use public transport only after being issued a special permit, depending on a lengthy background check ("Question 3: Do you have any connection to a terrorist organization? Question 4: Which spelling is correct: Al-Queda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida or Al Jarreau?"). Latest after ten attacks downtown London will become a MELTS-free zone, with an eight meter high wall around it.

It is unavoidable: Once a country experiences the effects of continuous terror first hand, a lot of measures once considered undemocratic, unethical or even illegal will be implemented under the pressure of a terrified (=exposed to terror) public. In that sense the harshest criticism of Israel's anti-terror measures comes from Scandinavia, where not a single terror attack has ever taken place. I'd say, let's wait and see which funky anti-MELTS measures the Swedes will invent, once their time has come.

Here is my low-cost suggestion to make the London public transport system safe again in one day: Allow people to use buses, trains and the tube only in swim suits, slippers and without bags. No opportunity to conceal a bomb, that's it. It's summertime anyway.

Dear Mayor Livingstone,

2005-07-20T16:18:00.000+03:00

First my condolences for the 50-some dead from the recent terror attacks. That must have been really terrible for you.

But you know, those poor Pakistanis didn't really have much of a choice. After all, they don't have the military means to fight the mighty British Army in Iraq, which has taken part in an invasion costing the lives of 25,000 Iraqi civilians so far. So, under the circumstances, the suicide attacks in London were their only effective way of resistance, you see.

The British government and Al-Qeada are really only two sides of the same coin. I sincerely hope that this insight helps you to overcome your pain.

(Livingstone to Sky News: "Given that the Palestinians don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use. Israel has done horrendous things which border on crimes against humanity the way they have indiscriminately slaughtered men, women and children in the West Bank and Gaza for decades. The Likud and Hamas members are two sides of the same coin. They need each other in order to attract support.(...)"

Blame Israel for London's Terror Attacks?

2005-07-18T18:38:00.000+03:00

It was to be expected. Soon after Londoners came out of their shock, there were voices blaming Israel for what had just happened to them.

Maybe somebody out there can explain to me what is the connection? Would a wacko Pakistani blow himself up because he can't witness the suffering of the Palestinians at the hand of the Zionist enemy anymore? I didn't think so...

What we see here is the bill for Saddam Hussein's early retirement and the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. US and British forces invaded both places for their own national interest, not to protect Israel - God forbid.

Why then does every announcement of Al Qaeda et al. mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Simply in order to erode public support for Israel in Europe and to increase public support among Muslims world-wide for their useless slaughter of innocent civilians anywhere, anytime.

Get it people, Israel is nothing but a "shitty little country" (to speak with Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to the UK), and those few square miles of desert inhabited by some 6 million people can not possibly be responsible for the negative bias of 1.5 billion Muslims towards the Western World.

A Political Joke

2005-07-11T09:52:00.000+03:00

I received this joke recently by EMail. It gives a very good impression of what people think about the Likud's party central committee, around which allegations of corruption and abuse of power have become common news.

Teacher at the beginning of the new school year: "..and now everybody will tell us what his or her father is doing!"

1st kid: "My father is a policeman and arrests thieves!"
2nd kid:" My father is a doctor and fights diseases!"
3rd kid: "My father is a bus driver and brings kids to school!"
....
Last kid: "My father is a strip dancer in a gay bar, and if customers are willing to pay a lot of money, they can even have sex with him."

The teacher, totally shocked: "What? You can't be serious! Is that really true??"
The kid (whispering): "No, actually my father is a member of the Likud central committee, but I was too ashamed to tell this to the other kids..."

Gaza First? And Last!

2005-07-04T19:33:00.000+03:00

The count-down continues, it seems like we are really going to pull out of Gaza in August. Right wing activists are blocking highways (who in his or her right mind could expect to generate any sympathy for the settlers by keeping thousands of people at each junction away from their families or jobs?). The most idiotic thing I have ever heard in that context was the explanation of one protest organizer to why the road blocks planned for the day after the train accident were cancelled: "We would not have gotten enough media attention in the aftermath of the accident." Nothing about the victims, media attention is what counts. Shmock!

