Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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There is sadness along with satisfaction in recent stories of Palestinians captured or killed as a result of their attacks against Jews. A 13-year-old girl was shot to death as she charged, with knife raised, against a security guard on the border between a Palestinian town and Jerusalem. Subsequent pictures showed where she had lived in a cluster of Bedouin tents and shacks alongside the buildings of Anata. It could not have been comfortable during winter cold and rain, without decent heat, running water, electricity and toilets. We hear that...
A New York Times review of a book describing what may be the world’s largest refugee camp, near Kenya’s border with Somalia, notes that 60 million people have been displaced throughout the world as a result of conflict and other mass misfortunes. We can paraphrase Stalin: one person forced from home to a condition of poverty and wandering is a tragedy. Sixty million of them is a statistic. Other headlines are about a million refugees moving from the Middle East to Europe in 2015, another million projected for 2016, with European gov...
In one of the episodes of the TV drama, Homeland, a CIA operative reports to a meeting of senior officers about his experience in Syria. The discussion proceeds something like this: There are too many militias to count, and more than a few considered important. The US has no strategy guiding its personnel on the ground. Where does it come from? They’ve been at it since the 7th century. What would it take to fix it? 200,000 US troops on the ground, and billions to create and teach a new kind of education for the younger generation. That is n...
A video showing young and religious Israeli men—along with at least one enthusiastic old man—dancing at a wedding and celebrating the killing of an Arab family has gone viral. It’s not “dancing” of the ballroom kind familiar in the better circles of the West, but men only jumping up and down to the beat of music, along with words that urge violence toward Israel’s enemies. Women may be doing something similar in another room, but outside the range of this video. It’s the kind of dancing common at religious weddings, but here with the celebrati...
It was possible to hope that this wave of violence was winding down. Soon after Friday prayers at the mosques, there was not much more excitement than routine stone throwing at a light rail train as it passed by an Arab neighborhood. For some time now, the management of the rail line has coated the windows with material that prevents serious damage. Then began an event that has occupied Israel’s media more than anything earlier. It also revealed some of the complexities that suggest the conflict is endless, with ups and downs in outbreaks. A gu...
Imagine Donald Trump as the leader of the free world. It may be something we have to get used to. Coming after eight years of Barack Obama, who came after George W. Bush, who came after Bill Clinton, one can wonder what made America great. A population of 320 million and the world largest economy had a great deal to do with it, along with being the last country standing at the end of the most recent world war, and still having the greatest military assets. However, 1945 was a long time ago. Those of us who remember it are too old to be relied...
John Kerry is seeking to top up his several efforts to deal with the Middle East by joining the Israeli and international left in warning that Israel will have to accommodate itself to a single country, with a Palestinian majority, if it doesn’t make peace with a Palestinian state. As my late mother used to say when pressed, “Horse shit.” We are used to Mahmoud Abbas’ threats, more or less weekly, that if he doesn’t get what he wants he will have no choice but to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and present to Israel responsib...
It’s not exactly the story of Sisyphus, with Israel always pushing a stone but never getting it to the top of the hill, but it’s close. Currently we’re at another of the upticks in violence. We’ve lost count as to how many of these have occurred in the last century or more, or when we should start counting. We hear from some of the experts that it is almost all individual actions, lots of them by teenagers or even pre-teens. They are said to be excited by the Internet, preachers in the mosques, kids at school, or what they hear in the family ab...
Routines are everywhere, with everyone. Almost all our waking hours we are employing one or another. How we brush our teeth, fix our breakfast, drive to where we’ve been before, get ready for bed. They are crucial for government and politics. Just as an individual cannot be bothered to ponder at length what to do in most situations, officials, politicians, and activists generally do what they have done in similar circumstances. Routines simply life, make expectations more predictable, and serve well in most cases. They are also limiting. R...
This letter is prompted by a note I received from an Internet friend who chided me for minimizing the threats of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and BDS. He thinks like Caroline Glick, whose columns express the view that if things aren’t optimal, they are terrible. Ms. Glick has a substantial audience. Some view her as the best thing since ice cream. She expresses a Jewish malady we’ve known about for years. A prominent symptom is the frequent expression of oy gevalt. Or Not again, and Why us? for those whose Yiddish is less than minimal. I have str...
It is not yet clear what caused the destruction of the Russian airliner as it flew from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh over the Sinai toward Saint Petersburg. However, the betting is an explosive device. Maybe slipped on the plane by a Bedouin baggage handler doing the work of Allah and the Islamic State, carried on by a passenger with similar motives and willing to die for the cause, or shot from below. Egypt is worried about its once flourishing tourist industry, now hanging on at a south Sinai beach a long way from the heart of the...
We are seeing in recent events the advantages of a state, as well as reasons to doubt the wisdom of creating a Palestinian state. It’s not a simple issue. A state can discipline its people, via decisions of a government, police, and courts. However, Palestinians speak and act in numerous ways, with no leadership capable of imposing its will, reaching agreements with others, and likely to implement those agreements. We can’t be certain they’d do better with a state. Various claimants of leadership—Palestine National Authority with ostensi...
The alleged division of Jerusalem has brought forth a prolonged singing of our national anthem, oy gevalt. In order to deal with the recent wave of violence coming from the most restive of the Arab neighborhoods, exit roads have been staffed with police who search those leaving. Large concrete blocks have been used to narrow the exits, and there are mobile concrete walls several meters in height along roads of Jewish neighborhoods bothered by frequent stonings and fire bombs. Critics are claiming that these actions violate the principal that...
