Hamas Mourns Bin Laden, Condemns his Killers

I suppose it's not surprising that Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, responded to the killing by stating that

the operation is "the continuation of the American oppression and shedding of blood of Muslims and Arabs."

Still, surprising or not, from now on whenever someone tells us Israel must accommodate itself to Hamas, we need to put on a puzzled face and say something along the lines of "Hamas? Weren't they the ones who condemned the Americans for killing Bin Laden? That Hamas?"  If needed, one can add that Haniya is often described as a moderate Hamas fellow, not one of your militant types at all actually.

An Italian Rachel Corrie?

Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian ISM volunteer in Gaza, has been murdered by local Islamists. The Israeli Y-net website has an interview with him, in which he explains that his arrival in Gaza in 2008 was the happiest day of his life, because he and his friends had broken a the blockade which began in 1967. (Their boat was allowed through by Israel). He goes on to explain that he's here because it's in his DNA: his grandfather fought the Italian Facists. The interview is only a few minutes long but has enough nonsense in it to fill a very long blog-post.

Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed by the IDF in 2001, yet her name has been widely commemorated, there's a play based on her letters, and she has become an icon of the non-Arab anti-Israeli forces. Arrigoni was purposefully abducted, beaten and hanged, so he should rightfully be canonized even more. I doubt this will happen, but who knows. We'll wait and see.

On another related matter: Salafi murderers are a small minority among Palestinians. But they're there, and if you assume the Palestinians are Arabs or Muslims, their power and popularity could yet grow, as has happened elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Salafists hate all sorts of people, including Italian fools who hate Israel, but they vehemently hate Jews. I think any reasonable person would agree that offering  such murderers uncontrolled access to large numbers of Israeli Jews would be a bad idea. Yet that precisely is what most of the world, from President Obama down, insists is the key to peace, since Jerusalem must be divided and also remain an open city. I apologize for droning on about this matter, but I admit I'm personally threatened by the imbecilic idea.

Finally, a nice little note: The Guardian reports on Arrigoni's murder:

Arrigoni arrived in the Gaza Strip on a boat bringing humanitarian supplies in 2008 that Israel, which enforces a blockade on the tiny coastal territory, allowed into Gaza port. [My emphasis]

Update: Just Journalism demonstrates the British media are being worse on this story than I'd said.

Hamas War Crimes

Sometimes a picture really is better than 100,000 words. Especially when it's a typical picture, which cannot be put into any context except the most simple one in the picture, and the rest of the 99,989 words are intended to obfuscate, distort, lie and malign.

The Inability of the Radical Left to Deal with Reality

I"m dedicating this column to The Guardian, Andrew Sullivan, Mondoweiss, and Didi Remez and his handful of like-minded Israeli loonies. Ah, and also To Alberto, the Argentine lefty with no Arab blood but at least one Jewish grandparent who likes to call himself Ibrahim and sometimes visits this blog.

The murder of a peace hero by Palestinians has no place on the left's emotional and ideological map. The murder of a freedom hero by Palestinians is a dogma-undermining, paradigm-subverting event for the left. Mer-Khamis' murder by Palestinians is a murder doomed for repression.
This is a deep, broad issue that goes beyond just the Israeli left. One of the outstanding characteristics of Western enlightenment in the 21st century is its inability to denounce forces of evil in the Arab-Muslim world. Western enlightenment likes to criticize the West. It especially likes to criticize the West's allies in the East. But when it runs into evil originating in the East, it falls silent.

Layers of Jerusalem

The Davidsohn Center is a tourist center to the immediate south of the Temple Mount. It was opened a few years ago, and there's a funny story about that. As the American State Department refuses to learn, building in Jerusalem is an arduous and multi-stage project, which takes years to cross. The folks behind the center didn't want to wait all those years and deal with all the bureaucracy, so they made the case that they weren't actually bulding anything new, merely refurbishing the basement of an Umayyad palace. The palace was built in the 8th century and then forgotten from history until it was rediscovered in the 1970s by Israeli archeologists, who uncovered a series of monumental Arab structures no-one had known were there. Refurbishing is a shorter process than building, and so the center opened at least five years earlier than otherwise. The Haredi guide we were with said - tongue in cheek - that when the time comes to build the Third Temple the same argumentation should be made: it's a reconstruction, not a new building.