The theme of the setter's campaign against the pull-out is "Jews don't expel Jews from their homes." This works well with the emotional mindset of many people here, and you can see a lot of orange flags and bands -the banner of resistance- on houses and cars.

I am impressed that despite the uncertainty about the benefits of the pull-out and the great effort by right wing activists and many religious groups to stop the count-down, the majority of Israelis is still supporting Sharon's plan. The sad thing is that it won't bring us any closer to peace with the Palestinians and everybody here knows that. During a recent trip to Germany a lot of people expressed new hope, but I could only smile at so much naivete. Nothing of what is going on in the territories suggests that the militants are planning to give up the armed struggle and move towards non-violent resistance. On the contrary, arms smuggling is at a high and preparations to start a new wave of terror attacks are being discovered every day.

Once that new terror wave starts, the Israeli public opinion will move so much to the right, that any negotiated settlement containing more pull-outs will become an illusion for many years to come. I start to develop the feeling that this is Sharon's great plan: Give up lousy Gaza and justify the total freeze on any other moves towards the Palestinians with the terror starting after the pull-out. If so, he is on the right track, as the Palestinians are preparing to fall into this trap as fast as they can.

It seems nothing is ever going to change out here.

What is Life Really Like in Israel?

2005-07-04T10:40:00.000+03:00

After a long break due to the house project (see below...) here finally some new stuff.

Although I have tried here and there to relate to the daily life in Israel, this time I want to explicitly give you my take on what is life like these days in The Holy Land.

I could sum it up in one word: Tough. But the again, there is hardly a place on earth where people don't think their life is tough. Even my parents in wealthy Germany with (still) secure and comfortable pensions are moaning every day under the tax weight, the Euro and everything getting worse all the time. So tough is a very relative statement, I admit.

But life is tough here, no doubt. Nobody will deny that our security situation is somewhat more tense than, say, in the Black Forest. But, apart from a small part of the Israeli population that is directly exposed to the almost daily attacks by Palestinian militants and terrorists, most people here got adopted quite well to the threat and take it like Germans take the bad weather. It is annoying, sometimes even depressing, not much you can do about it, but probably there are better days ahead.

So, as surprising as it may be to the outside world, terror has not managed to make a significant dent in the quality of life - again, this is true for the lucky majority that has not lost anyone close in a terror attack. Maybe this is comparable to the risks of traffic. Many more people die here on the roads than in terror attacks, but if you, your family or friends have not been involved in a serious accident, you don't really relate to the dangers on the road in an emotional, upsetting way. Your know the danger is there, but chances are good it won't hit you personally.

Daily life is more a reflection of the struggles to earn a decent living than anything else. In a way, the economic situation of most people is absurdly bad. The average family gross income is barely $ 2,000 / month, and family means just that: Both parents have to be working to bring home that kind of salary, which is quite modest for a country with a flourishing HiTech industry and world-class academic institutions. In the HiTech sector itself things are a little bit better. A good engineer with 5 years experience can earn some $ 4,500 - but wait, before you pack your bags to move here, consider the tax load and the buying power. Take home at that level is less than 40% (income tax, health insurance, social security, pension funds,...) and literally every item on your shopping list except for tomatoes, cucumbers and oranges is more expensive than abroad. A half way decent middle class car goes for $ 20,000, and a 120 m^2 flat 10-20 km from Tel Aviv in a reasonable neighborhood is around $200-250,000. The bottom line: Even a modern HiTech warrior working 12 hours a day in order to develop the next big thing for a Venture Capital funded start-up can not alone guarantee the family a reasonably comfortable life in suburbia.

