tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80872741241771359532024-03-13T01:31:22.902-04:00Ma HadashRabbinic commentary and conversations about Israeli current events, and much more with Rabbi Analia and Rabbi Mario.OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.comBlogger226125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-17660872926944810292015-11-18T15:42:00.001-05:002015-11-18T15:42:50.542-05:00The world can't choose which terrorists it gets to support<div>
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The entire world has condemned the acts of terror committed in Paris. Is there a reason why nobody outside Israel has condemned the murder of Rabbi Litman and his son in the West Bank the same day? By Moshe Arens | Nov. 15, 2015 | 5:36 PM | 10 Tweet 0 StumbleUpon There are no good terrorists. The Hamas terrorists who killed Rabbi Ya’akov Litman and his son Natanel last Friday, near Otniel in the Hebron Hills, are bad terrorists. They’re just as bad as the Islamic State terrorists responsible for the carnage in Paris later the same day. The terrorists who killed dozens in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut last week are bad terrorists, as are the Hezbollah terrorists who blew up the Argentine-Israeli Community Center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires back in 1994. All terrorists are bad and must be fought, in order to stop the trail of blood of innocent victims which they leave behind. With all current attention focused on the terror acts committed by ISIS in Paris last Friday, one can tend to forget – or maybe even wish to forget – that not only is this not the first act of terrorism committed in recent years, and that ISIS is not the only terrorist organization engaged in killing innocent civilians. We have to remind ourselves that there are not good terrorists and bad terrorists – all terrorists are bad, there is no excuse for terrorism, and all terrorist organizations need to be fought tooth and nail if this bloodletting is to be stopped. All terrorists are venting a grudge they have against the society in which they live – against the West, against Israel, against Jews and Christians. It is important to understand what lies behind their grudges, but under no circumstances to excuse their murderous acts. Understanding must not mean forgiving. Israel knows this only too well. Israeli civilians have been the victims of terror committed by Sunni terrorists and Shia terrorists. By the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas and Hezbollah, and Israel is threatened by Islamic State. When acts of terror are committed against Israel, they are often glossed over in the world. Excuses are often sought for their cause, it being suggested that possibly Israeli policy toward the Palestinians may justify these acts. The entire world has condemned the acts of terror committed in Paris. Is there a reason why nobody outside Israel has condemned the murder of Rabbi Litman and his son? Does anyone really think they was murdered by “good” terrorists? The terrorist organizations, like Hamas and Hezbollah, who direct their activities primarily against Israelis or Jewish targets outside Israel seem to be granted a certain amount of license for their activities by many in the world. Although Hezbollah’s responsibility for the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the AMIA bombing two years later is well known, no steps have been taken by countries other than Israel against this organization. The European Union has refused to outlaw Hezbollah, and the European parliament maintains contact with that terrorist organization. If terrorism is to be fought, all terrorist organizations must be fought. That may be difficult, but there is no other way. It is not an impossible task for nations who understand they are under attack from them. Neither ISIS, Hezbollah nor Hamas have significant military capabilities compared to the nations they attack. The idea that some terrorist organizations should be used as allies in the fight against other terrorist organizations is absurd and will lead nowhere. And yet the United States, the EU and Russia are presently attempting to build an anti-ISIS alliance that will include Iran – a terrorist state and the sponsor of Hezbollah. It is true that Hezbollah, which supports President Bashar Assad’s regime in Damascus, hates Islamic State – and that that sentiment is reciprocated by ISIS – but Hezbollah can contribute nothing to the war against ISIS. Giving it the stamp of approval by co-opting it into an antiterrorist alliance simply makes that alliance a laughingstock and can only encourage it to engage in further terrorist activity. That the EU’s approach to the danger of terrorism is totally unfocused was proven yet again by its recent decision to label products produced in Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights that are exported to Europe. Is this part of the EU’s war against terrorism? How does it believe that Islamic State, Hamas and Hezbollah understand this senseless decision, which it claims is purely “technical?”</div>
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Source: Haaretz.com </div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-58137544698405453472015-11-12T11:42:00.002-05:002015-11-12T11:42:39.049-05:00Yitzhak Navon, fifth president of Israel, dies at 94<br />By Ofer Aderet and Jonathan Lis<br /><br /><br />Yitzhak Navon, who served as Israel's fifth president between 1978-1983, died on Saturday. He was 94.<br /><br />Navon was born in 1921 into a distinguished Jerusalemite Sephardi family who has lived in the city for over 300 years. His paternal family descended from Spanish Jews who settled in Turkey following the Spanish Inquisition. His mother was born in Morocco and immigrated to Israel at the end of the 19th century.<br /><br />Navon joined the pre-state Betar movement when he was 12, and later enlisted in the Irgun. However, he left the Irgun when he was 18 over ideological differences and joined the Haganah.<br /><br />In his youth, he attended the "Doresh Tziyon" beit midrash, the "Takhemoni" school and Hebrew University Secondary School, where he studied education, Islamic culture, and Arabic language and literature. He was a teacher for several years until 1946, when he joined the Haganah's Arab intelligence unit until the end of the War of Independence.<br /><br />Navon spoke to a local Jerusalem publication in 2009 about his experiences during the war. "It was a time of suffering and near starvation. But there was a feeling that this war was life-or-death, that we would finally win and have a state here or — God forbid — it would all end."<br /><br />"We were surrounded by the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Palestinians — they all besieged Jerusalem. But Ben-Gurion, both the prime minister and defense minister, understood the great importance of protecting Jerusalem. He said that the fall of Jerusalem would be heartbreaking and would endanger our existence," said Navon. "There were indeed many hard battles and many sacrificed themselves, and I'm pleased that our unit was able to contribute real-time intelligence information to combat units," he added.<br /><br />In a 2001 interview with Ma'ariv, published on his 80th birthday, Navon discussed Israel's initial years. "6,000 people were killed, crippled and wounded during the War of Independence. The economy was devastated — there was no milk, just milk powder. No eggs, but egg powder. Meat was only once a week. Today, it's in such abundance, you go into shops and buy whatever you want."<br /><br />Yitzhak Navon's first job in the public sector was second secretary at the Israeli legation in Uruguay and Argentina. Upon his return to Israel in 1951, he joined the Mapai political party (a precursor to the Rafi and Alignment parties) and was appointed David Ben-Gurion's political secretary. He was appointed Ben-Gurion's bureau chief the following year, a position he held until Ben-Gurion's resignation in 1963.<br /><br />"Israel was very honored to have someone like Ben-Gurion at the wheel during such a critical time," Navon later said. "A person like that is born perhaps once every few thousand years. The State of Israel would not have been established without him. He was a rare individual, a unique combination of vision, realistic perspective, courage and leadership abilities."<br /><br />"It was an experience seeing how a man with such a huge responsibility, acting under such pressure, maintained a balance — it's not easy," he continued. "Anyone who wants to be prime minister understands the heavy burden placed on his shoulders and surely has a sense of mission. There was much to learn from him and I miss him."<br /><br />Between 1963-1965, Navon was a department head at the Education and Culture Ministry, leading a campaign against adult illiteracy. Navon recruited hundreds of soldiers and volunteers to work with adults who could not read or write in Israel's development towns and communities in the periphery.<br /><br />According to data from this period, approximately 12% of Israel's Jewish population was illiterate. Education Minister Zalman Aran said at the beginning of Navon's operation: "It's a shame and disgrace that more than 200,000 adults in Israel do not know how to read or write in any language, and we must do everything possible to erase this stain from us."<br /><br />In 1965, Navon was elected to the Knesset as a member of Ben-Gurion's Rafi party, a predecessor of the Labor Party. Navon served as deputy Knesset speaker and chaired the Knesset Committee on Foreign and Defense Affairs for seven years.<br /><br />In 1970, he received a visiting delegation from Gaza at the Knesset. "One way or another, Gaza's residents must live in peace with Israel. Therefore, the key question is whether you want to live in peace with Israel," Navon said to the delegation. Mayor Ragheb al-Alami, the delegation's head answered that "intense hostility toward Israeli authorities will only improve once the rights taken from Gaza's residents are returned to them." Navon replied: "How can there be peaceful coexistence with Israel when you act like this... do you want to eat the grapes in the vineyard or kill the guard?"<br /><br />Navon was elected Israel's fifth president in 1978. His inauguration ceremony was televised in color, creating a stir within the Israel Broadcasting Authority, as Haaretz reported at the time. "The IBA's executive committee decided to soon hold a fundamental debate regarding the introduction of television broadcasts in color. At yesterday's committee meeting, the IBA decided to recommend to the communications minister to allow President Yitzhak Navon's ceremony to be broadcast in color. The board of directors determined that yesterday's decision will not determine a principle or precedent regarding future color broadcasts."<br /><br />He was a popular president who traveled throughout the country and worked for mediation between ethnic groups, religious and secular groups, Jews and Arabs and peripheral and central communities. In 1980, Navon visited Egypt as President Anwar Sadat's official guest after the Israel-Egypt peace treaty was signed. Navon received a warm welcome after speaking Arabic during his visit.<br /><br />"Sadat's covenant with peace is an authentic covenant. Although the path we have decided to take is not without obstruction, Sadat and [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin have already come a long way," Navon said. Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus wrote that "Navon visited Egypt once and received what Begin failed to achieve in five visits."<br /><br />In 2009, Navon spoke to a local Jerusalem paper about his tenure as president. "I had a feeling of great responsibility, but also of great satisfaction. I knew all segments of the population. There are Jews who came from 102 countries and speak 81 languages — how do you consolidate them into one nation? This is where I saw my role."<br /><br />"On the one hand, to find what everyone holds common, whether they come from Georgia or Morocco — usually this is through history or the Bible — while allowing each individual tribe of Israel and community to express what makes them special: their heritage, their folklore, their poetry. These are two things that seem to contradict, but actually complement each other," he said.<br /><br />Navon is the only Israeli president to return to political life following his presidential term. In 1984, he was elected as deputy prime minister and served as education and culture minister from 1984-1990. Navon stressed the teaching of Arabic studies and Mizrahi Jewish studies, and oversaw the "culture basket" program that annually showcased students' contributions and performances. He left the Knesset and politics in 1992.<br /><br />Outside of his political career, Navon was a successful author and playwright whose work was influenced by his Spanish heritage. "Bustan Sephardi," a work that deals with the life of a Spanish family in Jerusalem, achieved great success and critical acclaim at Tel Aviv's Habima theater.<br /><br />In 2014 the play celebrated its 2,000th performance. Navon’s involvement in Sephardic Jewish culture also manifested itself in his work as chairman of the National Authority for Ladino Culture.<br /><br />In 1963, his marriage to Ofira Navon was dubbed “wedding of the year.” “The best man was David Ben-Gurion and Jerusalem’s chief rabbi, Eliyahu Pardes, officiated. Blessings were recited by the Israel Defense Forces chief rabbi, Maj. Gen. Shlomo Goren. Ophira Navon, who was a psychologist, was active in public life and starred in beauty contests. Her own fight against breast cancer set an example for many women. She died of the disease in 1993. The Navons had two children. For the past 20 years Navon’s life partner has been Miri Shafir, whom he met when he was 75 years old, two years after Ofira died.<br /><br />On Navon’s 80th birthday, he was asked in the Ma'ariv interview how he summarized his life so far. “All in all I can’t complain. I had — wait a minute, why am I speaking in the past tense — I have life with a great deal of honey and a great many stings.” This year, Navon’s autobiography, entitled “Yitzhak Navon, All the Way,” was published in Hebrew by Keter.<br /><br />"Yitzhak Navon's legacy is his work for justice and peace among the nations," said Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog.OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-59464348403447076582015-09-08T11:48:00.004-04:002015-09-08T11:48:56.885-04:00Rabbi Sacks writes on the European refugee crisis'Love the stranger because you were once strangers' calls on us now<br /><br /><img height="240" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/2a91b54e856e0e4ee78b585d2/images/c4c73e55-cafd-4985-80de-58a7752725b7.jpeg" width="400" /><br /><br />The following article on the European refugee crisis by Rabbi Sacks was published today in The Observer (a UK national newspaper).<br /><br />You would have to be less than human not to be moved by images we have seen of the refugee crisis threatening to overwhelm Europe: the desperate scenes at the station in Budapest, the seventy one bodies found in the abandoned lorry in Austria, the two hundred people drowned when their boat capsized off the coast in Libya, and most heartbreaking of all, the body of three year old Aylan Kurdi, lifeless on a Turkish shore: an image that will linger long in the mind as a symbol of a world gone mad.<br /><br />This is the greatest humanitarian challenge faced by Europe in many decades. Angela Merkel was not wrong when she said, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed.”<br /><br />The influx of refugees overwhelming parts of Europe is a massive crisis, but it is at just such times that it is worth remembering that the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity.’ Now is a unique opportunity to show that the ideals for which the European Union and other international bodies such as the United Nations were formed are still compelling, compassionate and humane.<br /><br />Many of the conventions and protocols establishing legal rights for refugees emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, as did the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. One of the dark moments in that history occurred in July 1938, when representatives of thirty two countries gathered in the French spa town of Evian to discuss the humanitarian disaster that everyone knew was about to overtake the Jews of Europe wherever Hitler’s Germany held sway. Jews were desperate to leave. They knew their lives were at risk and so did the politicians and aid agencies at the conference. Yet country after country shut its doors. Nation after nation in effect said, it wasn’t their problem.<br /><br />At such times even small humanitarian gestures can pierce the darkness and light a flame of hope. That is what happened in Kindertransport, the initiative spearheaded, among others, by the late Sir Nicholas Winton that rescued ten thousand Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Half a century later I came to know many of those who had been rescued. They loved Britain and sought richly to contribute to it. I and many other Jews of my generation grew up with that love, knowing that without Britain’s willingness to provide our parents and grandparents with refuge, they would have died and we would not have been born. As long as human history is told, these acts of humanitarianism will stand as a triumph of the spirit over political expediency and moral indifference.<br /><br />Sixty years after Kindertransport a gathering took place in London of more than a thousand of those who had been rescued. It was a highly emotional day as one after another told their stories. But the speech that had us all in tears was not from one of the rescued children but from the late Lord Attenborough, whose family were among the rescuers.<br /><br />He spoke of how his parents summoned their three boys and told them they wanted to adopt two young Jewish girls from Germany, Helga and Irene. They explained the sacrifices they would all have to make. They would now be a family of seven rather than five, which meant that they would have to share more widely, and that, they said, included their love, because “You have us, but they have nobody.” The boys agreed, and the two girls became part of their family. As he told this story, Lord Attenborough wept, and said that was the most important day of his life. Suddenly we realized that it is the sacrifices we make for the sake of high ideals that make us great, and that applies to nations as well as individuals.