Anyway, the reason the center is a tourist attraction is that it sits on the main road from the oldest parts of Jerusalem into the Temple, and throughout the two temple eras, all the way up to the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE, this was the main thoroughfare for pilgrims (the Talmud mentions this in detail, which is the kind of thing you learn when you've got a haredi guide). In the center there's a 10-minute film, in which a fellow acts the part of a modern researcher and also a 2nd-Temple pilgrim, wandering through the area then and now. It's a cute sort of thing.

Since the majority of tourists to Jerusalem are not Jews, the film depicts a Jewish pilgrim from the early 1st century CE, a youngish man with a beard, who just so happens to come from the Galilee, and not, say, from anywhere else Jewish pilgrims would have come from. In case any of us weren't getting the hint, our Haredi guide spelled it out for us.

The actor, depicting a contemporary Israeli and a Jesus-era Jew, is one Juliano Mer-Chamis, an Israeli mix-up who had a Jewish mother, a Palestinian father, founded and ran a theatre in Jenin, and lived on a hill above Jenin from which he could see Haifa, where he was born, and Jenin, where he made his life. He was murdered earlier this week by some Palestinian thug who apparently was angry, among other things, at Mer-Chamis' eagerness to have Israeli and Palestinian theatre troupes collaborate.

Cycle of Violence

Following the murder of four Jewish civilians two evenings ago on route 60 near Hebron, there was an attack against civilians on Route 60 south of Nablus yesterday. This time no-one was killed, but the two civilians in the car were wounded.

The cycle of violence seems to be back, doesn't it?

IHH Kaput? PA Ascendant?

Silke informs me that the German government has just banned the German branch of the IHH - remember them? The kindly peace activists massacred recently by the war-mongering Israelis?

Haaretz has the story in English here.

I'm not certain how this fits into the overall tragedy which is the story of Man, but seen on its own, it's hard to see why it would be a bad thing.

Alex, on the other hand, wants me to note that the PA authorities are cooperating with Israel to the extent that Yuval Diskin, chief of the Shabak (Shin Bet) is having full-day workshops with his Palestinian counterparts on the West Bank. Here also, I can't say what this really means in the big picture, but seen on its own it can't be bad.

The Monoweiss brigades will inevitably cast this as proof the PA is collaborating with the colonial Israelis, thus putting themselves beyond the pale. But my skepticism comes from a different direction. Back in the 1990s it just so happened that I knew an Israeli Arab who was high in our security apparatus, and worked closely with his top PA counterparts. How great then was my surprise to learn that his political positions on the Israeli spectrum were considerably to the right of where I was: this isn't likely to lead to peace, he said, in spite of they way it's being cast by our leadership. Eventually he was proved right.

Still, we can hope this time it's different, can't we?

Simple, but Fundamental, Morality

The discussion of Didi Remez' allegations about Silwan and Israel's media rumbles on, over at his blog. Along the way one Michael LeFavour penned a fine comment on morality, focusing on the pervasive idea that Israel, or America, or the rich West, somehow make folks so mad they've got no alternative but to commit murder. You'd think arguments such as Michael's would be unnecessary - had you been on Mars the past 30-40 years.