So while the vast majority of the Israelis is struggling to live the middle class dream, or even just to get by, the government spends like there is no tomorrow. Public sector spending is 54% of GDP, a whopping 15% higher than in Europe, for example. And the same time, public services are dismal for the most part. Sure, some of the money goes into a quite formidable and therefore expensive military, but the bigger problems are die-hard leftovers of the socialist past, like all-mighty unions and low performance standards, rampant corruption up to the highest levels and the blunt abuse of the democratic system by all kind of special interest groups. To know the right person ("protectia") is still more important than to be qualified or otherwise entitled, and not only the Arab municipalities have totally bloated administrations staffed with friends and relatives of the mayor. And I am not telling you any secrets, all of this is known, it happens every day out in the open, and never has a high ranking public servant been punished in a meaningful way for abuse of power and corruption. In China a criminal like the ex-mayor of Yehud (a bankrupt municipality near Tel Aviv) would have been executed, here the guy is not even in jail.

And then there is the fragmentation of the Israeli society into religious and secular, right wing and left wing, Askenazi and Sephardi Jews, native Israelis and immigrants, Jews and non-Jews. So if there are no other things to worry about, Israelis start to fight between themselves. This level of tension is culpable everywhere in daily life. Israelis are famous for being aggressive, unfriendly and egocentric in their public behavior. This changes dramatically once you have befriended somebody, but until that moment you are in for a rough ride by most European or American standards.

But this change of attitude is where the fun part starts. Relationships with friends, neighbors, colleagues and whomever else you can call at least an acquaintance are very, very friendly and warm. They don't stop at the superficial "How are you? (But don't bother to answer, I don't really care!)" level. Families are very close and the Friday night dinner at mom's is so commonly observed a ritual that traffic just before the Sabbath can be worse than morning rush hour.

More about the god sides of life in Israel another time.

For now just one image: "Spring in the Negev" - this is how the desert looks like right after the winter rain and before the summer heat turns everything into a brown, stony, ahh - well, desert.

Living the Middle Class Dream

2004-12-27T23:12:00.000+02:00

After some excursions into politics, this one is once more about the daily madness of life in Israel, about the urge of every Israeli to own a house, to be precise.

Even more so than in Germany, in Israel owning a flat or a house is a basic fabric of life. Although economically nonsense (at least as long as you have to take out a mortgage), you have to do it in order to be accepted by family and friends as a reasonably responsible adult. People that live in rent are either unstable or just plain poor.

Once you have accepted those ground rules the questions, which remain are: Where, what and when. When? As soon as possible. Where? As close to the center (=Tel Aviv) as possible. And what? A house with a garden for the kids to play in, of course. Never mind that you can play in the garden only two months a year, because in the summer it is just too hot and in the winter just too wet. A house with a garden is the ultimate middle class fulfillment.

Once you have settled on the type of property and the timing, you are now about to realize that "as close as possible to the center" probably means pretty far away, at least in terms of commuting time during the Tel Aviv rush hours. In our case we made to within 20 kilometers of the TA city limits, which translates to about one hour commute. Now here comes the crazy part: None of us actually works in TA. We both work in the opposite direction and haven't seen a traffic jam in 4 years of daily drive to work. So why not live further away from the center, where we could afford a respectable plot of land and a nice single family home, instead of a cottage with barely enough space around it to park two cars next to the entrance and still be able to put two shopping bags on the ground on our side of the fence?

Well, basically because just a few hundred meters further south of here starts the province. The province is where people don't take bar exams, they bath their kids only once a week and they watch Reality TV every night. In the province people drink Turkish coffee and eat Falaffel, while in the center we drink Moccacino and eat goat-cheese-on-sun-dried-tomato sandwiches.

Lucky us, we made it into the center, outskirts and barely, but center it is. House on the ground it is too, and the small garden has advantages: The kids can't get lost in it and always will make it back for dinner in time.

All difficult questions settled, now starts the fun part. Plan and build your dream house. We soon realized that we neither have enough spare time to plan the house properly, nor does an architect fit into our budget, so we went for a turn-key project with one of the more respected Israeli development companies. This would also free us from the hassle of managing the project ourselfs and struggeling almost daily with the contractors. Little did we know how smart a decision this would prove to be...