<br /><br />Even in the best-case scenario, Europe alone cannot solve the problems of which the refugees are the victims. The conflicts that have brought chaos to the Middle East continue to defy any obvious solution. Every option that has been tried has seemed to fail: military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, no-fly zones in Libya, and non-intervention in Syria. None has put out the smoldering fires of unrest, religious and ethnic discord and civil war. It is all too easy to say, this is not our problem, and besides, it is happening a long way away.<br /><br />Yet nothing in our interconnected world is a long way away. Everything that could go global does go global, from terror to religious extremism to websites preaching paranoia and hate. Never before have John Donne’s words rung more true: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Therefore, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”<br /><br />A strong humanitarian response on the part of Europe and the international community could achieve what military intervention and political negotiation have thus far failed to achieve. They would constitute the clearest possible evidence that the European experience of two World Wars and the Holocaust have taught that free societies, where people of all faiths and ethnicities make space for one another, are the only way to honour our shared humanity, whether we conceive that humanity in secular or religious terms. Fail this and we will have failed one of the fundamental tests of humanity. <br /><br />I used to think that the most important line in the Bible was, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Then I realised that it is easy to love your neighbour because he or she is usually quite like yourself. What is hard is to love the stranger, one whose colour, culture or creed is different from yours. That is why the command, “Love the stranger because you were once strangers,” resonates so often throughout the Bible.<br /><br />It is summoning us now. A bold act of collective generosity will show that the world, particularly Europe, really has learned the lesson of its own dark past and is willing to take a global lead in building a more hopeful future. Wars that cannot be won by weapons can sometimes be won by the sheer power of acts of humanitarian generosity to inspire the young to choose the way of peace instead of holy war.OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-36222848796230045512015-08-25T10:17:00.003-04:002015-08-25T10:17:52.052-04:00I saw Hamas' cruel and selfish game in GazaPolish reporter Wojciech Cegielski spent a month in Gaza during last summer's war. He has no doubt Hamas used people as human shields.<br /><br />Haaretz.com<br />By Wojciech Cegielski Aug. 25, 2015 | 1:25 AM | 14<br /><br /><br />I spent a month in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. It was one of the worst and deadliest months I have seen in my life. The reality there was much more complicated than was seen from a safe distance in Europe or the United States.<br /><br />Yes, Israel bombed Palestinian houses in Gaza. But Hamas is also to blame for its cruel and selfish game against its own people. I do not have hard evidence, but for me, spending a month in the middle of this hell, it was obvious that they were breaking international rules of war and worst of all, were not afraid to use their own citizens as living shields.<br /><br />The first incident happened late in the evening. I was in the bathroom when I’ve heard a loud rocket noise and my Spanish colleague, a journalist who was renting a flat with me near the Gaza beach, started to scream. He wanted to light a cigarette and came to one of the open windows. The moment he was using his lighter, he saw a fireball in front of his eyes and lost his hearing.<br /><br />From what our neighbors told us later, a man drove up in a pickup to our tiny street. He placed a rocket launcher outside and fired. But the rocket failed to go upwards and flew along the street at ground level for a long time before destroying a building. It was a miracle that nobody was hurt or killed.<br /><br />When we calmed down, we started to analyze the situation. It became obvious that the man or his supervisor wanted the Israel Defense Forces to destroy civilian houses, which our tiny street was full of. Whoever it was, Hamas, Iz al-Din al-Qassam or others, they knew that the IDF can strike back at the same place from which the rocket was fired. Fortunately for us, the rocket missed its target in Israel.<br /><br />The second story happened in the middle of the day. I was sitting with other journalists in a cafe outside one of the hotels near the beach. During wartime, these hotels are occupied by foreign press and some NGOs. Every hotel is full and in its cafes many journalists spend their time discussing, writing, editing stories or just recharging the phones. Suddenly I saw a man firing a rocket from between the hotels. It was obvious that we journalists became a target. If the IDF would strike back, we all would be dead. What would Hamas do? It would not be surprising to hear about the “cruel Zionist regime killing innocent and free press.”<br /><br />For me, provoking is also creating living shields.<br /><br />While I was interviewing people on the streets of Gaza, I couldn’t meet anyone who spoke something other than official propaganda. But some Palestinians, when they were sure my microphone was turned off, told me they have had enough but they are afraid. No one would dare to say publicly that Hamas is creating a hell inside Gaza. But they were also asking “what if not Hamas?” The Palestinian Authority government would have no authority there. So if not Hamas, they say, there could be somebody much worse. “The choice is between evil and evil plus,” one of them said.<br /><br />The reality is much more complicated than can be seen from a distance.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />The writer is a foreign news correspondent for Polish Radio.OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-42806064027534203302015-08-18T11:16:00.001-04:002015-08-18T11:16:09.480-04:00IS DELPHINE HORVILLEUR THE FEMALE RABBI WHO WILL SAVE FRANCE?<a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjp8lQItEtDt3JVgHUX13OA2XxPHmQv_Uh14tz9Cj8R_Mt5WcLE-Ji1v5AZEXBqK2rRtQlusis5GZ2kNctQ73mMCcj1SkvbRjsWFrwsFScmLapMF_Jh-f1YTUQaNZ_f8xKan4nFOl7TWBIpt8s4L4P451jtYsAEKFlExAmLEV1XG_Ahn7az7bDizZXGZA=s0-d-e1-ft" /></a><img height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEi2Q9pcCklZ93MCmy4IZmOks3C2ZYA4h1ScHMQgnBRdeffo1Ew3plV2x5T4SEwDXGKUHiXiUtWpMS4uGoQzwE7t-iZcT44MMH2rf5aeOZa9ssMAbRuttdFSlLXBNkLsmHvabqJoDq9JGvdhE42X1XmCXQoyRvpCa5b2vBw=s0-d-e1-ft" width="320" /><br /><br />IS DELPHINE HORVILLEUR THE FEMALE RABBI WHO WILL SAVE FRANCE?<br /><br />The ‘secular rabbi,’ who gained notoriety in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, skillfully negotiates the borders of ‘laïcité’ in a republic that remains on edge<br /><br />By <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/author/scott-sayare/">Scott Sayare</a><br />August 17, 2015<br /><br />Elsa Cayat had little patience for God. In that respect, she fit well at Charlie Hebdo, for whom she wrote a weekly column as resident psychoanalyst. Still, she had been known for an extravagance of intellect, a contrarian flair that was, in the view of some, her inheritance as a Jew, and her siblings felt her funeral should acknowledge this. Their aged parents, mistrustful of religion in the manner of many on the French Left, were reticent, but said all right.<br /><br />The ceremony was held on a blustery January morning, just days after the terror killings in and around Paris that left Cayat and 16 others dead. Her siblings introduced their parents to the woman who would be eulogizing their daughter. “This is the secular rabbi,” they said, and presented a <div>
kind-spoken, youthful woman in circular glasses named Delphine Horvilleur. This designation was a paradox, but not altogether misleading; Horvilleur, who is indeed a rabbi but is also religious, did not contest it.<br /><br />She is not what most French expect, in either image or substance, when they think of a rabbi. To begin, she is a Liberal, and thus a member of an all-but-unknown minority among French Jews, nearly all of whom are Orthodox. Horvilleur, who is 40, is also a woman, one of only three to serve as rabbis in France. (Her secular admirers in the French press have been known to marvel, a bit backwardly, that so charming a female should choose a life of the cloth.) The Judaism she practices, far from the worship of ritual that is the French norm, is a doctrine of inquiry, of unraveling dogmas and interrogating traditions, a celebration of the profane thrill of interpreting and reinterpreting the sacred.<br /><br />Before the hundreds who huddled in the grayness, crowding beneath a tent in the Jewish section of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Horvilleur, who had fretted over finding a tone of appropriate humility, irreverence and pain, <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/188400/elsa-cayat-eulogy">described</a>Cayat’s work as a psychoanalyst. “She was neither Freudian nor Lacanian,” she said. “She was ‘Cayatian,’ a school apart, the school of someone who cherishes freedom to the point of forever teaching it to others, the school of someone who knows how to see into your depths and tell you exactly where it hurts, who knows where to place her words, who knows how to play with them so that the language heals you.”<br /><br />It would not have escaped the attention of a careful listener that the rabbi was attempting precisely such a feat herself. For all the two women’s differences—which extended even to the realm of the sartorial, with Horvilleur favoring pants and dark turtlenecks, where Cayat was known to pair her jogging outfit with stilettos and fur—their talents and ideals appear to have been quite similar. “This wordplay,” Horvilleur went on, “this passion for language and debate, as you know, is very dear to Judaism and its sages. I think she perhaps could have made a very good rabbi—I hope she won’t be angry with me for telling her this, her, the secular Jew, the practicing atheist.”<br /><br />Horvilleur then recounted an episode from the Talmud, the story of a Yeshiva debate that she likened, in a moment of playful subversion, to “an editorial meeting at Charlie Hebdo.” God has intervened in a theological argument to declare Rabbi Eliezer the winner; Rabbi Yoshoua rises to his feet, Horvilleur told the mourners, to challenge God, “This discussion is none of your business! You entrusted us with a law, a responsibility, now it’s in our hands. Keep out of our debates.” God laughed and remarked tenderly, “My children have defeated me!” she said.<br /><br />Horvilleur had chosen the story because it seemed to her “Cayatian,” she said, “the story of a deity who laughs and delights in cheeky humanity,” a “God of freedom” who has delegated to his charges the responsibility of their world and the agency to do with it as they please.<br /><br />Afterward, the surviving members of Charlie Hebdo wept and took her in their arms, and Elsa Cayat’s reticent parents asked that the eulogy be published.<br /><br />***<br /><br />It is tempting to see in Horvilleur a symbol of some détente between religion and a French lay society that, in the presence of a large, post-colonial Muslim minority, has stiffened in its anti-religiousness. For the time being, though, her ease in the idioms of both the sacred and the profane, and her vision of the two realms as gently interwoven, make her more a curiosity than the herald of any trend. “I understand why they come talk to me,” she said of the reporters who have sought her out in recent years, and especially since the January killings. “I know full well that I represent the friendly face of ‘what religions could be,’ ” she said, but “I am not at all representative.” Horvilleur’s relations with the country’s conservative official Jewish instances, led by men who maintain that women cannot be rabbis, are cordial but strained. (She was ordained at Hebrew Union College, in New York.) “Like all religions,” Horvilleur said, Judaism “has problems with women.”<br /><br />In the French media, where stories about her inevitably run under the headline “Madame Le Rabbin”—an expression that rings a bit odd, as intended, as there is no female word for “rabbi” in French—her existence is often posited as thrilling proof that the country’s intransigent secularism can indeed help cure religion of the backwardness that is understood to define it. Horvilleur “has a cheerful face and bright eyes … the precise speech and the modern look of an active young woman of today,” wrote Anne Fulda, a prominent political and society columnist at Le Figaro, in a lengthy 2013 profile. “On the outside, aside from her curly hair that calls to mind the ringlets of Orthodox Jewish men (‘But mine are natural,’ she laughs), nothing could suggest that Delphine Horvilleur is a rabbi.”<br /><br />The French tend to view religion not only as inherently other but also as a “destabilizing factor” and a “threat,” Horvilleur said. She is, then, reassuring: “neither aggressive nor subversive,” Fulda wrote, without explanation, in Le Figaro. “Just contemporary.” (However radically vulgar Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures may be, the mix of apprehension and disdain they express toward religion is common in France, where there is a long tradition, especially on the left, of hard, “bouffe-curé” anticlericalism. As a left-leaning Frenchwoman, Horvilleur said, she finds the newspaper’s humor irreverent and “fairly wholesome,” if sometimes unduly stigmatizing or misguided. She is not a regular reader.)<br /><br />Less than a month after the killings, at a Tu B’Shevat ceremony for about 80 members of the congregation to which she belongs, the Jewish Liberal Movement of France, she led a singing of “Sheleg Al Iri,” a song by the Israeli musician Naomi Shemer; only she and an Israeli Hebrew school teacher seemed to know the words or melody, though the other congregants hummed and mumbled gamely. Shortly afterward, she led the group in the singing of “Auprès de mon arbre,” a minor song by the beloved French outcast-poet and musician Georges Brassens, which she presented jokingly as a “traditional Jewish chant.” Here her congregants participated with far more self-assurance. If, on the dark street four stories down, the two young soldiers assigned to guard the synagogue were able to hear Brassens emanating from this house of worship, they were surely surprised.<br /><br />While her progressivism has made her a darling of secular society, she is not tender with the French model, in its current form at any rate. The stringent secularism that has spread in the past two decades has sown the very community divisions it allegedly seeks to head off, she says, creating a class of </div>
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so-called “communitarian” offenders out of what were, previously, innocuously, individual Muslims or Jews. Muslims and Jews have, in turn, come to think of themselves increasingly as communities, with collective interests that may conflict with those of society at large.<br />In France, Muslims and Jews have come to think of themselves increasingly as communities, with collective interests that may conflict with those of society at large.<br /><br />The murders in January, perpetrated by men claiming ties to al-Qaida and the Islamic State, of course did little to convince many French of the virtues of religious belief or identification. The French government swiftly announced that the teaching and application of laïcité, the country’s official secularism, would be reinforced in schools. This suggested a conviction that any accommodation of religion might invite religious violence—that in order to prevent any further tragedies, state schools would have to be even more unflinching in their refusal to allow Muslim girls or Jewish boys to enter with their respective head-coverings, for instance, or in their refusal to offer halal or kosher meals.<br /><br />The current moment is one of intransigence, of “juvenile regression” into intolerance and the “negation of our complexities,” Horvilleur said. Thirty years ago, in her public grade school in Nancy, in eastern France, when tests were scheduled for Saturdays, Jewish students were granted alternate test times to allow them to practice their Sabbath rituals; this seemed to bother no one. There was “a certain flexibility” in the country then, she said.<br /><br />“I grew up in a France where, when I was a child or even a teenager, at no time did anyone tell me that I belonged to the ‘Jewish community,’ ” she said. She regarded herself “as a Jewish French girl, or as a French Jewish girl, in one order or the other.” Only in the 1990s—as social tensions rose over Muslim girls wearing headscarves, and as religious practice in general was increasingly viewed as incompatible with a full life in society—did the notion of a “Jewish community” enter the public discourse. “This was a term that didn’t exist,” she said. Whether it was first used by French Jews or non-Jews she does not know, but in any case it is not an expression she endorses. “As if all that identified me were my Jewishness, as if this were the only component of my identity,” she said.<br /><br />Still, despite herself, her Jewishness has lately come to the fore. After the January attack at a kosher market, she no longer brings her children grocery shopping; she has caught herself remarking to friends that men with peyos are “courageous” to ride the Métro in Paris. As much as she detests the “competition for victim-status” in which the French tend to engage, jockeying for recognition from the entitlement state—this is “the great French malady,” she said—she finds herself reassured by the soldiers who have been assigned since the killings to guard synagogues and other Jewish sites throughout the country. And yet she worries that protection will be viewed by some non-Jews as yet another symbol of Jewish privilege, reinforcing notions of a “Jewish community.” “It’s normal that the state protect us,” Horvilleur said, using the first-person-plural in what seemed an unconscious confirmation of her fears. “But at the same time, the more they protect us, the more they weaken us.”