[T]here is nothing that an enemy of mine could ever do to me that would cause me to shoot a 70 year old cripple to death, roll his wheel chair to the edge of a ship, and dump his lifeless body into the ocean. There is nothing that an enemy of mine could ever do to me that could allow me to take his child from him, execute him in front of her, then crush her skull with my rifle and saunter past her mangled corpse with a sense of accomplishment lightening my stride. There is nothing that an enemy of mine could ever do to me that would fill me with so much rage that I could shoot the tires out of a family sedan, stroll up to it, place the barrel of my weapon against the swollen womb of an expectant mother and pull the trigger three times to make sure the family’s first boy would die first, then proceed to execute, at point blank range, her four screaming children huddled together in a final embrace, the oldest not even a teenager at the ripe old age of eleven.
No, sir, there is nothing my enemy could do to me and there is no hate I can imagine harboring that would drive me to do those sorts of things or the hundreds of other similar things your Arab friends have done to Israeli Jews over the course of this conflict. In fact it is precisely my morality that brings me here, it is precisely my morality that drives my pen to criticize, and it is precisely my morality that motivates me to oppose the moral perverts that side with, further the cause of, or advance the goals of a craven peoples that honor, congratulate, idolize, and revere the child martyr, the suicide belt, the death squad killers, and the bloody handed mass murderer.

Thanks, Michael, for the clear reminder.

Let's Shoot Some Israeli Citizens

Says Mahmoud Al-Zahar. Nice of him.

He's got a whole series of codes in this short statement. Feel free to see how many of them you can identify, while I'm offline, and we'll make a full list later.

Flare-Up of Violence

On Thursday Palestinian gunmen killed Meir Avishai Hai, 40, father of seven, in the northern West Bank. On Saturday IDF forces killed the three killers. What you make of this story depends upon who you are and what positions you held prior to the events, obviously. Yet it also works the other way: the kind of information you routinely take in impacts how you understand the story.

First, the NYT. Ethan Bronner, whom the Mondoweiss crowd has long since written off as hopelessly pro-Israel, puts all of what he sees as the essential elements in his first short paragraph, then gives two conflicting interpretations in the next two paragraphs, and then gives details about the events.

The Israeli military killed six Palestinians on Saturday, three in the West Bank whom it accused of killing a Jewish settler and three in Gaza who it said were crawling along the border wall planning an attack. It was the deadliest day in the conflict in nearly a year.
Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, called it “a sad day for Palestinians and their National Authority” and condemned the West Bank operation as an “assassination” and “an attempt to target the state of security and stability that the Palestinian Authority has been able to achieve.”
Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for Israel’s Central Command, which controls the West Bank, said that its forces had spent the past two days looking for the killers of the settler, Rabbi Meir Hai, a 45-year-old teacher and father of seven, who was shot dead on Thursday as he drove near his home in the settlement of Shavei Shomron.

The BBC's headline tells of Six Palestinians killed in West Bank, Gaza attacks. Who attacked? The headline doesn't say, and the short item wanders around the hill doing its best not to be clear about anything:

Israeli troops have killed six Palestinians - three in the Gaza Strip and three in the West Bank.

The Israeli military said three Palestinians suspected of trying to infiltrate from Gaza were killed in an air strike near the Erez crossing.

It is the largest number of deaths in a day since the Gaza conflict a year ago.

Separately, Israeli forces said they had killed three men - who were suspected of killing a Jewish settler - in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Palestinian sources in Nablus say two of those killed were militants from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party.

The faction was one of two groups which said they had killed the settler, a father of seven, two days ago - the first fatal shooting of an Israeli by militants in the occupied West Bank for eight months.

The item was later folded into a longer item in which the theme was how angry the Palestinians are at the Israelis. Palestinian leaders condemn Israeli raid in West Bank:

"This [Israeli] operation represents a dangerous escalation," Mr Fayyad said. He said the raid in Nablus "can only be seen in the context of targeting the security and stability that the Palestinian Authority has been able to bring about".

That would be Salam Fayad, the most moderate leader the Palestinians have ever had, not some firebrand Hamasnik - not that you'd ever know it from the BBC.

So far as I saw, the BBC never manages to mention the dead Israeli without reminding that he was a settler. As regular readers of this blog will recognize, human rights are a slippery thing, to be applied differently according to ethnicity and identity. A dead Palestinian may or may not have murdered a Jew, but the dead Jew most certainly was a settler, with the unspoken implication that his human rights are thereby diminished.