All things decided, we signed a contract in December 2003, took out a mortgage, paid up and waited for things to happen. We passed by the plot almost every day in order not to miss any action, but nothing happend for over four months. The development company didn't send us the signed contract despite several reminders, it appeared to have been lost! The companies' lawyer didn't send receipts for tax and registration payments we made to them, and not a single worker ever showed up. Just when we started to suspect that the whole deal was a hoax to relief us of our life savings, the first tractor magically appeared one day in early May to clear the plot.

From then on things happend at the speed of light. We had to meet with all the suppliers of the development company, to choose among a limited list of options for kitchen cabinets, tiles, doors, electrical outlets and most importantly pay for every deviation from the holy list. All in all hundreds of big and small decisions, and everything had to happen in about one week - although the completion of the house was still months away.

Just when we thought that the worst is behind us and from now on it is about watching how everything falls into place, things started to go south, but this time for real.

To be continued...

The Arafat Principle

2004-11-08T10:32:00.000+02:00

These days it is opportune to think about the positive effects Mr. Arafat had on his people and entire Middle East. I'd like to join this honorable cause and offer an entirely new view point on Mr. Arafat's achievements.

I think Arafat's life symbolizes a deep principle, which could be an inspiration to a lot of desperate people out there:

No matter how ugly you are, you can still be rich ($800 Million, all stolen, but who cares....) and famous (Peace Nobel Price, tricked, but who cares...), if you really want to and if you are willing to pay the prize (lie, cheat, steal, torture, kill and whatever else is needed, who cares...). You can even expect to get a reasonably good looking woman enough excited to marry you, although you missed most of your dentist appointments.

The advantage of being extremely unattractive in the diplomatic field may seem counter intuitive at first. But here is a reconstructed meeting between a French government official and Mr. Arafat.

Arafat: "I need more money now to wipe out the Zionist cancer that has befallen my beloved Palestine!"
Frenchman (thinks): "Gee, I feel like kicking your butt, but then again, you are so freaking ugly, that would be like hitting a cripple. Well, so the least I can do is to ease your pain a little bit."
Frenchman (says): "Well, I think we can allocate some more money for infrastructure and education... Would 300 Million Euro do for today?"
Arafat smiles the broadest smile he can muster, and thinks: "Education, my ass!"
Frenchman (thinks): "And please use some of it for a cosmetic surgeon, if you will."

Seriously, can there be any other explanation for the continuous stream of European money into the black hole called the Palestinian Authority?

I would like to suggest calling this newly discovered principle the "Arafat Principle" of living a highly successful life.

What will Steven Covey say about this?

Historic Moment?

2004-10-27T23:35:00.000+02:00

Yesterday the Knesset passed the so-called "Disengagement Bill", which foresees the removal of all settlements in Gaza and some in the northern West Bank. The landmark bill passed by a large majority made up by the center part of the governing coalition (the split went right through the middle of Ariel Sharon's Likud party) and most of the opposition. Surveys say that more than 60% of the general population support the bill, as does practically the whole rest of the world, as one can see in the major newspapers of today. Described outside of Israel mostly as a hawk and war criminal, Ariel Sharon got for the first time world-wide so high approval ratings, that his best buddy George in Washington must have become green from jealousy.

So far the good news. But is this bill really so great as most of the world seems to believe? Here comes in one of my well tested principals: If something is believed by almost everybody, including those which know nothing about the subject matter, it is probably wrong. And it could well be that this test is going to go in the same direction, although I haven't made up my mind entirely. Let's look at the two most often quoted angles:

The peace camp says this is Oslo II, finally there is movement in the Israeli government in the direction of a settlement with the Palestinians. The withdrawal from Gaza will prove to the Palestinians and the World that we are willing to compromise and will ultimately make us safer, even if maybe in the short run we will suffer more Qasam rockets fired from northern Gaza into Israeli cities. It is one first step to end the occupation and return Israel into the circle of civilized nations, and as such well worth the risk.