<br /><br />***<br /><br />Horvilleur was raised by the children of Holocaust survivors, and her grandparents’ sense of terror and gratitude were the poles of her childhood. Her maternal grandparents, deportees from Munkács, in the Carpathian mountains of Czechoslovakia, were “phantoms,” she said, “shut away in their pain,” all but incapable of speech and deeply mistrustful of non-Jews, whom they understood as their killers. Her father’s parents, Jews from French families predating the Revolution, survived in France, hidden and protected by non-Jews.<br /><br />Her paternal grandfather, a rabbi, was also the principal of a local public school; he removed his kipa every day upon entering. “The school is the temple of the French Republic,” Horvilleur explained, and her grandfather believed “you don’t enter with religious objects.” He treated the Republic, to which he felt he owed his life, “practically as a religion,” she said. Shortly before his death in 1992, when he was 75 and she 15, she fought with him over the Muslim veil, which he felt should be banned from schools so as to help Muslim girls “think beyond their origins.” (France’s law banning the veil and other religious accessories was passed in 2004.) “For me, it was a violation of liberté,” she said, even if she did not care for “what the veil represents.” “And for him, it was a violation of égalité.”<br /><br />At the time, she believed that her grandfather’s vision of laïcité, in which equality is guaranteed not by the impartial treatment of difference but rather by the imposition of conformity, belonged to a less complex, less diverse era, she said. It has since become the norm. “I think there is, in this pure, secular ideal, something a bit naive,” she said. “In reality, religion can never be a purely private matter, and it can’t be a coat one takes off at the school entrance, either. Religion is not a coat.”<br /><br />As a child, she was sent to the only local synagogue, an Orthodox congregation whose rhetoric regarding women and Jewish otherness, including the suggestion of “a certain Jewish superiority,” did not sit well with her. Scripture was being manipulated or misinterpreted, she felt; from a young age, she felt “the official reading of the texts was hiding something else, that it was sheltering something else,” she said. “And I think that if I hadn’t believed this, I would have quite simply left the synagogue. But I always thought the text could say, or in fact meant, something other than what they were making it say.”<br /><br />Scripture offered, too, some knowledge of her impenetrable maternal grandparents. “Their silence really fed my search, my will to find something between the lines,” Horvilleur said. “That is, I realize that my attachment to exegesis, to interpretation, to searching between the lines for all that’s missing in the text, all that’s not said—I think it’s akin to a conversation with a world that’s disappeared, a conversation that I couldn’t have with them.”<br /><br />After a period in Israel after high school—“All of sudden, Israel seemed to me a response to my identity issues,” she said, a natural reconciliation of her “Jewish particularism” with her “quest for the universal,” but her sense of internal contradiction endured—she returned to France to study with Jewish scholars in Paris. Her interest was purely academic at the start, she said; she was intrigued by Jewish rites and drawn to the “intellectual exercise” of exegesis but did not consider herself a practicing Jew. Wanting to undertake Talmudic studies that, as a woman in France, she could not, she moved to New York. It was only at the suggestion of a Long Island rabbi, her instructor in a course in psychoanalysis and rabbinic thought at the Skirball Center in Manhattan, that she first considered the possibility of the rabbinate. “All of a sudden, it seemed obvious to me,” she said. “But I never could have put it into words myself.”<br /><br />***<br /><br />In February, about three weeks after the killings, Horvilleur was told she had been named “Manager of the Year” by Le Nouvel Economiste, an elite independent newspaper. She had “no idea at all” why they had named her, she said. Gérard Biard, the top editor of Charlie Hebdo, would also be receiving a prize, as would an imam from Marseille. The theme of the awards ceremony was to be “free speech.”<br /><br />“It’s a bit surprising, on the face of it, to name a rabbi, even if she is a woman, manager of the year,” said the woman who introduced Horvilleur, a columnist and political commentator named Michèle Cotta. Cotta, speaking from a lectern to a concrete amphitheater filled with silent men dressed in suits of blue and gray, spoke of “the modernization of religion” and of her surprise in discovering that a woman—and “one who is young and pretty, no less”—should be a rabbi. Horvilleur had been chosen, however, for her conviction that “if one stops at the literal text, be it sacred, be it revealed, one risks locking oneself away in dogmatism and, especially, in a worldview that cannot tolerate an opposing perspective,” Cotta said. “In the times we’re living in, an affirmation such as yours is more than necessary, it is vital for our tolerant and secular society.” Horvilleur’s role, as Cotta understood it, is “to produce confidence, to reassure with confidence.”<br /><br />Horvilleur silently mounted the steps to the raised lectern and unfolded a short sermon on Jewish humor.<br /><br />“Recent events suggest that the God of monotheism doesn’t have much humor,” she said. “So, it falls upon the attentive reader of religious texts to reestablish a forgotten truth: In the Bible, God is capable of making very good jokes.” She cited the preposterous pregnancy of 89-year-old Sarah, Moses’ stutter, and God’s choice to “make the Hebrews walk in circles in the desert for 40 years, even though their destination is just a few kilometers away.” Laughter murmured, briefly. Religious texts are to be understood only with a certain “interpretative distance,” she said, and the rabbis of the Talmud, “faithful to this humor” of God, “distance themselves from literal meaning in order to, quite often, make the text say what it doesn’t say at all.” (The theme of the spring issue of Tenou’a, a review of Jewish thought that Horvilleur directs, was, “Does God have a sense of humor?”)<br />Horvilleur: ‘In the Bible, God is capable of making very good jokes.’<br /><br />She concluded by suggesting that this interpretative “Jewish humor” and “distanced reading” ought to be taught in schools. They are, she said with a pleasing bit of wordplay, “at once the guarantee of our freedom of expression, and the very expression of our freedom.” The dour audience applauded, and the editor of Le Nouvel Economiste, an exceptionally kempt man of cold, buffed features, thanked her for a “very fine address.”<br /><br />Next was the imam, Haroun Derbal, who arrived at the lectern smiling, in an open collar and a dark suit coat that was slightly rumpled and slightly too large. He seemed to have assigned himself the impossibly grave task, made all the more difficult by a heavy Algerian accent and his sometimes approximate French, of proving the basic compatibility of Islam and French notions of liberty, though he declined to say a word about the caricatures of Muhammad that had so angered the Charlie Hebdo killers. He cited the preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as three Quranic passages that demonstrate, he said, that “all points of view are possible and audible” within Islam. He ended his address with the third of these, a story of Noah, who declines to force his belief in God upon his people. “Should we compel you to accept it, when you are repulsed by it?” Derbal recited. This was a cryptic conclusion; Derbal offered neither an answer to Noah’s question nor an exegesis of the story, and unfortunately mispronounced the final word of the passage such that the meaning of the whole was impossible to know. “Thank you, Mr. Derbal,” the editor said.<br /><br />Now Biard, the slight, balding Charlie Hebdo editor, spoke. “This last while, I’ve often said—and I’ll say it again until it becomes obvious to everyone—freedom of speech, freedom of satire, the freedom to laugh, including about the worst things, the freedom to blaspheme, the freedom to contest, to oppose—everything that Charlieembodies, can’t exist without laïcité,” Biard said. “Because only laïcité allows for the exercise of democracy.”<br /><br />Afterward, as the laureates stood in a line at the base of the amphitheater to pose for a photograph, Biard extended his hand to Horvilleur and they shook hands and laughed as the imam stood silently between the two of them. “That was really great,” Biard told her. He did not offer his hand to the imam.<br /><br />“She’s an admirable and invaluable woman,” Biard said later, praising Horvilleur’s taste for questioning and interpretation, “this approach of challenging dogmas.” “The function of a religion is to discuss the texts,” and not only to cite and obey them, he said. “Too often we forget this.” He sees this practice honored “only in Judaism,” he said, though he acknowledged that he was familiar with all faiths only “in a pretty distant way.”<br /><br />At the cocktail reception, a pale and abstemious-looking man in a gray suit approached Horvilleur to shake her hand, which presently held a flute of champagne. She tucked an award diploma, which she had been holding in her left hand, under her arm, transferred the champagne to her left hand and extended her right hand to the man, who did not identify himself but remarked that he had not realized that women could be rabbis. Horvilleur explained that she was a member of a liberal Jewish movement. The man announced that he was a Protestant, and then discreetly retired from the conversation. Horvilleur appeared accustomed.<br /><br />***</div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-65780117600965927222015-08-11T10:22:00.001-04:002015-08-11T10:22:05.246-04:00The Hebrew state is disappearing, the Jewish state is taking over<br />We are witnessing a mutation of Judaism, a new Judaism – fanatic, violent and now murderous as well. It is liable to bury the state, just as it buried the Second Temple.<br /><br /><img height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEi4cdQugVGK7L42GlrU-lfEd87FxwGQ8yq8Oj3bzBynsTzTEzhIZWanKNMowvtVGk0nmGKoDFAthsMnZepcV1nP956gBQ_dRIpocCSuhzCb7HgH1N8TlBTKdmmrw6VOsc-7yU2j4YTsxdXsjxXzHJj4os0n4-Y7-a15WZj-E4KVN4VTfOSUp6NuBtUGMAzYIOF085n-dfy_Geh9ij5BisIEB12GK0DFmVqj92BGpvR3p_kc1zbk=s0-d-e1-ft!/image/63539350.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/63539350.jpg" width="400" /><div>
Settlers clash with police in West Bank settlement of Beit El, July 29, 2015. / Photo by Emil Salman<br />By Uri Avnery<br />Published 02:37 11.08.15<br /><br />After World War II, I participated in many demonstrations against the British, who were ruling this area at the time. All those demonstrations used the slogan, “Free immigration! A Hebrew state!” I can’t remember a single demonstration at which people shouted, “Free immigration! A Jewish state!” <br /><br />Back then, “Jewish state” sounded like a paradox to us. Everything pertaining to the Jewish community in the Land of Israel was “Hebrew.” Everything pertaining to Jewish communities in the Diaspora was “Jewish.” There was Hebrew agriculture, a Hebrew underground, the first Hebrew city. There was Jewish religion, a Jewish Diaspora, Jewish immigration.<br /><br />One can leaf through any newspaper published here before the state’s establishment: The term “Jewish” as applied to things created in this land was virtually nonexistent. The spoken language had adopted this distinction long before the small group of writers and artists who took it to extremes had arisen. This group, which Avraham Shlonsky derogatorily termed “the Canaanites,” claimed we had no connection with the Jews at all; rather, we were an old-new “Hebrew” nation that had leapfrogged over 2,000 years in the history of the Jewish Diaspora.<br /><br />If so, how did it happen that the declaration of the state’s establishment in 1948 spoke of a “Jewish state”? To understand this, it’s necessary to go back to the reality of those days. In the eyes of the British, there were two peoples in this land: Arab and Jewish. Thus the UN resolution on partition decreed the establishment of an Arab state and a Jewish state. The Declaration of Independence was based on this resolution, and therefore declared the establishment of “a Jewish state ... the State of Israel.”<br /><br />At that time, the Jewish religion in this land was at a nadir. As a boy, I lived for some time on the moshav of Nahalal. Its founders lived for many years in miserable wooden huts. When they were able to build stone buildings, they built cowsheds, and only afterward did they build modest houses for themselves. Then they built a milk processing plant, and then a community center, Beit Ha’am. There was also a synagogue – a small, out-of-the way hut where the old people prayed. <br /><br />The general feeling was that the Jewish religion in this land was dying, and would die for good when the old men and women who still clung to it passed away. Zionism, we believed, had come in place of religion.<br /><br />David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, thought the same. Otherwise, it would never have entered his head to exempt yeshiva students from army service, which he viewed as sacred. The exemption of a few hundred students was, for him, a good way to solve his coalition problems. <br /><br />For the same reason, he allowed the establishment of the state religious school system. “The old man” liquidated the school system affiliated with the left-wing workers’ movement because he saw it as a danger to the state’s sovereignty. But he permitted the state religious system because he was convinced religion was dying and didn’t constitute a threat. <br /><br />The religious kibbutz movement was also a withered limb, the stepchild of the secular agricultural settlement movements. And the ultra-Orthodox, somewhere out on the fringes, merited at most a tolerant smile; they aroused nothing but pity.<br /><br />Toward the end of the 1950s, the wheel began to turn. This was due to several developments that had no relation to each other but had a cumulative impact. <br /><br />First, as the horrific details of the Holocaust were gradually revealed, the Israeli community began experiencing remorse. After all, we were living here in (relative) happiness and plenty while Jews were being slaughtered over there en masse. Later, the Eichmann trial caused a revolution in Israelis’ consciousness.<br /><br />Another development was the mass immigration from Islamic countries. The new arrivals were moderate religious traditionalists, just as the Muslims in those countries were back then. The Bulgarian rabbi in Jaffa would ride his bike on Shabbat to watch the Bulgarian team’s soccer games. But the Mizrahi rabbis, who hailed from the Middle East and North Africa, fell captive to the fanatic Ashkenazi rabbis of the non-Hasidic “Lithuanian” sect. They adopted the Lithuanians’ clothing and became more extreme in their turn. <br /><br />High fertility rates in the religious and ultra-Orthodox communities gradually changed the demographic picture. And instead of shrinking, as Ben-Gurion had hoped, the religious and ultra-Orthodox school systems grew by leaps and bounds.<br /><br />The dramatic turning point, however, was the Six-Day War of 1967. The stunning victory by the secular Israel Defense Forces turned into a religious celebration; “The Western Wall is in our hands” became the battle cry of the religious fanatics. <br /><br />The religious Jewish public, which until then had been humble and demeaned, suddenly became aggressive and demanding. The National Religious Party, which until then had been the most moderate party in the government, changed its spots and switched to the side of radical nationalism. Its youth, products of the state religious school system and the Bnei Akiva youth movement, gave birth to the extremist settlements.<br /><br />Recently, we have witnessed a new phenomenon. In the past, a yawning chasm of hatred divided the national religious youth from their ultra-Orthodox counterparts. Now they have begun hooking up. The national religious are becoming more religiously ultra-Orthodox, while the ultra-Orthodox are becoming more nationalistically fanatic.<br /><br />The recent atrocities perpetrated by national religious “hilltop youth” and ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students are the writing on the wall (literally). The settlement youth, together with disturbed people who have returned to religion, are imbued with incomparably greater zeal than the youth of the “Tel Aviv bubble” and the rest of the secular public.<br /><br />History has many examples of countries in which hardy people from the periphery took over a center that had gone soft. The frontier folk are used to war, while the centrists create culture. <br /><br />Prussia, a remote peripheral region that perpetrated an ongoing genocide, took over Germany. The remote Piedmont region united modern Italy. Two millennia ago, Jews from the Galilee took over Jerusalem and brought about its destruction. The Manchus took over China, while the Japanese took over East Asia during World War II.<br /><br />This danger is now hovering over Israel. The settlers are neither “wild weeds” nor youth from the margins. They constitute an extreme and immediate threat to everything that has been built in this country in recent generations. The Hebrew state is disappearing, and in its place, the Jewish state is taking over. <br /><br />And this isn’t the Judaism that arose during 2,000 years in exile – the Judaism of Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, the Judaism of a dispersed community that loathed violence. We are now witnessing a mutation of Judaism, a new Judaism – fanatic, violent and now murderous as well. It is liable to bury the state, just as it buried the Second Temple.<br /><br />The state can still be saved. But to do so, the real Israel – the secular, national Israel – must wake up. We need the courage to change before disaster strikes.</div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-90448795269192828432015-06-23T12:15:00.003-04:002015-06-23T12:15:53.629-04:00One Syrian killed in Druze attack on IDF ambulance carrying wounded rebelsProtesters extract two wounded Syrians from military vehicle in northern Israel and beat them; two soldiers wounded, too.<br /><br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhbMaJjVry2aVhKf_9H9EzoBZTCfF-YnWVMru2Ip8009K-gzR_X9vwOui1JCJ9oB1FQqqzYZlg3sw_Dl_G2IEUK8t8eIiYB0VhweFreHchyphenhyphenRFkUyAyuQ0AEGoZ9rSTzdX74Wn8vrBY9jmq0E9qVYVTDNVwjzsrotHiVzilxfjgeNoJIml2KOvsKVu_wjbzyUxNBIh4iqVO1in-H33nHZuuO5K7ex_t6M_U2Wv8nIvJUdwZEZnwgo-QIZQ=s0-d-e1-ft!