Then again, why complain about the BBC when we've got our very own B'telem? None of their people were on the scene, but they're already calling for the IDF to investigate itself on the accusation that its troops wrongfully executed innocent Palestinians:

An investigation into an overnight Israel Defense Forces operation in the West Bank city of Nablus early Saturday suggests that Israeli soldiers may have executed two of the three Palestinian militants who were killed, the left wing rights group B'Tselem said Saturday.

In the operation, the IDF killed three Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades operatives, whom officials said were responsible for a shooting attack on Thursday which killed 40-year-old father of seven Meir Hai of the settlement of Shavei Shomron. The troops surrounded the homes of the three and called for them to exit, and killed them when they refused to surrender.

Haaretz gives B'tselem space, but also quotes an IDF officer:

Meanwhile Saturday, a senior IDF officer rejected claims that the militants had been executed, telling Channel 10 news that "the soldiers called on the terrorist to surrender and turn himself in. He refused and hid in his room and sent his wife out toward us. In cases where there is a threat to our troops and a wanted militant refuses to surrender, IDF forces are permitted to open fire in order to neutralize the threat. I am pleased that none of our fighters were hurt, but the risk factor was very high in this operation."
Another senior IDF official told Israel Radio that the three militants had not fired at Israeli troops and that two of them were unarmed, but that the Israeli soldiers knew that the terror squad that carried out Thursday's attack, to which the three belonged, were highly skilled and had access to firearms and therefore posed a threat. He stressed that the operation was carried out in accordance with IDF regulations, and that the soldiers first fired protest dispersal ammunition, then fired at the walls, and only later fired at the militants.

Earlier, Friday's edition of Haaretz had some discussions that are totally absent in the non-Israeli media: what is the significance of Thursday's attacks? It turns out there were two roadblocks in the immediate vicinity of the site of the attack that were both recently removed. Depending upon your political views, this removal was either crucial, and encouraged the attackers, or totally irrelevant and had no connection to anything. None of the folks voicing opinions can know if they're right, of course, but the question is worth posing, which is why the foreign media doesn't. This little nugget, however, seems very important to me:

Over the past year, the number of terror attacks in the West Bank has dramatically decreased thanks mainly to the Shin Bet security service and IDF. However, IDF officials say attempts to carry out terror attacks continue, especially those perpetrated by local individuals working alone.

Anyone watching knows that matters on the West Bank have been getting dramatically better this year, yet cells of local Palestinians are trying incessantly to attack Israelis; we don't hear much about them because they're being thwarted. Kind of important, isn't it?

Finally, in Hebrew only, Ron Ben-Yishai, tries to figure out what's significant and what not. The dismantling of those two roadblocks: Ben-Yishai admits it didn't help, but expects the attackers could have attacked anyway by shooting from the roadside. At least one of the three attackers signed the agreement with the PA and Israeli authorities whereby he renounced terror and was let off Israel's list of target. Yes, but so did 400 others Palestinian terrorists, and most have indeed honored their signature. The IDF acted on its own yesterday, without coordinating with the PA's police forces except to notify them at the last moment so they should still uninvolved: yes, says Ben-Yishai, that wasn't really nice, but then maybe it's better that they obviously weren't involved so that the Palestinian populace not think their own police is cooperating in killing terrorists.

And so on.The difference between the reports in Haaretz and Y-net, on the one hand, and the non-Israeli media on the other, is that the Israelis are trying to understand the complexity of the situation. Not surprising, given that it's their fate. The outsiders offer a superficial story, more or less biased, but in any case offering only bits of the story. The dramatic bit, yes, but not the bits that explain what's going on.

Means, Methods, Morality and Memory

Most of us ought to be able to agree that if someone drags innocent civilians from their home and hacks them to death, that's cold-blooded murder. If done repeatedly, in an attempt to cause wide-spread terror and up-end the social order, the perpetrator is a terrorist.