The other side (I don't want to call them the anti-peace camp, because in the end 90% of the people here do want nothing but peace, one way or another) say yes, this is Oslo once more, only much worse than the first, which was a total failure in it's own right and led us into the catastrophe we are living with today.

When we started Oslo I at least there seemed to be a partner for peace, although this partner was actually imported into the territories by the Israelis from Tunis without asking anybody on the ground there beforehand. Unfortunately the miraculously emerged partner neither had any intention to honor any of the numerous agreements he signed, nor did he want to build a truly democratic and self supporting Palestine, as we know today.

But this time there can be no illusions. We know from the very beginning that there is no partner for peace at this time. There is no one group anywhere to be seen that wants peace with Israel and has the power to control the groups which refuse to even consider a deal. So in effect we are giving up territory that has been under Israeli administration for 20 to 30 years (Kfar Darom was even founded already in 1946) and we get absolutely nothing in return. We only loose the little suppressing power we have over the Qasam launch teams, we'll loose extremely valuable intelligence by not actually being there and we'll also loose the ability to openly or covertly support an eventually emerging Palestinian partner against the Hamas, Jihad and so on extremists. Meanwhile Hamas & Co. can smuggle in and stockpile more and better weapons than ever, turn more children into potential bombs by systematic brain wash, and suppress any remaining moderate and secular groups. To remove this threat will eventually make a military intervention necessary that pales anything we have seen in the last four years of Intifada.

The only thing we will gain is the appreciation of the World for our efforts. But, as history has shown time and again, the World doesn't care about our well-being (just consider the European weapon embargoes at times which Israel was actually at war), with the notable exception of the USA. So what the heck, we can do without the World!

So far the view points of the two main camps. Where do I stand? Well, here is one more angle.

I have always supported the annexation of territory occupied in a defensive (or preventive) war. As such I am totally at peace with the Golan Heights being and remaining an integral part of Israel since the war of 1967, and I would never support a move to return them to Syria for a peace treaty. Who needs a treaty with that screwed up regime anyway?

The same holds true for the West Bank and Gaza - but: They were never annexed. Israel's truly democratic system would have had to deal with the political weight of too many hostile Arabs within it's own borders, so full annexation was not an option. Total withdrawal and return of the old regimes in those areas was not an option either, simply from a security point of view. The additional territorial buffer was thought to be crucial for the next military confrontation. Therefore the concept of ex-territorial settlements was invented and quickly implemented. This is the very source of the mess we are facing today.

It must be obvious to even the most steadfast supporters of the settlement idea: This concept has served us well for 30 something years, but now it is falling apart and something else has to replace it.

So here is finally my 1-2-3 solution for one of the World's thorniest problems:

Israel has to make a simple choice, square meter for square meter: Annex or leave.
Criteria are: Present population distributions, strategic importance for Israel's defense, practical connectivity to Israel proper, economic and administrative viability of the abandoned areas as an independent entity (ultimately a Palestinian state), and then some.
In the absence of a functional Palestinian administration, the decision rests with Israel only and the new borders have to be drawn up unilaterally.

As for Gaza, I am not sure if annexation of the settlement areas is a viable choice in that respect. But I am convinced that this should be the main factor in Ariel Sharon's mind, not the World's opinion, not the pain of the potentially uprooted settlers and not the short term gains for any one party.

And somehow I have the feeling that he knows what he is doing. May the Force be with you, Arik!

Herzl Street at Night

2004-07-26T17:04:00.000+03:00

2 AM in a town of 30,000 souls – doesn’t sound all that exciting, right? Well, in my hometown the "central artery" – like the main street in every Israeli town called either Weizmann or Herzl Street – is bustling with life any summer night.