/image/1675688841.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/1675688841.jpg" /><br />The Israeli ambulance carrying Syrian rebels attacked by Druze, June 22, 2015. / Photo by Courtesy<br />By Jack Khoury and Gili Cohen <br /><br />One Syrian militant was beaten to death and one was wounded in very serious-to-critical condition after Druze protesters attacked Monday night an Israel Defense Forces ambulance in northern Israel carrying Syrian members of armed militias wounded in the civil war there. Two Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded.<br /><br />According to the IDF, the ambulance was accompanied by a military police escort following the Druze attack on an IDF ambulance earlier Monday. Upon entering Majdal Shams en route to Kiryat Shmona, approximately 150 furious protesters from Golan Heights villages in the Neve Ativ region, who attacked the vehicle.<br /><br />According to one eyewitness, the protesters extracted two wounded Syrians from the ambulance and beat them. The IDF said it sent a military helicopter to evacuate the wounded Syrians, who are now in serious condition. The emergency rescue vehicle was also damaged.<br /><br />A large deployment of Israeli police and military forces were called to the site, where they confronted the protesters.<br /><br />The head of the Israeli Druze community, Sheikh Mowafak Tariq, strongly condemned the attack, saying "this is not our way, and we're in pain over what happened. This is a criminal act, carries out by lawless people and the authorities must act."<br /><br />This is the second time in 24 hours that protesters have struck an ambulance carrying wounded Syrians. Early Monday, Druze residents from the village of Horfish in northern Israel attacked a military ambulance carrying wounded Syrians, demanding to check whether the passengers on board belonged to a rebel organization that has been targeting Druze in the civil war across the border.<br /><br />Most of the Druze in the Golan Heights do not enlist in the army, though their brethren in the Galilee and the Carmel do serve, and the situation of the Druze community in Syria often raises questions of loyalty among the community in Israel.<br /><br /><br /> OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-8706032105404389662015-06-16T14:28:00.001-04:002015-06-16T14:28:08.339-04:00Israeli report highlights IDF casualty prevention, Hamas abuses during Gaza conflict<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjHvG-3Gn8CfzTs36rB6gquWy4TMKCz_8C76K_VRa_qw2fNNMSYMZBxdxpfouTpHKv-NoJQDr4FRj4A-KGF8PCc9sLRjtf7Ma5xmBVcq_2cWahvs6IZ7XIdrhx62oKU6VOSfJoF7_0ir5AfCQEydNljsNEiLYjUcKlhMmVhU3M8VrQvbCKte25HcMJjGVA=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br />Ariel Schalit/AP/Press Association Images<br /><br />Israel’s government yesterday released an extensive report into last summer’s Operation Protective Edge, highlighting the IDF’s extensive efforts to avoid military casualties, while at the same time documenting Hamas’ exploitation of Gaza’s civilians during the conflict.<br /><br />The 277-page document is an inter-ministerial report published by the Foreign Ministry. Among its key findings, the report found that the IDF engaged in a lengthy legal process before attacks were approved, in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict and that the IDF also made extensive efforts to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza’s civilians during the fighting.<br /><br />By contrast, the report said that Hamas deliberately attempted to draw fighting into urban terrain for political gain and often physically coerced Gazans to remain in areas Israel warned would be attacked. 550 rockets and mortars were identified as having been fired from civilian sites including mosques, schools and hospitals. Meanwhile, of the 2,125 Palestinians killed during the conflict, the report said 36 per cent were civilians and 44 per cent combatants. Had Hamas accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire a week into the conflict, the report said 90 per cent of casualties would have been avoided.<br /><br />Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented that the report “presents the true fact that the actions carried out by the IDF were done in accordance to international law.” It comes soon before the expected publication of a United Nations’ Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commission report into the conflict. Israel declined to cooperate with the UNHRC investigation as the commission’s mandate appeared to target Israel, while the UNHRC itself has a track record of hostility towards Israel.<br /><br />Meanwhile, a multi-national group of former-chiefs of staff, generals and politicians on Friday submitted a report to the United Nations summarising their own investigation into the IDF’s conduct during Operation Protective Edge. It concluded, “Israel not only met a reasonable international standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard.”OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-4106458099930377432015-06-08T13:38:00.001-04:002015-06-08T13:38:16.037-04:00Rivlin urges “wake up” to challenge of Israeli society’s changing face<br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEh54GKmtpGP0dDcd7i1t5eMukxSYv4giQlkVQ3GTSQFY6_0rqUGIoNv1xJZyqUzhBXD8n0mcGdbLHhFgwoKu2Jd3yCfqJExRLtruBJkZaDD44SZpeqUuJousPQjwY5L5V7Q2LfNoupAgM7sMofizrWP6KszF39UGegIVKsEHAcLh3JBIyF5Vg9TA-k=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br /><br />08/06/2015<br /><br />Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin used a major address yesterday evening to highlight the demographic changes facing Israeli society and their potential economic and sociological impact.<br /><br />Speaking at the opening of the Herzliya Conference, a major policy gathering, Rivlin said that, “Israeli society is in need of a wake-up call.” Outlining the country’s changing demographic reality, he said, “Whether we like it or not, the makeup of the ‘stakeholders’ of Israeli society and of the State of Israel is changing before our eyes.”<br /><br />In essence, said Rivlin, Israeli society is becoming increasingly fragmented and compartmentalised. He explained that in the mind-set of many Israelis, the country remains dominated by a large secular Zionist majority. In reality though, Rivlin noted that, “First-grade classes are composed of about 38 per cent secular Jews, about 15 per cent national-religious, about one-quarter Arabs, and close to a quarter ultra-Orthodox.” He described it as “a ‘new Israeli’ order… there is no longer a clear majority nor clear minority groups.” It is a configuration which Rivlin predicted “will have a profound impact on the way we understand ourselves and our national home.”<br /><br />Giving two practical consequences of these changes, Rivlin said, “The mathematics is simple … If we do not reduce the current gaps in the rate of participation in the work force and in the salary levels of the Arab and ultra-Orthodox populations … Israel will not be able to continue to be a developed economy.” He added that “in the emerging Israeli order, more than half of the population does not serve in the military. So the different Israelis will meet for the first time, if at all, only in the work place.”<br /><br />In addition, explained Rivlin, each sector is “educated toward a totally different outlook regarding the basic values and desired character of the State of Israel.” As a result, Israeli society will need to answer difficult questions to “balance the secular-liberal character of the State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise.”OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-90240851508766885862015-06-02T09:52:00.002-04:002015-06-02T09:52:18.508-04:00Netanyahu calls on PA to return to peace talks, drop delegitimisation.Speaking at a press conference alongside Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Netanyahu reiterated “the only way we can achieve a lasting peace is through the concept of two states for two peoples – a demilitarised Palestinian state that recognises the Jewish nation state of Israel.” It is a position Netanyahu publicly declared last month in a similar setting with European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini. Also last month, Netanyahu’s new government announced that it would “strive to reach a peace agreement” as part of its agreed policy guidelines and Interior Minister Silvan Shalom has since been appointed to head any future talks. The last round of peace talks, spearheaded by the United States, broke down in April 2014 after the PA agreed a unity government with Hamas.<br /><br />Netanyahu said yesterday that he had discussed with Steinmeier, the “common quest to move forward on peace with the Palestinians” and to that end “I think the only way to move that is through direct negotiations … Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority has moved away from these negotiations.” He urged Steinmeier to, “Tell the Palestinians to stop their campaign to delegitimise Israel … Tell them to get back to the negotiating table. Tell them that we should negotiate without preconditions.”<br /><br />Speaking to his cabinet yesterday, Netanyahu elaborated on Palestinian efforts to exclude or attack Israel in international forums. On Friday, the Palestinian Football Association (FA) eventually dropped a motion to suspend Israel from FIFA, football’s world governing body. However, Netanyahu warned that the Palestinian FA initiative formed just part of “a great struggle being waged against the state of Israel, an international campaign to blacken its name.” At its core, said Netanyahu, “this campaign to delegitimise Israel … seeks to deny our very right to live here.”<div>
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Source: BICOM</div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-76445792225913371552015-05-19T13:46:00.004-04:002015-05-19T13:46:35.063-04:00Religious group excludes non-Orthodox rabbis from Shavuot event The Tzavta Tel Aviv theater allows the snub for the second straight year.Haaretz Newspaper, By <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/or-kashti-1.520">Or Kashti</a> | May 17, 2015<br /><br />Tzohar, a group of moderate Zionist rabbis, has vetoed the participation of Reform and Conservative rabbis in this year’s all-night Shavuot study session next Saturdayat the Tzavta Tel Aviv theater.<br />A raft of political and religious leaders have thus criticized Tzavta for agreeing to cooperate with what some called the exclusion of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. A similar dispute erupted at Shavuot last year, when Tzavta officials accepted the ban on the need “to build cooperation” with Tzohar. They said the policy was likely to change.<br /><br />Leaders of Israel’s Conservative, or Masorti, movement, say they were told by Tzavta that such a change was a “long process” and that they should settle for the invitation sent to an official of the movement who is not a rabbi. “The secular community that plans to attend should know that it is not a pluralistic event that genuinely welcomes all streams of Judaism,” MK Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) said.<br /><br />This year’s Tzohar-organized tikkun leyl will be the fifth all-night Shavuot study session at Tzavta. Tzohar describes itself on its website as “a powerful national movement of 1,000 Zionist rabbis and women volunteers who are leading the revolution for an ethical, inclusive & inspiring Jewish Israel.”<br /><br />In promotional materials for the event, it says the annual affair “is considered one of the main tikkun leyl Shavuot events” and that is was “born out of curiosity and a desire to touch the various worlds and text comprising the mosaic of Jewish-Israeli identity.” The event’s leading organizers include MK Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid), Tzavta’s Gavri Bargil and Tzohar chairman Rabbi David Stav. Last year around 1,500 people of various levels of religious observance attended the event.<br /><br />“After explicit, unequivocal promises last year that the refusal to have us would not be repeated, this year too it was decided to exclude non-Orthodox streams,” said the head of the Masorti Movement, Izhar Hess, who was invited to take part. “I’m not a rabbi and I don’t teach Judaism. That’s exactly what Tzohar seeks: the delegitimization of rabbis” who are not Orthodox, he said.<br /><br />“Tzohar is a private organization that has the right to invite whomever it wants to its events,” says Tomer Persico, a fellow at the Elyachar Center for Studies in Sephardi Heritage at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “The problem is that although the tikkun is defined as studying “the mosaic of identity,” in practice Tzohar is indicating who stays outside — non-Orthodox movements.<br /><br />According to Tzohar, there is just one way to be Jewish, the Orthodox way. Secular Jews are invited to attend not because the Tzohar rabbis see secularism as a legitimate Jewish option, but because they see secular Jews as ‘babies who were captured,’” a Talmudic term for Jews who sin inadvertently because they were raised without the benefit of a proper Jewish education. Persico says that by cooperating with Tzohar’s exclusionary tactics, Tzavta helps to perpetuate the Orthodox stranglehold on Judaism in Israel.<br /><br />Bargil rejects this criticism, saying that Tzavta “created the partnership with Tzohar in order to bring the various denominations closer together. That means all the speakers must be acceptable to all sides. After the participation of the non-Orthodox streams wasn’t supported last year,” Tzohar and Tzavta agreed that Reform and Conservative representatives, but not rabbis, would be invited to take part this year. Bargil said he hoped that next year rabbis from the non-Orthodox movements would be invited to lead sessions.<br /><br />“Introducing social change requires great intelligence and patience. There are many tikkun layl Shavuot events for the general public, but the wisdom lies in bringing both religious and nonreligious people to the same place,” said Tzohar’s executive director, Rabbi Moshe Be’eri. “For that to succeed, there are boundaries that must be respected. That’s why we tried to be creative and invited the head of the Masorti Movement. The message can be the same; why insist that rabbis must be invited? I understand that it bothers them, but you have to take the long view.”OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-72927426348522853962014-09-15T11:39:00.001-04:002014-09-15T11:39:03.975-04:0018 questions for Hamas leaders in wake of Gaza warHad the IDF not prohibited Israeli journalists' entry into the Gaza Strip and had the leaders of the Islamic movement agreed to be interviewed in the Israeli media, this is what Amira Hass would have asked.<br />By Amira Hass, Haaretz<div>
<br /><img height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEh4lbJMywA99QU9wVKOWnkRlt6yPf2yIIY8HPzAyNpypnNiZj3eShGUEvd8f4fhbVuYNgCobwPUT1sHtbGpmj6ZCiHIl1FvsBjJyvxpNw-r_xNKbEHSoMTTOhw5326U52qC9nm4gyyX8LmWW3KunY10c1uiE2JOuaGv-OpcjgKC9aAPUs6EN60vriaotE22iYNUy11wg8aDkyPdDz-ugpv6kq0rX52KgrNvrMlE5vzNnlsSeQqXjZ8=s0-d-e1-ft!/image/639679270.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/639679270.jpg" width="320" /><br />A Hamas militant and supporters celebrate what they claim was a victory over Israel, in Gaza City, August 27, 2014.Photo by Reuters<br /><br />1. Are you still insisting that the past war ended in a victory for you?<br /><br />2. A Palestinian victory or a Hamas victory?<br /><br />3. You managed to confuse the strongest army in the region. Is that the victory?<br /><br />4. Israeli tourism suffered losses. The Israeli education budget will be cut. The defense budget will increase. Residents of the “Gaza envelope” communities are frustrated, and feel betrayed and insecure. If that is the victory, was the price paid by Gaza and its inhabitants worthwhile, and why?<br /><br />5. You knew in advance that the West would hasten to promise to bear the cost of rehabilitating Gaza and its inhabitants after the destruction caused by Israel. That’s what it has been doing since 1994 </div>