But what if we dislike the social order that's being attacked? Might that lead us to be understanding, even if perhaps not openly supportve? What about a social order that is demonstrably evil on a large scale? What then?

The reason I'm asking is because there's this fascinatng article in the New York Times about just such a murderer, a man by the name of John Brown. Yes, that John Brown, the one who wished to topple slavery, repeatedly murdered innocents to make it happen, and intended to spill far more blood but was stopped. Though, truth be told, he probably never conceived of as massive a spilling of blood as eventually happened, on the way to exonerating his goals.

By my lights, the man was a murderer and in the modern terminology which didn't exist in his day, a terrorist. Yes. And no, Lincoln was neither, though he presided over far worse. I have a moral system which can contain all these concepts. What's interesting is that 150 years later, two separate exhibitions are still wondering about the matter. Unlike the story of Agincourt which I mentioned the other day, this stuff is still quite relevant and active - as history often is.

Suicide Murders Against Muslims

Jeffrey Goldberg tells an interesting story:

Nine years ago, I was in Cairo for an emergency meeting of the Arab League,
which had gathered to discuss the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada.
Most everyone at the meeting was supportive of the Palestinian right, such as it
is, to use suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians. Even Amr Moussa, who was
soon to become the secretary-general of the League, argued to me that suicide
bombing represented a legitimate attempt at self-defense. When I saw Moussa in
Cairo, I argued with him about this support. It seemed to me that Arab leaders
would one day reap the whirlwind for their endorsement of this gruesome terror
tactic, and I told him so. But he argued back, saying that the tragic and unique
reality of Palestine -- the special "desperation" of the Palestinians -- meant
that the tactic of sucide bombing would never spread beyond the borders of this
one conflict.. He was wrong, of course, and many more Muslims have since died in
attacks committed by suicide bombers than have Jews or Christians.

So Amr Moussa sincerely felt the Israelis were (are?) uniquely evil, did he. Today the suicidists have added the Iranian leadership to their list of enemies so evil one should die to kill them. It's a very long list.

Who Started This Time?

One of the perennial problems in following Israel's wars and their lulls, is that an isolated incident isn't obviously isolated until the following days or perhaps even weeks prove it so. Say there's a period of calm, and one side launches an act of violence. Will this shatter the calm and set off a spiral of violence, or will the lull continue after the brief interuption? (And of course there are then all sorts of subsidiary questions, such as what preceded the initial act of violence, were the casualties from the launching side or the defending side, and so on and on: the Israel-Arab conflict is fiendishly complex on this level and it's a rare outsider who can keep track, although they'll never admit it).

Anyway. For the past few months there has been calm on the Israel-Gaza front. The longer this goes on the more plausible Israel's justification for the operation last January: if it suceeded, it must have been proportional. Yet this must be stated a bit gingerly. Someday there will be another round of violence, and only then will we know (if we'll know) if the lull was a Hamas decision not to tangle with those mazhnoon (crazy) Israelis, or perhaps the opposite: a tactic of lulling Israeli civilians back to Sderot and vicinity and out of their shelters, so that Hamas can kill lots of them when it decides the time is right.

These are only some among many considerations. There are lots of other levels.

Having said that, it is worth noting and recording that following a few months of general quiet, and some weeks of complete quiet, the Palestinians yesterday started shooting mortars and one Qassam rocket; that Israel retaliated by bombing one Rafah tunnel; and then... now we wait to see what then. If the shooting escalates again, this wil have been the starting point and the Palestinians started it - so remember that because our critics will spin it otherwise. If there's no escalation, remember that also: the Palestinians started, we responded, and everyone went back to their regular occupations.

Ah, one more thing. The mortars the Palestinians launched yesterday? They were aimed at.... Palestinian civilians on their way into Israel for medical care. You couldn't make this up.