People sit outside, around tables sponsored by the never ending row of junk food shops along both sides of the street, with ample supply of pistachio, sun flower seeds and other bird’s food (after ten years in Israel I still don’t manage to open a sun flower seed with my front teeth only in a split second and take the seed out with the tip of my tongue, but at least I do succeed to spit the peel silently onto the pavement), watch other people walking by, or stare with empty glares at the TV inside the nearest shop. The girls bitch about the competition, which the guys admire, if they are not preoccupied with the next Honda-Civic-turned-Starship-Enterprise, roaring down Weizmann (or Herzl, depends) Street.

The average age at these hours is around 19 for the men, and not more than 16 for the girls. Without checking the ID you can’t tell here if a girl is 14 or 22, there are no limits with regard to the minimum covered body surface, make-up and hair-do. Anything goes, the hotter, the better, remember: Taste is subjective.

The most interesting place is the central junction. Here is where the mating rituals take place. Four to six boys crammed into anything from a disintegrating wreck to the latest 4x4, try to get the attention of the apparently totally bored girls, which happen to be at this junction purely by accident. The challenge is to overcome the brutal volume of the car stereo (yes, true, I love Sarid Hadad, I have confessed to this one already) with shouts relaying deep wisdom and a deep tone. Can be difficult when you are 16, so better turn the volume up a little more. What happens when the mating calls are unexpectedly met by an inviting response? Nothing, of course. How could you pack six girls into a 1986 Fiat Punto, which already is collapsing under six hopeful heavy weights? So here is my tip for the boys on Weizmann (or Herzl) Street: Walk!

As a father of two boys and one girl I have made the following resolutions after witnessing the local scene:

No driver license allowed under the age of 25.
Summer curfew is 8 PM for now, 10 PM for ages 16 and up. This is in our garden, outside take 2 hours off.
Pop’s and Mom’s cars are out of order after 8 PM.
No muscles shirts, no mini skirts and no barely visible blouses in my vicinity. (No platform shoes either, but this one is for another time, too.) .

I guess you are asking yourself now: Since neither his age (for sure) nor his dress code (presumably), actually not even his driving style (hopefully) is appropriate for that kind of nightlife, what is he doing outside at those hours?

Well, I’ll get back to this topic in one of the next stories, when I will tell you something about the not-so-nice sides of small town night-life in crazy Israel.

Another Wall, 15 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

2004-07-20T21:49:00.000+03:00

Now this one is especially interesting from a German point-of-view.

I have lived next to the fortified border between East and West Germany for 25 years, so it was kind of obvious to me that
a) one can build a border that is cheap yet almost impossible to overcome, and therefore
b) I suggested already in 1995 in several letters to the Israeli media to hire the unemployed East German border engineers for a year or two to separate Israel proper from the territories, at least as long as it is necessary to cool the fighting parties down.

As we have seen in Germany, such a border must not be permanent and is no contradiction to a negotiated settlement. Well, somehow I was not taken all that serious at the time, but here I am, 9 years later, deeply satisfied that finally an Israeli government has the guts to do the sensible thing and separate us from the lowtech terrorism emerging on a daily bases from the PA territory.

Is the wall, or rather fence - because that is what it is for 90% of the total length - legal or fair? Does it bring hardship upon part of the Palestinian population? Complicated questions with a simple answer: I couldn't care less, at this point in time.

The only relevant question from this side of the fence is: Does it save lives? And here the answer is a crystal clear YES! And, believe it or not, it saves both Israeli and Palestinian lives. Israelis are not being blown up in busses and restaurants, while the Palestinian suicide bombers have a hard time to find a worthy target to blow up, so they stay alive and their families don't suffer Israeli retaliation for another day, and another one, and another one. And maybe one day they'll wake up and realize that there are better career moves than to explode at the entrance to a disco.

Not many people know this, but there are at any given moment about 300 Palestinian volunteers willing to turn themselves into living bombs. The fence may save most of them eventually. So this is what the fence is all about: It buys all of us, on both sides of it, time to stay alive, day after day, one at a time. Welcome to Middle Eastern realities.