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(in the West Bank as well), partly for humanitarian motives, and mainly for political calculations: In order to keep the Palestinian Authority in place (in the role of the agent of rehabilitation) in order to guarantee that the system of balances with Israel will not be overly shaken. Had you not known that the West and the United Nations would mobilize for rehabilitation – would you have acted exactly as you did?<br /><br />6. You preserve the right to choose the path of war (the armed struggle) for the Palestinians. But for every civic task that must be carried out you reply: That’s the job of the reconciliation government. Isn’t that contradictory and hypocritical?<br /><br />7. The cost of rent in the Strip has increased, due to the decline in supply (houses demolished by Israel) and the fact that at least 100,000 people have become homeless. The rates of poverty and unemployment have also increased. What is your plan for reducing them?<br /><br />8. The combat skills of your fighters improved as compared to 2008-2009 (although at the time you boasted of such skills, and didn’t convince anyone except for Hamas followers). Clearly you learned from your mistakes and devoted a great deal of time to military exercises. Have improving your combat skills and developing your arsenal become an end instead of a means, and therefore when they were achieved – you consider that a victory?<br /><br />9. You said that the cease-fire agreement with Israel is a great achievement. What exactly does it include that makes it such an achievement? We laymen fail to understand. Meanwhile the closure has not been lifted and Israel has no intention of lifting it, the Israel Navy continues to fire at Gaza fishermen and to arrest them when they sail out to make a living from the sea, and the inhabitants of Gaza are still living in the same prison that Israel created for them about 20 years ago.<br /><br />10. Why did you give up the original demand for international guarantees to ensure that Israel would abide by its commitments?<br /><br />11. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found in its last survey that Palestinian support for you has soared. Do you think that the outcome would have been similar had you not managed to exempt yourself in advance from the burden of responsibility for civic rehabilitation and to impose it on the reconciliation government, which emerges very poorly in the sampling?<br /><br />12. Your status before the war was at a nadir. Is that your victory – that support for you has soared?<br /><br />13. When you were deliberating whether to begin a military escalation (in my opinion both you and Israel chose the direction of military escalation, not only Israel), did you have in mind the reasonable chance that your public status would be rehabilitated, as is always the case after military campaigns?<br /><br />14. According to the survey, 43 percent of the residents of the Strip under your rule want to emigrate (as compared to 20 percent who want to emigrate from the West Bank). Are you shrugging off responsibility for this high rate of potential emigrants?<br /><br />15. You presented the disengagement (the evacuation of the settlements in the Strip in 2005) as a victory for your military track. But what has happened is that Gaza has become totally cut off from the West Bank, a goal that that has been the pillar of Israel’s policy since 1990. Your military track only helped to realize Israel’s original intention of imposing a regime in Gaza that is different and separate from that in the West Bank. What is your reply to that?<br /><br />16. Due to the disengagement, Israel permits itself to disseminate the lie that the occupation of the Strip is over (which it doesn’t permit itself to claim regarding the West Bank). Therefore, just as it did in its attacks against sovereign Lebanon, in the Strip too it is crossing borders and red lines: destroying, crushing and killing indiscriminately. Isn’t it your obligation to take into consideration the fact that the occupier that pretends to be attacked has no God?<br /><br />17. You claim (rightly, in my opinion) that the path of negotiations chosen by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) has proven its futility and its failure. The World Bank screams that without Area C there is no Palestinian economy, and Israel could not care less. It continues to rob land, to demolish Palestinian homes. The army and police do as they wish: They kill young and older demonstrators who do not endanger the lives of their armed men. East Jerusalem is one huge slum. What do you propose to do instead of negotiations?<br /><br />18. The military path and the militarization that you have chosen since the 1990s is older than the years of negotiations. What has it accomplished? During the first intifada you pushed for the use of firearms and explosives, but only in the occupied territories. After the massacre perpetrated by Dr. Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in February 1994 you began your suicide attacks against civilians in Israel. During the first decade of the millennium you greatly increased your militarization and began to improve your rockets. And still everything is worse than it was: The Palestinian territory is more fragmented. Not only have the settlements expanded, so have economic gaps among the Palestinians. There is great despair. So perhaps the conclusion is that your armed resistance has also proven its failure and futility?<br /><div class="ii gt m14874025a40a9ff7 adP adO" id=":189" style="direction: ltr; margin: 5px 15px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 5px; position: relative;">
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OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-88826216069308816812014-09-03T11:05:00.003-04:002014-09-03T11:05:46.120-04:00Israel holds first conference for 'gingers'<br />
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Children attend a redhead convention at the Kibbutz Gezer (Hebrew for carrot), Aug. 28, 2014. (photo by Yuval Avivi)<br />
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Israel holds first conference for 'gingers'<br />
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"Having a conference for redheads on Kibbutz Gezer [Hebrew for carrot] is like having a conference for the elderly in Kfar Saba [literally Grandpa’s Village]." <br />
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“Next year,” Ofri said at the end of the event, “we’ll organize a gathering that is open to everyone.”With that joke, Ofri Moshe, a sweet 9-year-old redhead, opened Israel’s first conference for gingers, an event that she initiated and organized. Some 200 redheads from across the country registered in advance — a requirement made by the Home Front Command — to participate in this special event on Aug. 28.<br />
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Then, all 942 people who expressed their desire to attend on the event’s Facebook page could actually show up. This year, most didn’t make the 200-person cutoff. Even after the cease-fire was announced on Aug. 26, the limit on the number of participants was not lifted, much to the chagrin of many redheaded Israelis. “Is there any chance that the event will be open to everyone now that there is a cease-fire?” wrote Nir Amichay on Facebook. “There are a lot of disappointed redheads out there who would love to take part.”<br />
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Ofri was inspired to launch this special convention after hearing about the famous conference for redheads in the Netherlands. She was unable to attend, so she decided to organize a similar event in her home of Kibbutz Gezer. “I said to myself, that's a great idea,” she said, and then, “I bugged my parents about it until they realized I was serious.”<br />
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In the end, Ofri’s project took off and became a reality. Yes, the event was amateur, but the mood was polished and refined. Given Ofri’s energy and charisma as event moderator, it was obvious she enjoyed the attention.<br />
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It was a lively event, and often funny. Together with her mother Meirav, Ofri led the artistic session, which began, of course, with the popular Hebrew children’s song, “I’m a Redhead.” From there it continued with the “Giness World Records,” which Ofri explained was “like the Guinness Book of World Records but for gingers.” It included the redhead with the longest hair (measured using a carrot); the person with the most freckles; the oldest redhead (Esperans, 82, who was born in Iraq, and who excitedly told the audience, “Never dye your hair!”); and the youngest redhead (David, 1, named after the most famous biblical king and redhead, of course). Then there was a carrot-sharpening contest, using a special sharpener, and a bagpipe performance as a tribute to Scotland, home of the redheads.<br />
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One young woman said that she came to the gathering “to find a redheaded Jewish husband, preferably a Chabad [Hasidic movement] follower.” It’s hard to imagine that she found one, if only because so many of the participants were children. Some parents explained, “We wanted them to see other children who looked like them, so that they’ll be like everyone else for a moment.” Those children, however, don’t seem to be suffering because of their red hair. Sure, there are stereotypes and insulting nicknames, but most of the kids there said they were proud to be redheads. It is actually their parents who have the painful memories.<br />
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The Koniak family brought three generations to the event. Grandma Malka, who encouraged everyone to attend, said, "I suffered a lot. In school they called me ‘Malka the Ginger’ [in Hebrew, 'ginger queen'], with a negative connotation. After years of being looked down on, I wanted them to have an experience that will strengthen them instead." When her grandson Tom, 9, said he is called “Red Tom,” his mother Sharon was quick to add, “I think it’s a nice nickname.” Tom changed the topic: “The only thing I agree with is that redheads get angry easily. I really do get angry too quickly.”<br />
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Plenty of parents actually do complain about a frenetic energy. Ayelet Helerman, the mother of Alon, 10, said that in their house they often use the code words, “Danger! There’s an angry redhead in the house.”<br />
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Mirit, 17, and Sigal, 15, are redheaded sisters from Jerusalem. “It’s true. We really do get angry,” they said, but note that despite their hot tempers, they aren’t bothered by all the red in their lives. “People will always reference the color, but it should be taken with a grain of humor and good fun. My nickname is ‘Sweet Ginger,’” said Sigal. “And mine is ‘Beloved Ginger,’” said Mirit.<br />
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Tom, Sigal and Mirit are the only redheads in their schools. Statistics show that redheads are becoming increasingly rare, which may be why they are showing so much pride. Alon Helerman, for instance, is very proud of his orange hue. “I raised him to take pride in it,” said his mother Ayelet. “It’s true that I always tried to hide it about myself, but when Alon was born, he liberated me.”<br />
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Alon really is proud. He first learned of the event just a day before it was supposed to take place. When he heard it was invite-only, he didn’t give his parents a moment’s rest until they managed to finagle him an invite. On the morning of the gathering he made special shirts for himself, his mother and Ofri, with the slogan, “Redhead is a state of mind.” He plans on celebrating his bar mitzvah three years from now at the redhead conference in the Netherlands.<br />
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Danielle Nayer grew up in the United States, where, she said, she was subjected to nasty names. Some of these were unpleasant. “I’m not worried that it might happen to my children, too. I’m sure it will happen to them. It’s the first thing that people will notice about them. That’s what they’ll laugh at. But there’s also something good about it. It means that people won’t laugh at anything related to their true inner beings.” Her children, Nes, 4, and Max, 3, are fourth-generation redheads and absolutely beautiful.<br />
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As the event came to an end, some shouted, “Redhead selfie! Who’s in?” Ofri closed the conference with a brief speech, saying, “Let’s hope that this becomes a tradition.”<br />
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“Hold on a minute,” someone shouted from the audience. “When do we take over the world?”<br />
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Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/08/israel-redhead-convention-ginger-children-kibbutz.html#ixzz3C88fcfRXOrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-80525080908235527872014-07-28T10:48:00.001-04:002014-07-30T11:52:54.708-04:00Open letter to the Atlanta Journal ConstitutionAs a citizen of this glorious country, a member of the Atlanta community, and a proud Jew, my heart ached when I saw the cartoons that your prestigious newspaper (what I consider The Voice of Georgia) published on July 15 and July 22. These cartoons were created by Mr. Mike Luckovich.<br />
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The cartoons portrait a State of Israel which takes advantage of the American society through its friendship and loyalty (July 15), and Israel’s view on the Two State Solution incarcerating the people of Gaza sieged by barbed wire.<br />
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Let me understand these two images and remind Mr. Luckovich that one image or picture speaks more than a thousand words.<br />
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I would not challenge Mr. Luckovich's creative mind in regard to his ability to draw, but let me clarify his ignorance regarding geopolitics.<br />
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Let me elucidate the erroneousness conveyed in his cartoons:<br />
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1. The relationship between the State of Israel and the United States of America is strong and steady because the values of this country based on democracy, freedom of speech, patriotism, progress, intellectual stimulation and spiritual growth are values that prevail in the State of Israel, a land that welcomes all the religions and embraces its inhabitants. The unwavering bond between these two countries is based on mutual trust and loyalty (referring to the cartoon on July 15).<br />
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2. As far as Israel’s attitude towards Gaza is concern after the Disengagement in 2005, let me tell Mr. Luckovich that Israel provides assistance to the Palestinians living in that area. Allow me to quote Israel’s UN Ambassador Don Prosor back in 2011 when he spoke about myths and facts<br />
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“Myth: there is a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. In fact, numerous international organizations have said clearly that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the Deputy Head of the Red Cross Office in the area. Gaza 's real GDP grew by more than 25% during the first three quarters of 2011. Exports are expanding. International humanitarian projects are moving forward at a rapid pace. There is not a single civilian good that cannot enter Gaza today. <br />
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Yet, as aid flows into the area, missiles fly out. This is the crisis in Gaza. <br />
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And that is what keeps Gaza from realizing its real potential. It is a simple equation. If it is calm in Israel, it will be calm in Gaza. But the people of Gaza will face hardship as long as terrorists use them as human shields to rain rockets down on Israeli cities. Each rocket in Gaza is armed with a warhead capable of causing a political earthquake that would extend well beyond Israel 's borders. It will only take one rocket that lands in the wrong place at the wrong time to change the equation on the ground. <br />
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If that happens, Israel 's leaders would be forced to respond in a completely different manner. It is time for all in this Chamber to finally wake up to that dangerous reality. The Security Council has not condemned a single rocket attack from Gaza. History's lessons are clear. Today's silence is tomorrow's tragedy”. <br />
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Israel has been offering humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza: food, medicine, cement to build their own infrastructure and to teach then “how to fish”, but they are victims of their own government, the terrorist organization Hamas has robbed them of their own future.<br />
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The people of Gaza run for their lives and are treated in Israeli hospitals because our Jewish values do not discriminate on race, religion, color and social status. Israel nurtures them, heals them, cures them, while their own regime uses them as shields to protect their weapons, Israel uses its weapons to protect the human beings.<br />
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As a Rabbi involved in interfaith events in Georgia and nationwide, my soul cries when I see these cartoons, they destroy tireless constructive hours of honest dialogue and mutual understanding. As a medical doctor who finished her fellowship at the Hadassah Medical Hospital in Jerusalem my heart aches to witness these cartoons while I remember that 40 percent of my patients were Palestinians treated in Israeli hospitals with the same efficiency and professionalism as the Christians and the Jews who live in Israel.<br />
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I truly hope that Mr. Luckovich publicly apologizes for these cartoons.<br />
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I don’t expect him to counterbalance these cartoons with one that shows terrorists from Hamas hiding in the tunnels and getting to their “Promise Land” while attacking a kindergarten of the Kibbutz on the other side of the border, or thanking the Iron Dome for protecting the American citizens that just landed from a safe Delta flight.<br />
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It’s time, Mr Luckovich to get informed, to get your facts right, to stop repeating deceptive myths.<br />
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We will welcome your public apologies.<br />
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Shalom, Salam, Peace!<br />
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“The Lord detests lying lips, but delights in people who are trustworthy” Proverbs 12:22<br />
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Rabbi Dr. Analia BortzOrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-85005453565503493792014-07-22T11:05:00.001-04:002014-07-22T11:05:20.169-04:00Which will come first: A siren, Gaza invasion or my first grandchild?When my children were born, I allowed myself to think that by the time they grew up, all the fighting would be over.<div>