On Sunday, Gaza militants fired mortars at a crossing into Israel just as Palestinian patients were being transferred for treatment, a Palestinian official said. "It's a miracle nobody was hurt," Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said.

Cease Fire of 2008

As one of my readers commented not long ago (I think it was Rashkov), the standard anti-Israel narrative about the ramp-up to Israel's invasion of Gaza earlier this year is that the Israelis broke a six month cease-fire with Hamas: the whole justification for the invasion, which was to put an end to rocket fire at Israeli civilians, was bogus.

A second, only slightly more subtle version, tells that the cease fire began in June 2008, and was broken by Israel in October (I think), when Israel suddenly killed six Hamas men; after that the Palestinians resumed fire, a bit, and the cease fire sort of unraveled.

Either way it's Israel's fault, of course.

At the moment I'm plowing through Israel's report on the Gaza Operation (I'm about half way through). It's fascinating, and I'm learning all sorts of useful things. I'm also following some of the footnotes and links. One link lead me to this document, which is full of of statistics about Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians.

Indeed, for about three months there was a bilateral cease fire. The six dead Hamas men were preparing an assault on IDF forces, and thereafter there were ever more rockets and mortars - hundreds, all in all. So the first story is simply a lie. Then, on December 19th 2008 Hamas announced, officially and openly, that the cease fire was annullled; from then until Israel attacked they indiscriminately shot 66 rockets and 63 mortar shells at Israel.

Apparently that particular anti-Israel story is counter factual.

What You See and What You Don't

Fascinating article in the NYT about the ability - partially natural and partially acquired through hard work and experience - to recognize danger at a glance, before there's enough data to know what you know. The article focuses on the ability of some American soldiers to identify hidden bombs from afar, because of some minute detail that's "wrong". Much of the discussion is about the psychology and physiology of the matter: electric pulses in sections of the brain, that sort of thing.

Yet the story also demonstrates the opposite: that sometimes you can have something staring at you in the face and still be unable to see it. It starts with a true story:

The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.
The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.
“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”

At the end of the article, we read the rest of the story

That morning in Mosul, Sergeant Tierney gave the command to fall back. The soldier who had asked to approach the car had just time enough to turn before the bomb exploded. Shrapnel clawed the side of his face; the shock wave threw the others to the ground. The two young boys were gone: killed in the blast, almost certainly, he said.

The striking thing about the article is that it misses the central part of the event: that some Iraqi murderer purposefully used two young Iraqi boys (5 year olds) as a deadly decoy to kill Americans. The murderer knew the Americans would notice the children and want to help; he was evil enough coldbloodedly to sacrifice them for the purpose of killing Americans; and the sergeant, unlike the NYT reporter, was so profoundly aware of this possibility that it tipped him off to the danger.

Do you wonder where the murderer got the children? He didn't kidnap them as they weren't panicking; that wouldn't have worked. He probably knew them, and they knew him, and when he left them in the car he told them he'd be back in a moment and they shouldn't worry. So they didn't. But the Sergeant did.

And the reporter didn't.

Hamas is Nasty

Do you ever get the feeling Hamas (and others of its ilk) use the terminology of human rights and democracy cynically? When it serves them, they're all for it and swear by it, but if it doesn't serve them, not? If so, you won't be surprised to hear this story (Hebrew only).

B'tselem, an Israeli so-called "human rights" group which focuses mostly on Israeli infringments and rarely on Palestinian ones, to the extent many of us find them factually challenged, has published an ad in the main West Bank newspaper (Al Quds) calling for the exchange of Gilad Shalit for many Palestinians held by Israel. Shalit was kidnapped three years ago yesterday, and contrary to international law and all that, no-one has seen him since, his family has no way of communicating with him, the Red Cross never visits him, he has no access to any sort of legal proceedings, nothing.

Why in the West Bank, you ask? After all, Shalit is being held (probably) in Gaza?