In that context it is no wonder that nobody here gives a damn about the absurd recommendation of the International Court of Justice. From the Israeli perspective the fence is a must, like it or not. And from the Palestinian perspective, too, although not too many Palestinians see it that way, I have to admit - yet. Once the fence is completed, things will settle down and when things settle down, blood returns from the muscles to the brain, and so maybe finally we can start talking business again.

Since I promised to write about the daily life here, I want to add something you haven't read in the international press. Besides the already very clear impact on the security situation in large parts of the country, the fence has another very significant effect: It reduces incidents of car theft, break-in into homes and businesses by over 40% overall, and even more so in the parts of the country where construction has been finished.

The explanation is obvious. Most of those stolen cars disappeared in the West Bank. The new ones were turned into official PA vehicles (especially fancy 4x4 very appreciated by PA security and police (!) officials of all sorts), or sold at 5-10% of the real value to whoever can afford it. The not so new ones were disassembled and sold as spare parts back to Israel, where many cheap garages used those parts. During the happy times of the Oslo accords, when the border to the PA areas had more holes than a same-sized Swiss cheese, close to 46,000 vehicles were stolen in Israel in the record year of 1997! (See http://www.police.gov.il/statistica_umipui/statistica/xx01b_09bd_stat.asp for official police statistics.)

This unbelievable situation could only exist, because the Israeli government decided not to do anything meaningful against it, officially because there were not enough resources for that - there never are, by the way. Essentially the common Israeli financed the complete PA car pool indirectly via his or her extremely high car insurance payments. It was not only my impression that our politicians didn't want to step onto PA toes and rather tolerate the illegal flow of wealth into the PA coffers. You can maybe call this an indirect peace tax.

What has happened since? Well, the silk gloves are off, the fence is progressing and car theft was down to 25,000 cars in 2003. Still very, very high by any standard, but there can be no doubt about the trend, can there?

By the way, I lived five years in Hong Kong, which has a population just like Israel, about 6 Million people. Believe me, had there been 46,000 car thefts in that city in any one year, the world would have witnessed an uprising of the local Chinese masses. Which only serves to prove the point - you have to be a little mad to live in Israel...

Why mad, and why in Israel?

2004-07-05T18:12:00.000+03:00

Am I mad? Didn't think so for the better part of my life, but recently I have come to reconsider. Let's start with some facts, so you'll see where I am heading.

First of all, having been born and educated in Germany, I could be living a peaceful, if somewhat dull life right there, or better yet, in Switzerland, Norway, or some other Eurodisney. Which place did I choose? A small town near Tel Aviv, Israel. Relatively quiet, but not quite as dull as, say, Trondheim. Not quite as clean either, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.

So how come? Why did I leave a perfectly sane place to live behind and settled in crazy Israel? Because I am a Zionist? Well, maybe a little, by now, but that was not the original motivation. Because I am a Jew? Nope, I am actually a Roman Catholic, although I have forgotten all about it. Actually, I haven't entered a church for reasons other than architectural curiosity in the last 30-something years, so I am not living here because I consider it the Holy Land either.

We have by now exhausted the range of acceptable explanations and enter the realm of the irrational. To make it short, I live in Israel because of love. I came here by accident and met a wonderful girl, which in the end agreed to marry me. Took some convincing, believe me, but this one is for later, too.

Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Yes, but I can say with the authority of almost 10 years living in Israel, the doorstep of our house is where the romance ends. Outside of that tiny bubble of ours Israel is a pretty crazy place. It’ll make you mad in the end, even if you started out perfectly normal. And I love it.

I will try to give you a glimpse of the daily life in Israel, from my very own perspective of a German immigrant. There will be some funny stories and some astonishing ones, but many will be sad or upsetting, because this is what life is all about in the Holy Land. It is about the basics, not the sterile, all cushioned version I grew up with.

See for yourself. If you have specific questions let me know.