<br />By Amy Levinson<br /><br /><img height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEh1VQ9UMaeNYCRfQI8arUIO3125CeBXzu5W5kevQguatXguQoEx2hl_t4bQ8-M4KisL9eAGGiM2remKzVc3xK5DfUFPnu4979Dvz4_22OWvHKfGc0NcNwX1jRuu0N9MYDmhwWK67Fc5RdZtmuZwmr5P-fEXf3FWkC4-Y7uJV0pw5VSKBoiJRNKK0WO_xG_ZwCJCIsjvz7YfyS_NtC-QEFm4N1eSSDYnVIov6uZET0RhbXnA3JVia5lYKw=s0-d-e1-ft!/image/2182064121.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/2182064121.jpg" width="320" /><br />Patients and their families in a shelter at Barzilai Medical Center. Photo by AP<br /><br />Surreal. There is no other way to describe it.<br /><br />I am waiting in the delivery ward, down the hall from the room where my daughter is about to give birth to our first grandchild. I am waiting for the happiest, the best of all possible news, while the country is becoming more embroiled by the moment in a military operation in the Gaza Strip that threatens to spiral into chaos, paralyzing our lives, stopping our hearts, causing untold damage, injury and death.<br /><br />Heart-rending screams. Gut-wrenching groans. Women are giving birth here, after all. <br /><br />It occurs to me, in a fleeting moment of clarity, that this is the only place in the world where pain is natural and moans of anguish are, well, the norm. <br /><br />I follow the doctors, nurses and midwives scurrying about, with tired and droopy eyes. <br /><br />My stomach is churning.<br /><br />My sons, the uncles of this as-yet-unborn child, are both Israel Defense Forces officers. They are not with us in the waiting room here, as we’d hoped. They will not share in the exquisite euphoria we will undoubtedly experience in those precious moments after the birth.<br /><br />The two of them, one in the regular army and one in reserves, have been called down south, along with tens of thousands of their comrades-in-arms in advance of a possible incursion of ground forces.<br /><br />Dazed by a peculiar mix of anxiousness and excitement, I can’t help but be struck by the irony: Here I am sitting in the labor ward of Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer. Just a stone’s throw away is the main IDF induction base, where each of my three children was brought on the very first day of their military service. I had kept joking with the boys until the very last minute about how it still wasn’t too late, they could still ask for desk jobs. <br /><br />For my part, I have consoled myself and my liberal conscience over the years with the thought that the IDF will be a more human and humane place with officers such as my two sons serving in it. My apprehension was diluted by pride. Now it’s returned with full force.<br /><br />At this particularly poignant juncture, I also recall the long-standing, familiar Israeli mantra whereby we – along with all Israeli mothers and fathers – deluded ourselves into thinking and declaring, upon the birth of our sons, that by the time they grew up and turned 18, there would be peace, there would no longer be a need for them to fight.<br /><br />American-born and Israeli-by-choice, a person who describes herself as belonging to the so-called and sometimes-maligned left wing, I was always particularly good at deluding myself. I have always clung to the naive idea that problems can be solved by means of dialogue and compromise.<br /><br />And I have a Peace Now sticker on my car along with the insignia of my son’s infantry unit.<br /><br />Now, above me on the muted waiting-room television, the latest headlines and images flash – warning sirens sounding simultaneously in four Israeli locales, death and destruction after an aerial attack on Gaza. My throat constricts. Tears well up. Where are my sons, I wonder.<br /><br />I catch a glimpse of some nurses and doctors going in and out of my daughter’s room. Why is the delivery taking so long, when we thought she was going to give birth over an hour ago?<br /><br />A phone call from my son-in-law, summoning us to the delivery room. We rush in, hearts pounding.<br /><br />“Do you see her?” my daughter asks, eyes glistening. “She’s perfect.”<br /></div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-19348527128684114652014-07-02T14:06:00.003-04:002014-07-02T14:06:28.346-04:00Where are the Palestinian Mothers? A culture that celebrates kidnapping is not fit for statehood.<h2>
Where are the Palestinian Mothers? A culture that celebrates kidnapping is not fit for statehood.</h2>
By Bret Stephens<br />wsj.com<br /> <br />Updated July 1, 2014 2:35 p.m. ET<br /><br />In March 2004 a Palestinian teenager named Hussam Abdo was spotted by Israeli soldiers behaving suspiciously as he approached the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank. Ordered at gunpoint to raise his sweater, the startled boy exposed a suicide vest loaded with nearly 20 pounds of explosives and metal scraps, constructed to maximize carnage. A video taken by a journalist at the checkpoint captured the scene as Abdo was given scissors to cut himself free of the vest, which had been strapped tight to his body in the expectation that it wouldn't have to come off. He's been in an Israeli prison ever since.<br /><br />Abdo provided a portrait of a suicide bomber as a young man. He had an intellectual disability. He was bullied by classmates who called him "the ugly dwarf." He came from a comparatively well-off family. He had been lured into the bombing only the night before, with the promise of sex in the afterlife. His family was outraged that he had been recruited for martyrdom.<br /><br />"I blame those who gave him the explosive belt," his mother, Tamam, told the Jerusalem Post, of which I was then the editor. "He's a small child who can't even look after himself."<br /><br />Yet asked how she would have felt if her son had been a bit older, she added this: "If he was over 18, that would have been possible, and I might have even encouraged him to do it." In the West, most mothers would be relieved if their children merely refrained from getting a bad tattoo before turning 18.<br />***<br />I've often thought about Mrs. Abdo, and I'm thinking about her today on the news that the bodies of three Jewish teenagers, kidnapped on June 12, have been found near the city of Hebron "under a pile of rocks in an open field," as an Israeli military spokesman put it. Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, had their whole lives ahead of them. The lives of their families will forever be wounded, or crippled, by heartbreak.<br />
<br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><img src="http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AS381_glovie_G_20140630191448.jpg" /></a> <br /><br /> In Tel Aviv, a woman holds a sign with the images of the three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped. Their bodies were found on June 30. Reuters <br /><br />What about their killers? The Israeli government has identified two prime suspects, Amer Abu Aysha, 33, and Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, both of them Hamas activists. They are entitled to a presumption of innocence. Less innocent was the view offered by Mr. Abu Aysha's mother. <br /><br />"They're throwing the guilt on him by accusing him of kidnapping," she told Israel's Channel 10 news. "If he did the kidnapping, I'll be proud of him."<br /><br />It's the same sentiment I heard expressed in 2005 in the Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City by a woman named Umm Iyad. A week earlier, her son, Fadi Abu Qamar, had been killed in an attack on the Erez border crossing to Israel. She was dressed in mourning but her mood was joyful as she celebrated her son's "martyrdom operation." He was just 21.<br /><br />Here's my question: What kind of society produces such mothers? Whence the women who cheer on their boys to blow themselves up or murder the children of their neighbors? <br /><br />Well-intentioned Western liberals may prefer not to ask, because at least some of the conceivable answers may upset the comforting cliché that all human beings can relate on some level, whatever the cultural differences. Or they may accuse me of picking a few stray anecdotes and treating them as dispositive, as if I'm the only Western journalist to encounter the unsettling reality of a society sunk into a culture of hate. Or they can claim that I am ignoring the suffering of Palestinian women whose innocent children have died at Israeli hands. <br /><br />But I'm not ignoring that suffering. To kill innocent people deliberately is odious, to kill them accidentally or "collaterally" is, at a minimum, tragic. I just have yet to meet the Israeli mother who wants to raise her boys to become kidnappers and murderers—and who isn't afraid of saying as much to visiting journalists.<br />***<br />Because everything that happens in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bound to be the subject of political speculation and news analysis, it's easy to lose sight of the raw human dimension. So it is with the murder of the boys: How far will Israel go in its retaliation? What does it mean for the future of the Fatah-Hamas coalition? What about the peace process, such as it is?<br /><br />These questions are a distraction from what ought to be the main point. Three boys went missing one night, and now we know they are gone. If nothing else, their families will have a sense of finality and a place to mourn. And Israelis will know they are a nation that leaves no stone unturned to find its missing children. <br /><br />As for the Palestinians and their inveterate sympathizers in the West, perhaps they should note that a culture that too often openly celebrates martyrdom and murder is not fit for statehood, and that making excuses for that culture only makes it more unfit. Postwar Germany put itself through a process of moral rehabilitation that began with a recognition of what it had done. Palestinians who want a state should do the same, starting with the mothers.OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-57333753761180839112014-07-01T11:26:00.003-04:002014-07-01T11:26:29.447-04:00The Third Mother<br /><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjHHKBjecl3PUptFSWwfubB7I6P-DQPGSRI4KzhB_Gpo2Esy1oEQJ0wx7hiKDtl-zLBQ4Q8-PmWnEG0D29dLsuOag7V9j5OkTuT8A4TMAiDaPReV26TzD8HGkoTuP5btRjSL0iDkvCV6W0jG6CF9JB_Jl8BkqFqrAK_G_Fa=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br /><br />
July 1, 2014<br /><br /><br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgExKjfTS6WkFELpI8U4Vb0i2g4cK2t-Avbmkjqrtd5APUfG1v_MSflqADxwbqwBMXn194bGzeAHpxU-606mE7rnDLEA0pFQ8cjt8wadwJwWc1Lbr20HAwolWq2M12B4R9nkQuQ6HG-EuqfQwjFe762IVSY9SGgh-Thl13hyJcw8w=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br />
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Today I defer to an Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, who wrote the <br />
following poem titled The Third Mother:<br /><br /> Singing mothers, singing mothers.<br /> A thunder's fist is pouring, a strong silence<br /> In the empty squares marching in rows<br /> Red bearded street lights.<br /> <br /> A dire autumn, a weary inconsolable autumn,<br /> And rain with no end or beginning<br /> And no candle in the window and no light in the world<br /> Three mothers are singing<br /> <br /> Says the first, I have just seen him<br /> I shall kiss his every little finger and nail<br /> A ship is passing in the silent sea<br /> And my son is hanged from the topmast sail<br /> <br /> Says the second, my son is tall and silent<br /> And for him a holiday gown I am sewing<br /> He walks in the fields, he is coming back<br /> He bears in his heart a lead bullet.<br /> <br /> And the third mother, her eyes wander,<br /> No one was as precious to me as him<br /> How can I shed tears for him and I don't see<br /> I don't know where he is.<br /> <br /> Then the tears bath her lashes<br /> And maybe not rested, and maybe<br /> He measures with kisses, as a devoted monk,<br /> Your worldly path, my God<br /><br /> Yours,<br /> Anat HoffmanOrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-56780596433551886302014-06-24T09:57:00.000-04:002014-06-24T09:57:04.125-04:00<br /><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjHHKBjecl3PUptFSWwfubB7I6P-DQPGSRI4KzhB_Gpo2Esy1oEQJ0wx7hiKDtl-zLBQ4Q8-PmWnEG0D29dLsuOag7V9j5OkTuT8A4TMAiDaPReV26TzD8HGkoTuP5btRjSL0iDkvCV6W0jG6CF9JB_Jl8BkqFqrAK_G_Fa=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br /><br /><div>
June 23, 2014<br /><br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgExKjfTS6WkFELpI8U4Vb0i2g4cK2t-Avbmkjqrtd5APUfG1v_MSflqADxwbqwBMXn194bGzeAHpxU-606mE7rnDLEA0pFQ8cjt8wadwJwWc1Lbr20HAwolWq2M12B4R9nkQuQ6HG-EuqfQwjFe762IVSY9SGgh-Thl13hyJcw8w=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br /><br />When I count the many perks of my job, "encounters with extraordinary women" is one of the prominent ones. In recent years I have become an ardent admirer of four Orthodox women from Beit Shemesh, Nili Philipp, Eve Finkelstein, Miriam Friedman Zussman, and Rachely Yair Schloss. Last Tuesday they gave their testimonies in our court case against the municipality of Beit Shemesh for failing to remove the modesty signs that are lining the streets of Beit Shemesh.<br /> <br />Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein has issued a report that declares such signs discriminatory and illegal. Nevertheless, the municipality continues to give excuses for why the signs have yet to be removed.<br /><br />Mati Chuta, the city's Director General was questioned on the stand by our lawyer, Orly Erez Likhovski:<br /><br />Orly: Why are you not ordering the city inspectors to take down the signs?<br />Chuta: “The city has to be managed with great sensitivity towards the different communities, removing the signs is not a priority for us at all…it causes unnecessary disquiet…when I weigh these issues, I put the signs aside… There's no point in removing the signs. As soon as we take one down another comes back. It's a very expensive endeavor…We have no way to deal with it."<br />Orly: "What steps have you taken to implement the Attorney General's report?”<br />Chuta: “I haven't seen the report, I haven't done a thing”<br /><br />The city's spokesperson Matti Rosenzweig was also questioned. He claimed “Women can alleviate the insult caused to them by simply removing it from their agenda. The minute women turn the signs into a symbol, they aggravate things."<br /> <br />The four women were given the opportunity to tell the judge how the signs affect them. Their testimonies showed that to avoid causing offense and to respect religious sensitivities, women are asked to relinquish far more substantive rights. These women demand to know why they should they be the ones to bear the cost of the religious needs of a group of extremist Haredi men. They are asking the judge, the municipality and Israeli society to take notice: the placing of signs in public spaces demanding that women observe extreme modesty standards is hurtful, it's illegal and it should be stopped.<br /> <br />In a Bat-Mitzva we bless the young girl, May you be like the foremothers of Israel who built our nation. There are many ways to build the sovereign Jewish state of Israel. Nili, Eve, Miriam, and Rachely are the foremothers on the front lines of the struggle for a sane Beit Shemesh. There will, one day, be a sign in Beit Shemesh commemorating their audacity, sisterhood, and unique contribution to their home town.<br /><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="14" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; text-align: -webkit-auto; width: 600px;"><tbody>
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OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-50985862681720354432014-05-27T11:54:00.002-04:002014-05-27T11:54:19.658-04:00The Pluralist Newsletter<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjHHKBjecl3PUptFSWwfubB7I6P-DQPGSRI4KzhB_Gpo2Esy1oEQJ0wx7hiKDtl-zLBQ4Q8-PmWnEG0D29dLsuOag7V9j5OkTuT8A4TMAiDaPReV26TzD8HGkoTuP5btRjSL0iDkvCV6W0jG6CF9JB_Jl8BkqFqrAK_G_Fa=s0-d-e1-ft" /><br /><br />May 26, 2014<br /><br />Jenny Baruchi challenged the Israeli economic system. She matriculated to Hebrew University and, in doing so, lost many rights afforded to her by the state as a destitute single mother. The state assumed that if she could afford university, then she did not need financial help. Jenny questioned whether if she was a poor yeshiva student instead of a single mother, would she still receive economic stipends for her studies? These types of questions inspired a series of landmark decisions by the Supreme Court, culminating yesterday when IRAC won an important victory against this kind of preferential treatment.<br /><br />Jenny was right. Some 10,000 yeshiva students who fit specific economic criteria receive stipends from the State of Israel paid directly from the Ministry of Education to their pockets. Such payments are supposed to be given, according to Israeli law, only to people who are unable to work, and therefore students are not eligible because they choose to study rather than to enter the workforce. However, for decades the State has continued to pay these stipends to yeshiva students even though the Supreme Court ruled the payments to yeshiva students illegal. The payments were subsequently limited to 5 years for each student under the age of 29. In January 2011, IRAC filed a petition at the Supreme Court stating that this practice is discriminatory.<br /><br />The government argued in the court that these stipends were helping economic integration of the Haredi community, but the reality was the exact opposite. The stipends encouraged Haredi men, who have the highest unemployment rate in Israel, to remain in yeshiva instead of learning hard skills and joining the workforce. Usually by that point in the yeshiva student’s life, he has a large family and would be unable <div>
to earn a living in any other way. Even if he wanted to enter the workforce, he would be trapped in </div>
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self-imposed poverty.<br /><br />Yesterday, a panel of 7 judges unanimously ruled in IRAC's favor stating that economic assistance for yeshiva students is illegal and will be ended by 2015. As Justice Rubinstein stated in the court's decision, this is a critical step both for the Haredi sector and for the society as a whole. What makes this victory significant is the historic step in the direction toward all members of society contributing equally and having the opportunity to benefit equally from the state. <br /><br />Combining Torah study with real world experiences is as old as Jewish learning itself. The great sages of the Talmud could all have been found in the Yellow Pages of their time. Maimonides was a physician, Hillel a lumberjack, and Yochanan ben Zakai was a cobbler. They all had professions and worked for a living, and they were all models of Torah scholarship. Our Israeli Torah scholars are capable of doing the same.<br /> <br />Yours, <br />Anat Hoffman<br /><div class="ii gt m1463915178e0631f adP adO" id=":pv" style="direction: ltr; margin: 5px 15px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 5px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
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OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-60132634399102478642014-05-06T12:09:00.002-04:002014-05-06T12:09:26.788-04:00Israel - Day One: The story of the Day of Independence<h2>
Israel - Day One: The story of the Day of Independence</h2>