Because in Hamas-controlled Gaza B'tselem wasn't allowed to publish their ad. Asked to comment, the spokesperson of B'Tselem had no official explanation, but said that they assume ("anachnu manichem") that in Gaza the press isn't very free.

Roadblocks on the West Bank

Heard the one about the more than 600 roadblocks that make life on the West Bank so hellish for the Palestinians? I'm sure you have, often. Why, the United Nations itself says so.

Although if you carefully read the most recent UN report, 18 pages of it, and you understand the topography, recognize the places, and take note of what's really being claimed, the situation is not exactly black and white. I'm not going to do your work for you this morning, but here's one hint, from page 8:

Not certain what you're seeing? The caption may be helpful:

A guardrail and an earthmound blocking a access to Road 60 from a dirt track
south of Sinjil village, Ramallah governorate

They're evil, those Israelis are, putting up guardrails along highways to obstruct tractors and cows from straying onto them from the surrounding countryside. As a matter of fact, their reach is so all-encompassing that every single such guardrail the world over has been set up by Zionists, in case you didn't know; if you see any in your vicinity, say, in New Zealand Texas or Bavaria, now you know they're actually signs of our secret dominance over you. And if this blog goes off air, it'll be because I've been revoked by the Elders.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the one in which the roadbloacks were put up because the empiric experience was that they were one of the tools to protect civilians from being blown up in Pizza parlors, most of them have been removed, and travel for Palestinians across the West Bank is mostly undisturbed.

On a trip to Ramallah, Palestinians will be checked at the Za'atra roadblock,
which is south of Hawara, but Palestinian eyewitnesses said there are no delays.
This is the only roadblock in the northern West Bank where checks of Palestinian
vehicles are still being carried out. On average, a trip between Ramallah to
Jenin takes 90 minutes, while several months ago it took hours.

Some roadblocks, however, are still acitve:

Twenty days ago the DCO roadblock to the eastern entrance to Qalqiliyah was
removed, and the Einav roadblock east of Tul Karm was also lifted. In it place
there are soldiers but they do not check Palestinian vehicles but only cars with
Israeli license plates to prevent Israeli citizens from entering Palestinian
towns.

Any idea why such measures might be necessary?

Don't expect this to be cited at Mondoweiss. Or the Guardian.

Beating Terrorists by Violence

The Sri Lanken army has defeated the LTTE, the Tamil terrorist/rebel army. It took 25 years, and the final stage was characterized by rather indiscriminate violence against whoever was in the theatre of operation, citizens and fighters all.

All the while, the Rajapaksa administration managed to amass better weapons,
corral political support to quash the Tamil Tigers, crush dissent, and dismiss
any international criticism of human rights as pro-rebel propaganda.

So much for the accepted wisdom that popular freedom movements can't be defeated, that terrorism can be defeated only by addressing its underlying root causes, and that wars and strife will end only when grievances are redressed. Nonesense. Admittedly, this set of beliefs is extraordinarily compelling, has long since acquired the status of meta-dogma, and residual skeptics are treated as unenlightened barbarians who must be banished from polite society and certainly removed from all levers of power. The High Priests of politically correct discourse and thought, however, are exactly as fallible and wrongheaded as most of their predecessors these past 5,000 years or so; sooner or later reality intrudes to the extent that new dogmas are elevated.

I don't know enough about Sri Lanka to evaluate the moral aspects of this development. All I’m saying is that sometimes power works, and violence can achieve its goals.

Can There Be Any Benefits to Torture?

The New York Times nails the matter: It depends. If the torture of a few terrorists saves the lives of thousands of innocents (and you know they're terrorists when they divulge valuable information about terrorist activity), the case is stronger than if no actionable information is acquired. Scott Shane doesn't know if this is what happened, one way or the other, in spite of trying to find out; the public evidence is inconclusive.

The distinction is important, since it indicates that statements such as "torture is the end of democracy", being bandied about these days, are not necessarily true.