There are no sure answers to either of those questions. Both Israelis and Palestinians are arguing—with each other and among themselves—if the current uptick in violence signifies an intifada or something less. Politicians, activists, and security professionals are arguing among themselves and with each other about the most appropriate ways to deal with the violence, and how to act in ways not likely to increase the violence. There is wide agreement that we are in a wave of violence, not all that different from previous waves that have bee...
By Ben Cohen JNS.org Remember how the terrorists fighting American forces during the occupation of Iraq gave us a chilling new acronym, IED, which stands for Improvised Explosive Device? The four-year war in neighboring Syria has now done the same. Syrian opposition activists are urging world leaders to pay heed to the favored weapon of the dictator Bashar al-Assad’s fighter planes and helicopters. It’s called a “barrel bomb,” and it’s the airborne equivalent of the IED—a crude, deadly, and unguided barrel casing, often made of metal and f...
Tensions, competition, or dust-up—call it what you will—between Russia and the U.S. presents a fascinating subject for analysis. No doubt, the U.S. is stronger by far economically and militarily. It was left standing at the end of the Cold War, while the Soviet Union disappeared. Now Russia is a fragment, albeit a significant fragment, of its former self, without the populations and resources of the Baltic Republics, Ukraine, Central Asian Republics, and tightly held allies of Eastern Europe. However, it has Vladimir Putin, who learned how to...
The Temple Mount (to Muslims Noble Sanctuary or Haram al Sharif) has returned to world headlines for God may know how many times, according to Jews, since the time of Solomon. Whatever happened there, and happens now, is a matter of intense concern. It is not a stretch to conclude that it is the prime reason, or at least among the prime reasons, why Jews and Palestinians have not moved beyond where we are to a final settlement of our disputes. There is no decent doubt that it was the site of the First and Second Temples, with the present...
One of the principal lessons that should be taught in courses dealing with politics and public policy is the persistence of uncertainty. People who insist on telling us what will be, or what will not be, have a lot to learn. Many who claim to be predicting are telling us what they want to happen, or alternatively telling us that their enemies currently in power are bound to make things worse. The reality is that there are many things capable of influencing who wins an election, which party or sub-party faction will have the upper hand in the...
The numbers are large, and projections are that the stream of refugees from the east and south will remain at flood stage. Some are predicting another historic migration, such as that which brought tribes from Asia to Europe long ago, and the great movements after World War II. Projections range to over a million this year, from east across Turkey and from Africa across the Mediterranean. Leaders are doing what they know best, i.e., talking. Also typical for a situation of crisis is that each is speaking differently, changing details from time...
It’s time for another round of that hoary folk song about disaster just about everywhere, i.e., “They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain...” The ugliest story concerns more than 70 bodies, decomposed to a smelly lump making counts difficult and identification impossible, found in a closed truck along a highway in Hungary. No less disturbing are reports by an Israeli journalist who interviewed women in a refugee camp on the Jordan side of the Jordan-Syria border. There were few men to be interviewed. The women told stories o...
The US State Department and Justice Department are wrestling with an issue concerned with a verdict handed down by a Federal Court in New York. It involves a civil suit, brought by American families who suffered injuries and death due to Palestinian terror attacks in Israel. The jury decided in favor of family charges that the Palestine Authority and PLO personnel were responsible for the attacks, and awarded the families $218.5 million. Due to provisions of US antiterrorism law, the verdict was automatically tripled, to $655.5 million. The...
It’s worth pondering at some length Barack Obama’s overlooking of Winston Churchill in his comment that he does not remember a case when a foreign official involved himself as much in American politics as Benyamin Netanyahu. Churchill was intent in bringing the United States into the European war, and it is conceivable that he would have succeeded if Pearl Harbor had not done the job. Roosevelt was in an incremental process toward war, not all that different from Wilson’s road to participating in World War I. Moreover, the US was as deepl...
Commentators have long noted that Israel is a western outpost in the Muslim Middle East, and suffers accordingly. This note accepts such a designation, but begins with a slightly different perspective, and seeks to learn what is relevant for the here and now. The Middle East is not only Muslim, or nearly entirely Muslim. It is also the Third World. This designation has its social, economic, and political elements, irrespective of religion. Traits of Mexico are similar to those of Palestinian areas of the West Bank, Gaza, and just about...
By Ira Sharkansky Israel is currently facing two especially delicate issues. We’re hearing about a New Middle East. This is not the one that Barack Obama and his supporters saw coming out of his Cairo speech and Arab Spring, but a post-Arab Spring alliance between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel. It looks promising in terms of mutual antagonism to Iran and its clients, and joint opposition to the American-brokered deal with Iran. One suspects that there is already considerable cooperation between the three, in terms of high level meetings b...
There aren’t any in the realms of politics or public policy, except in the books written for children, or childish adults. The world is too complex. We know too much to be heroic. There may be heroes on the field of battle, some of who survive their heroism, but that is a different story. Wise people, and perhaps most of those elected to high office, do not aspire to solve the big problems. They’ve learned to cope. That is, managing the problems, doing little things that make the big things less threatening. That leaves a lot of work for the...