On that day, the British Mandate ended and David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence. As the Arab armies attacked, he rushed to the command center to take charge of the war.<br /><br />By Elon Gilad<br /><br />The High Commissioner of British Mandate Palestine, General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham started the day early on May 14, 1948. It was his last day on the job, which was to keep the land under his control in order.<br /><br />This order was unraveling. Even as he was ceremoniously inspecting a guard of honor at 8 A.M. that morning before leaving Government House, his home and office since his arrival in November 1945, elsewhere in Jerusalem Jewish and Arab militants were shooting one another, vying for control of the city he was about to leave.<br /><br />The small ceremony ended and Sir Alan left in a car to an airport north of Jerusalem, where he would board a flight to Haifa.<br /><br />That morning British installations around the country were finishing their packing, holding small ceremonies and starting their way in convoys to Haifa, where they would board a ship for home. One such force was the Scottish garrison of Jaffa, which at 6 A.M., to the sounds of bagpipes, lowered the Union Jack from the Jaffa police station. By 11 A.M. the last British soldier had left the city, which was bracing itself for occupation by their Jewish neighbors to the north. The Arab leadership of Jaffa had already agreed to surrender the day before and much of the Arab population had fled. Late leavers could be seen packing their belongings and going.<br /><br />Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, the streets were decked with blue and white flags with the Star of David. The excitement was palpable, but one man - soon to be Israel’s first prime minister and then the leader of the Yishuv - was extremely concerned. David Ben-Gurion started off his day meeting with the heads of the Haganah forces, which would soon become the Israel Defense Forces.<br /><br />At first the news was good: Israeli forces had taken the Arab part of Kfar Sava and the recalcitrant village of Kfar Brir. But later, at 11 A.M. the news that Gush Etzion had fallen to Jordanian forces came in.<br /><br />The feared Arab invasion had begun.<br /><br />By 9 A.M. Sir Alan was already in Haifa presiding over the ceremony ending the mandate. At the Haifa Port, the general lowered the Union Jack and folded it ceremoniously, then proceeded to a boat that carried him to the HMS Euryalus as a 17 gun salvo roared. The ship would remain in Palestine waters until midnight, when it will set sail for Britain.<br /><br />At noon, Ben-Gurion was at a meeting of the temporary government of the Yishuv in Tel Aviv, where some final changes were made to the text of the Declaration of Independence. The text itself was prepared by a legal team. At 1 P.M. the final draft was approved.<br /><br />A bit to the south in Tel Aviv, Rothschild Blvd. between Herzl St. and Allenby St. was closed to traffic. It began to swell with a large crowd of people in the afternoon, as did cafes and balconies along the boulevard. People were waving little flags and singing. At 3 P.M. journalists from around the world started filing into the Tel Aviv Art Museum. Then the dignitaries joined, to the applause of the crowd.<br /><br />At exactly 4 P.M. Ben-Gurion started the ceremony with a gavel.<br /><br />Outside and around the country people were listening to the ceremony in the first broadcast of Israel Radio. In Ma’aleh Hahamisha, a kibbutz in the Jerusalem hills, a group of Haganah combatants were recovering from the last night’s hard-fought battle and were listening to Ben-Gurion speak. One of them was their commander, Yitzhak Rabin. But then a combatant huddled in one of the room’s corners opened his eyes and shouted “Guys! Turn that off. I’m dying to sleep...We’ll listen to the declaration tomorrow.” The radio was shut off and the room went silent.<br /><br />Ben-Gurion read the declaration, which opened with a historic prologue delineating the Jews’ connection to the land. Then it went on to describe what kind of nation Israel was to be.<br /><br />“Thus, we, the members of the People’s Council assembled, the representatives of the Hebrew Yishuv and the Zionist Movement, on the last day of the British Mandate over the Land of Israel, and in light of our natural and historic rights and on the basis of the United Nations’ resolution, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, named the State of Israel,” Ben-Gurion read.<br /><br />When Ben-Gurion was done reading, he called the visibly moved Yehuda Leib Maimon to speak. With cracked voice, he read the ancient prayer, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion.” The crowd shouted “Amen!”<br /><br />Then Ben-Gurion announced that the British restrictions on Jewish immigration were void and the crowd responded with enthusiastic applause. Ben-Gurion signed the declaration and then the members of the People’s Council were invited one by one to come up to the stage and sign the declaration alphabetically. The ceremony ended with the singing of “Hatikva,” the national anthem.<br /><br />As they sang, Ben-Gurion was rushing to the command center. While the people celebrated, he would write in his diary, “I was again a mourner among celebrants.”<br /><br />Ben-Gurion’s commanders briefed him on developments he missed while he was busy declaring independence: Jaffa was occupied with no resistance, his forces in Jerusalem had taken all the key strongholds in the city deserted by the British. Ominous reports of Arab forces making their way from Jordan, Syria and Egypt were coming in.<br /><br />While crowds were out celebrating in the streets, the new Israel Police made its first arrest - a book thief was placed in custody. The courts were in session that day. The first court case to be filed under free rule was opened that day - a man sued his neighbor for three pounds, which he said claimed should be returned to him from a donation he made in 1942.<br /><br />In the cities, young men and women lined up at military bases to be drafted. Everyone knew the war was about to enter a new, deadly phase.<br /><br />At 1 A.M., Ben-Gurion was woken up and informed that U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the State of Israel. Before dawn, Arab jets bombed Tel Aviv’s airport and power station.OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-33921226322532094762014-04-17T14:14:00.002-04:002014-04-17T14:14:39.548-04:00With Passover attendance down, U.S. Jews are still in Egypt, new data indicates a dramatic drop in U.S. Jews attending a Passover Seder. They are missing a vital opportunity to enjoy their religious freedom.<h2>
With Passover attendance down, U.S. Jews are still in Egypt, new data indicates a dramatic drop in U.S. Jews attending a Passover Seder. They are missing a vital opportunity to enjoy their religious freedom.</h2>
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A Ukrainian 19th-century lubok representing the Seder table./<br />By Rabbi Dan Dorsch / Jewish World blogger<br /><br />According to alarming new data, this year only 60 to 70 percent of American Jews attended a Passover seder.<br /><br />As late as the 1990s, 90 percent of U.S. Jews in the national population survey reported attending a seder. But various studies from 2013, reported in The Jewish Week, show that only twenty years later the number has gone down dramatically.<br /><br />I find this troubling for many reasons. Unlike other holidays whose language may seem distant to modern Jews, Passover is a holiday whose themes speak to modern values. So much so, that the Seder has continually been used now, and historically, as a platform to connect the story to contemporary issues such as the Holocaust , feminism, the release of Soviet Jewry, etc. Unlike the Haggadah's famous all-night Seder in Bnei Brak that lasted all night, attending a Seder these days also does not require as much of a time commitment as it used to (unless of course, you are hosting). There are websites that tout a Seder as short as thirty minutes.<br /><br />So if American Jews are unwilling to sit down for Passover, what hope is there that they will connect to anything else?<br /><br />I recently attended a Torah study with Dr. Erica Brown, the scholar in residence of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. She reminded me of an oft-quoted teaching of the biblical commentator Rashi about the number of Jews who left Egypt. The Torah teaches us that the Israelites left Egypt chamushim, with weapons. But, why supposes Rashi, would this have been necessary? Wouldn’t they have assumed that God would fight on their behalf? Rather, Rashi teaches us that chamush is linked to the wordchamesh, which means a fifth. The Israelites, it turned out, did not all leave Egypt. Only one-fifth of the Jewish people left, while Rashi tells us that the other 80% died in the plague of darkness.<br /><br />Here, I would like to suggest that we can read Rashi metaphorically. Throughout Jewish history, there have always been Jews who have refused to leave Egypt because they were, as we would say today, "left in the dark." Rashi reminds us that this, in some sense, is the real definition of what it means to be a slave. Slavery for Jews living relatively comfortably in the Diaspora is not about a cruel Pharaoh or about government oppression. It is not simply about being offered an opportunity to be free, as modern society offers us. It is about choosing willingly to walk through a door that has been opened.<br /><br />For me, the fact that so many people failed to attend a Passover Seder this year, no matter what its level of ritual, points out the degree to which so many Jews remain in slavery by failing to walk through the door to freedom. Passover remains a vital opportunity to practice our religious freedom, and as a grateful American who is appreciative for the religious freedom he enjoys, I find it frustrating and sad that so many Jews will fail to walk through that door.<br /><br />This Passover, let us remember that no Jewish person deserves to remain in slavery. Now that the data has been called to my attention, as an American Jewish communal leader I understand how much work we still have to do. Rashi reminds us that even in the worst of circumstances only 20% of Jews ever left Egypt. In America where we are "free," it seems we still have much more work to do.</div>
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OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-49856279435676647622014-03-05T11:15:00.005-05:002014-03-05T11:15:48.330-05:00When Israel’s high-tech guru turned the tables on me<h2>
When Israel’s high-tech guru turned the tables on me</h2>
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How an AIPAC interview turned into a comedy improv, and a Times of Israel lovefest, in front of 14,000 people<br />BY DAVID HOROVITZ<br /><br /><a href="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-05-at-3.41.36-PM-e1394026868570.png"><img height="179" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-05-at-3.41.36-PM-e1394026868570-635x357.png" width="320" /></a><br />Yossi Vardi and David Horovitz at AIPAC 2014 (photo credit: AIPAC video screenshot)<br /><br />What you are about to see is unquestionably the funniest interview I’ve ever conducted or, more accurately, been involved in.<br /><br />And that’s coming from someone who’s spent time with Jack Lemmon (for younger readers: peerless and brilliantly witty “Some Like it Hot” actor, who was starring in a play in Israel many years ago) and with Yuval HaMevulbal (for older readers: manic, gravel-voiced Israeli kids’ comedian).<br /><br />At AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington this week, I was invited to publicly interview a series of prominent Israelis, including several politicians and nonpareil photographer David Rubinger. Some of the interviews took place in sessions attended by “just” a couple of thousand participants; others in the vast main hall, where all 14,000 AIPAC attendees gathered.<br /><br />The last of these interviews, before the full AIPAC crowd on Monday night, was with Yossi Vardi, the guru of Israeli high-tech.<br /><a href="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-05-at-3.43.06-PM.png"><img src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-05-at-3.43.06-PM-305x172.png" /></a><br />Yossi Vardi at AIPAC 2014 (photo credit: AIPAC video screenshot)<br /><br />We’d chatted informally and briefly through a few questions beforehand, for what was intended to be a relatively short conversation, but the running order and timing of the carefully scheduled session was changing all the time. And once we got out on stage, the numbers on an electronic clock that only we could see, telling us how long we had left to talk, kept defying the natural order of things by going up instead of down.<br /><a href="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-05-at-3.42.20-PM.png"><img src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/03/Screen-Shot-2014-03-05-at-3.42.20-PM-e1394027130902-305x172.png" /></a><br />David Horovitz at AIPAC 2014 (photo credit: AIPAC video screenshot)<br /><br />So we kept talking, with me, the supposed host, torn between terror at what might happen if we ran out of things to discuss and fascination at what Yossi was saying. Increasingly, as you’ll see, I stuck to feeding Yossi lines for what became a (seated) stand-up comedy performance by a very smart, articulate, </div>
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self-deprecating and likable man.<br /><br />While I’d been watching the clock, however, I didn’t realize that Yossi had been too. So this gets really surreal 24 minutes in, when he turned the tables and started asking me questions. That’s also when it gets seriously lovely for The Times of Israel. Anyway, enjoy.<br /><br /></div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-69778391298444269272014-02-26T12:27:00.002-05:002014-02-26T12:27:16.604-05:00Oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, dies at 110<h2>
Oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, dies at 110</h2>
<br />Prague-born pianist who knew Kafka and lived in Israel for 40 years, dies in London.<br />By Ofer Aderet<br /><br /><img height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhJJ-uCndHq2CISQ1CU8bBs6es6xa33D7OmRpa7rOcgpl9I_LnAVHulUnP5IWpgE1D6TnCosnPn5rTYNyhJ-sAspdivgi47j60mbYk93hPfzHH7PfIZb4uqUEP5BwYdDqPNWegL59IsFdnTHQQ0W2mtQ8RNHDTbPY7k9rk2CNUNyWDOALXxNku29cNISGh29tvIkXYdTOSN3Bwk1LQ-WU_QOZK0GxweripoiwM4azKWt8DEG7AgAqQD0w=s0-d-e1-ft!/image/2349077637.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/2349077637.jpg" width="320" /><br />Alice Herz-Sommer, now 110 and pictured here on her 107th birthday, <div>
is the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary. Photo by Polly Hancock</div>
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<br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjYrJ0QVNJRvpKk2EISqZO953rUUH0wImQBmvoZUVDwbi7YGBjoSJXQ2r2TmBa4G8ahO72ZDUTVE0e_j7H4mbIXEba5ozOIl18NSwybOmtD09pEfKHtm6AF2lYUcv8xo3xLHtFX1wLqugRQfkjExbxJc4KmjvkBvhw808KHBUoOdU8HRlLbpM-HX2P6aAjGumym0-hQzWQwfljSjgWhYmd2rtoderaWZs3yxmYoBquQVk9XAHzcn5HWOsoyUWU=s0-d-e1-ft!/image/2349077637.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_300x173/2349077637.jpg" /><br />Alice Herz-Sommer Photo by Family archive<br /><br />The world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, died Sunday at the age 110 in London. </div>
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Herz-Sommer, a pianist, born in Prague, was the subject of a documentary “The Lady in Number 6: </div>
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Music Saved My Life”, nominated for an Oscar this year.<br /><br />“Young people take everything for granted, whereas we, the elderly, understand nature, “ Herz-Sommer told Haaretz in an interview at age 106. “What I have learned, at my advanced age, is to be grateful that we have a nice life. There is electricity, cars, telegraph, telephone, Internet. We also have hot water all day long. We live like kings. I even got used to the bad weather in London,” she said.<br /><br />Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated, among them Franz Kafka, who she remembers well. He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.<br /><br />“Kafka was a slightly strange man,” Sommer recalled. “He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly,” she says, and then grows silent. “And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him.”<br /><br />When World War I broke out, she was 11. Five years later she enrolled in the German music academy in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Within a short time she became one of the city’s most famous pianists, and in the early 1930s was also known throughout Europe. Max Brod, the man who published Kafka’s works, recognized Sommer’s talent and reviewed several of her performances for a newspaper.<br /><br />In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer, also a musician. Six years later their only son, Rafael, was born. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.<br /><br />This was a very difficult time for Sommer, who had stayed behind. The Nazis forbade Jews to perform in public, and so she stopped holding concerts and participating in music competitions. At first she was still able to make a living by giving piano lessons, but when the Nazis forbade Jews to teach non-Jews, she lost most of her pupils.<br /><br />“Everything was forbidden. We couldn’t buy groceries, take the tram, or go to the park,” she said.<br /><br />But the hardest times of all still lay ahead. In 1942 the Germans arrested her sick mother, Sophie, who was 72 at the time, and subsequently murdered her.<br /><br />“That was a catastrophe,” Sommer said. The bond between a mother and her child is something special. I loved her so much. But an inner voice told me, ‘From now on you alone can help yourself. Not your husband, not the doctor, not the child.’<br /><br />And at that moment I knew I had to play Frederic Chopin’s 24 etudes, which are the greatest challenge for any pianist. Like Goethe’s ‘Faust’ or Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’ I ran home and from that moment on I practiced for hours and hours. Until they forced us out.”<br /><br />In 1943, Sommer was sent to the Terezin-Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with her husband and their son, who was then 6 years old. The Nazis allowed the Jews to maintain a cultural life there, in order to present the false impression to the world that the inmates were receiving proper treatment. Sommer thus performed there together with other musicians.<br /><br />“We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year,” she recounts. “The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.”<br /><br />In September 1944, her husband Leopold was sent to Auschwitz. He survived his imprisonment there, but died of illness at Dachau shortly before the war ended. His departing words to her at Theresienstadt saved her life, says Sommer: “One evening he came and told me that 1,000 men would be sent on a transport the following day - himself included. He made me swear not to volunteer to follow him afterward. And a day after his transport there was another one, which people were told was a transport of ‘wives following in their husbands’ footsteps.’ Many wives volunteered to go, but they never met up with their husbands: They were murdered. If my husband hadn’t warned me, I would have gone at once.”<br /><br />In May 1945, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. Two years later Sommer and her son immigrated to Palestine, where they were reunited with her family: her twin Mariana, who had meanwhile married Prof. Emil Adler, one of the founders of Hadassah Medical Center (their son, Prof. Chaim Adler, is an Israel Prize laureate for education), and with Irma and her husband Felix (their grandson is actor Eli Gorenstein).<br /><br />I don’t hate the Germans,” Sommer declared. “[What they did] was a terrible thing, but was Alexander the Great any better? Evil has always existed and always will. It is part of our life.”<br /><br />In 1962, she added, she attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: “I have to say that I had pity for him. I have pity for the entire German people. They are wonderful people, no worse than others.”<br /><br />For almost 40 years Sommer lived in Israel, making a living by teaching music at a conservatory in Jerusalem. “That was the best period in my life,” she recalls. “I was happy.”<br /><br />In 1986, Sommer followed her son, a cellist, and his family to London. She continued playing and teaching; to this day she devotes three hours a day to practicing. She speaks lovingly of her two grandchildren, whose father, Rafael, died of a heart attack in Israel in 2001, at the end of a concert tour. He was 64.<br /><br />His birth was the happiest day of my life, and his death was the worst thing that happened to me,” she notes, but manages to find a bright spot even here. “I am grateful at least that he did not suffer when he died. And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology.”<br /><br />When asked in 2006 what the secret of her longevity was, she answered: In a word: optimism. "I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive. My recommendation is not to eat a lot, but also not to go hungry. Fish or chicken and plenty of vegetables.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-2071876021577689702014-02-26T11:15:00.004-05:002014-02-26T11:15:59.596-05:00The topic Israelis are talking about<h2>