Israel calls this scenario "the ticking bomb", when you know you've got a terrorist who knows the whereabouts of a ticking bomb in a civilian area, or the identity of a suicide bomber who's already on his way. It doesn't refer to a band of terrorists with murder in their eyes but no bomb yet constructed, the assumption being that if you've got one of them, intelligent interrogation methods will extract his knowledge in time to thwart his colleagues' plans even without torture; with the ticking bomb, however, you may need to beat him up now in order to acquire the crucial information now. Which of course then begs the question when a gang of Islamists intent on destroying more tall buildings in the US become ticking bombs: when they're on their way to the airport? Earlier in the plan? When?

Since Israel has been facing these questions without respite for generations, it has had the time for the discussion now being had in the US; over time its answers have changed; there has been a steady distancing from the use of torture in favor of tricky tactics that are even more efficient. But then, if you follow that NYT article all the way to the final sentence, you'll see the advantage - if advantage it is - that Israel has over the US:

Mr. Obama paid his first visit to the agency this week, and his reference to the interrogation issue made for an awkward moment in which he sounded like a teacher gently correcting his pupils.

“Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “That’s how we learn.”

The process of learning is the hallmark of democracy, far more than the measures taken during the process are the demise of it.

Iron Dome: Folly or Brilliance?

The Iron Dome anti-missile system being developed by Refael, an Israeli military-systems organization, is chugging along. It passed an important milestone last month, is expected to be finally tested sometime soon, and if it passes, full-scale production and deployment will begin. By next summer it may be operative, protecting Sderot and Ashkelon from Hamas rockets, and later on protecting the Galilee from Hezbullah's tender attentions. Add this to the Arrow long-range anti-missile system which is already operative and being upgraded all the time, and Israel is on its way to being protected from what-ever its neighbors will be able to throw at it except mortars and artillery. Mortars either have a very short range (about a mile) or they're large and cumbersome enough, as is all artillery, that drones can identify and destroy them; it's hard to set them up in a school-yard, shoot them off and disappear so quickly the UN personnel can pretend they were never there.

All of which means that each day that passes without rocket attacks brings us closer to the end of that chapter of our relations with our neighbors. They will of course find other ways to attack us, and we'll have to figure out an adequate response etc etc etc. The Palestinians and Hezbullah are very resourceful in such matters; it's in participating in the modern world that they're so dismally inept.

The Arrow anti-ballistic system is a fine thing. If we assume that sometime soon Iran will have nuclear weapons - a reasonable assumption, it seems to me - it will still be useful that they won't know if they have the ability to deliver through our defense systems, while they themselves have no such systems and our nuclear punch is harder. Who knows, maybe five or ten years from now we'll offer our defensive capabilities to the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Germans, heh.

The Iron Dome thing, however, isn't obviously such a fine thing. According to that article, each missile will cost $50,000m, or perhaps less in some scenarios - say, $49,800. A Kassam rocket probably costs $500, and a Katyusha, I'd guess, $2,500. Do the math and you'll see it will be worth the Palestinian's effort simply to get us to shoot Dome missiles in large numbers, for the financial burden. I'm also leery about a defensive strategy that relies completely on technology (I know about technology) rather than deterrence or, even better, the ability to disarm ones' enemies. (The option of making peace doesn't exist).

On the other hand, at the moment it's not obvious what the alternative is. I was in Sderot yesterday, and they've got these concrete mini-shelters strewn all over town; that's clearly not acceptable. Moreover, the law of unexpected consequences could kick in here, too. The Palestinian's most potent weapon agains Israel is the occupation, which is why most Israelis have long since decided to end it. Yet it can't be ended if every time we relinquish control over some territory it immediately becomes a launching pad for missiles against our civilians. Should the Iron Dome system put an end to that tactic, we could go back to the strategy most of us had already agreed upon, of dismantling most settlements and moving back to the barrier. The Palestinians, the Guardian, and Haaretz will continue to squawk that the occupation goes on, but most sensible people will disregard them, and Israel's position will be strengthened in many ways.