The topic Israelis are talking about</h2>
By Michael Oren<br /><br /><img border="0" height="180" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140113144722-tel-aviv-beachfront-story-top.jpg" width="320" /><br />The beachfront of Tel Aviv, Israel.<br /><br /><div>
STORY HIGHLIGHTS</div>
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<br />Michael Oren: Israel sits in a region bristling with conflict and hostile to its presence<br />He says one topic stirring attention is number of streets named for women in Tel Aviv<br />Israelis have always lived with the threat of war, and put it in perspective, he says<br />Support for a two-state solution is strong in Israel today, he says<br /><br />Editor's note: Michael Oren is the former Israeli ambassador to the United States. His books include "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present."<br /><br />(CNN) -- Like Americans, Israelis begin their day by watching one of several television news shows. These highlight the pressing issues facing the country. But Israel, of course, is not just any country, but a contested and often controversial Jewish state situated in the epicenter of an overwhelmingly Muslim and constantly roiling Middle East.<br /><br />One would expect, then, to hear commentators on these shows discussing the latest glitch in the peace talks with the Palestinians, the recent terrorist bombing just beyond Israel's southern border with Egypt, or the revelation of more advanced rockets in the arsenal of Hezbollah in Lebanon. But the topic on Israel's leading morning show this week was none of these. The top issue, rather, was the percentage of Tel Aviv streets named for women.<br /><br />Turns out that women's studies scholars and feminist activists have examined Tel Aviv street names and discovered that the overwhelming majority of them are named for men. While preparing for work, I kept one eye on the television and listened, fascinated, as representatives of women's rights groups argued passionately for gender equality in Tel Aviv street-naming. They made a compelling case and even the show's hosts, who are generally testier than their American counterparts, were convinced. I, too, was impressed, and not only by the discussion, but also by the very fact that it was taking place.</div>
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<br /><img border="0" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/130317114021-michael-oren-left-tease.jpg" /><br />Michael Oren<br /><br />From Tel Aviv it is roughly a two-hour drive to Mafraq in Jordan, the temporary home of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, making it the country's second-largest city.<br /><br />From Tel Aviv, one can drive three hours north — less than the distance between New York and Boston — and arrive in Damascus, in the thick of the Syrian civil war. Or one can drive east from Tel Aviv and in eight hours reach Iraq, where an estimated thousand people are being killed each month by suicide bombers.<br /><br />A similar excursion of about nine hours concludes in Tahrir Square in time for the latest confrontation between Egyptian protesters and police. A veritable firestorm is engulfing the Middle East, and Israel's Tel Aviv is just a short commute from its flash points.<br /><br />Yet it was women's rights, not the upheaval encompassing Israel on all sides, which highlighted the morning news. One explanation, certainly, is that Israelis need diversion from the chaos closing in on them, and what could be more distracting than a debate about signposts?<br /><br />After all, the question of whether to name a street after Golda Meir is certainly easier than asking if Israel can coexist with a nuclear-armed Iran.<br /><br />Another claim, one that is sometimes voiced by visiting statesmen, is that Israelis have it too good to think about the hard choices they face in the peace process. In fact, support for the two-state solution is vastly higher among Israelis today—more than 60%--than it was during the years of suicide bombing, when it was close to zero. But the real reason for Israel's interest in women's rights at this time is much more fundamental and reveals this country's secret. The reason is fortitude.<br /><br />Unique among the world's nations, Israel has never known a second of peace. Since its creation in 1948, and for many years before that, the country has been in a relentless state of war. And yet, in spite of that trauma, Israelis simply refuse to live abnormal lives.<br /><br />Almost militantly, they insist on normality. Call it a bubble, call it a fantasy, but the fact is that it works. In the midst of regional insanity, Israelis have built several of the world's leading universities, a cutting-edge high-tech sector, a universal health care system, and a wildly vibrant democracy.<br /><br />Yes, there is controversy. There is still no two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and no end in sight for the Iranian nuclear program. Israeli intelligence recently reported that terrorists are pointing 170,000 rockets and missiles at the Jewish state. But on the streets of Tel Aviv, quite possibly the most threatened city on Earth, the cafes and cultural centers are packed, the food is superb and people are arguing why more of those streets are not named for women.</div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087274124177135953.post-62959179460561495652014-02-20T10:05:00.006-05:002014-02-20T10:05:52.873-05:00In Rawabi, the brand-new Palestinian city, both sides winProjects like this bring our peoples closer together, says Bashar Al-Masri, the entrepreneur behind an unprecedented construction project that is changing the West Bank landscape<br />BY ELHANAN MILLER<br /><br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.28.39-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />Civil engineer Shadia Jaradat (center) poses with two colleagues in one of Rawabi's model apartments. <div>
A third of the project's engineers are women (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)</div>
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<br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-13.00.19-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />A model of Rawabi in the project's visitors' center (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)</div>
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<br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.17.04-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />Former Sharon adviser and current Rawabi legal fixer Dov Weisglass (left) stands next to Rawabi managing director Bashar Al-Masri (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)</div>
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<br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-13.51.20-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />A construction site in downtown Rawabi (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)</div>
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<br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-15.04.51-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />Palestinian flags encircle Rawabi's visitors' center (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)</div>
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<br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.28.15-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />A view from the balcony of a ninth-floor Rawabi apartment (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)</div>
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<br /><img height="180" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.27.44-965x543.jpg" width="320" /><br />The living room in Rawabi's model apartment (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)<br /><br />RAWABI, West Bank — If all goes according to plan, this summer 600 middle-class families will begin moving into their new apartments in Rawabi, the largest construction project in recorded Palestinian history.<br /><br />The city slopes down a hill 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) north of Ramallah, directly between Nablus and Jerusalem, and the Israeli coastline is clearly visible from the balconies of its higher apartments. Rawabi, which is Arabic for hills, is entirely funded by private investment — a joint venture of Palestinian company Massar International and Qatari real estate developer Diar — estimated to surpass $1 billion. When phase A is done, it will be home to more than 25,000 residents seeking to escape the disarray of traditional Palestinian cities.<br /><br />While the prospects of a positive outcome to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians seem iffy, Rawabi is a towering certainty. But the shiny new city on the hill is not only a model of Palestinian entrepreneurship, it is also a little-known exemplar of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.<br /><br />Bashar Al-Masri, managing director of Rawabi, said that though no Israeli companies have been involved in constructing the city, hundreds of Israeli suppliers provide it with raw materials such as cement, sand, electric components and plumbing. He estimated that Israeli businesses benefit from the Rawabi project to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a month. The only political principle Rawabi holds with relation to Israel is no cooperation with businesses in the settlements.<br /><br />“We buy from whoever gives us the lowest price,” Al-Masri said. “It makes no difference to us if the company is Israeli, Italian or German.”<br /><br />“We have no choice but to cooperate with Israel and Israelis, but we also want to do so,” he added. “It is a mistake to separate our economy from Israel’s. Projects like this bring our peoples closer together: Israelis come to the site, they are exposed to Palestinians, and they realize there’s no risk in coming here. There is a sense of comfort.”</div>
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<br /><a href="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.21.57.jpg"><img height="179" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.21.57-635x357.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />A view from the kitchen in Rawabi’s model apartment (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)<br /><br />These positions have placed Masri — a native of Nablus who spent much of his adult life living in the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia — under fire in his own society. In 2012, the Palestinian National BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) Committee condemned him for normalization with Israel, accusing him of “advancing personal interests and profit making at the expense of Palestinian rights.”<br /><br />But despite the BDS efforts, the ambitious project is already a huge blessing for the Palestinian economy. Providing 8,000-10,000 jobs in construction, Rawabi is by far the largest private employer in the West Bank. Once complete, the city is expected to employ 3,000-5,000 people in its commercial and cultural center, said Amir Dajani, the project’s deputy managing director.</div>
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<br /><img src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-15.02.43-195x293.jpg" /><br />A model of Rawabi’s mosque in the visitors’ center (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/times of Israel)<br /><br />Rawabi materialized remarkably fast; its planning began five years ago and construction just two. Situated in area A, Rawabi lies within full Palestinian jurisdiction, where planning and construction bureaucracy are far less obstructive than in neighboring Israel. A local quarry feeds an on-site stone-cutting factory active 24 hours a day, six days a week. The city will eventually emerge complete with three schools, two mosques, a church, a commercial center including restaurants and cinemas, and an amphitheater that can seat 15,000. With no residents yet, Rawabi already has an appointed mayor, Majed Abdul Fattah.<br /><br />But cooperation with Israeli authorities has not always been easy. The Civil Administration, an IDF organ entrusted with the civilian governing of the West Bank, objected to the widening of a local road leading up to the city and passing through area C, which lies under Israeli administrative control. And Israel’s national water company, Mekorot, has still not guaranteed a water supply to Rawabi.<br /><br />Dov Weisglass, an Israeli lawyer and former bureau chief for prime minister Ariel Sharon, serves as the legal and regulatory adviser to Rawabi in its dealings with the Israeli government. He said that while some officials in the Civil Administration place hurdles before Rawabi since they are “no big supporters of the vision of Palestinian development,” the Israeli government has gradually changed its attitude toward the new city.<br /><br />“A few years ago, when Rawabi was just getting started, the Israeli attitude was harsher and more suspicious,” Weisglass said. “However, today I can state with satisfaction that most Israeli authorities willingly cooperate based on a deep understanding that history is being made here before our eyes, both domestically and — to a certain extent — with relation to Israel.”<br /><br />Weisglass asserted that the new middle-class city will be the antithesis of violence and extremism.<br /><br />“Does this project not contribute to normalization, to co-existence and to peace?” Weisglass wondered. “We are doing something tremendous for the State of Israel.”<br />A new Palestinian concept: The mortgage<br /><br />Rawabi looks remarkably different from the typical Palestinian community. The city, which markets itself as environmentally sustainable, will have no water tanks on its roofs and will enjoy a centralized TV service to replace the ubiquitous satellite dishes of Arab urban centers. All of its infrastructure is being laid underground.<br /><br />When planning began for the city, Masri met with renowned Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie, who took him on a tour of nearby Modi’in.</div>
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<br /><img src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2014/02/2014-02-13-14.07.37-195x293.jpg" /><br />Bashar Masri at Rawabi’s construction site (photo credit: Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel)<br /><br />“When searching for a model, we first looked at cities next door,” Masri recalled. “Modi’in has similar topography and a similar climate to Rawabi.”<br /><br />Rawabi’s planners also learned from Modi’in’s mistakes. The planned Israeli city is still widely viewed as a commuter town due a lack of local businesses, a planning mistake Masri said he was determined to avoid with Rawabi. Rawabi’s center is therefore designed as a commercial hotspot built to attract Palestinians from the surrounding areas.<br /><br />“Today many Israelis come here to learn from Rawabi,” Masri noted. “Just last week we hosted a group from the Israeli association of planners.”<br /><br />But Rawabi has also challenged the conventional attitude toward home ownership in the West Bank.<br /><br />Traditionally, Palestinians build their homes on family land, expanding the house as money becomes available. The Rawabi project has introduced a new concept: the long-term mortgage.<br /><br />Before Rawabi set up a mortgage company granting 25-year loans, the typical Palestinian loan would entail a five- to eight-year payback period. The Palestinian Monetary Authority used to require a down payment of 20 percent of the property’s value, a rate Rawabi successfully lobbied to lower to 15%.<br /><br />One beneficiary of Rawabi’s financing system is Shadia Jaradat, a 26-year-old civil engineer who has been working for Rawabi for the past four years (a third of Rawabi’s 300 engineers are women). Through an assistance program in which the project helps its employees on their down payment, the Hebron native recently purchased a four-bedroom ninth-floor apartment for $120,000, a price she said was affordable. Eleven percent of home-buyers in Rawabi are single, like Jaradat. <br /><br />“I plan to move in as soon as they fit the windows,” she told The Times of Israel.</div>
OrHadashATLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08177578268522139705noreply@blogger.com0