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« The Bush Record on Israel | Main | Martin Luther King, Jr. »

January 15, 2009

Comments

Dan Alexander

Jabotinsky's words are a challenge. We in fact do have to speak out and define ourselves but we can do so in a way which lets the rabble know we are not afraid.

We also have to maintain a firm commitment to morality - which as the Mogadishu comment shows is situational always to some extent -else we will not be able to distinguish villain from hero, nor remember who we are.

As we move into Sefer Sh'mot we can remember that slaves cannot speak their truth, cannot call for help, cannot praise Creation, cannot recount history. Thank God, we can.

yonason

We must NOT forget to credit G-d with our success!

Spoff

“Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip……
….The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade…
…Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland.”

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/sieg01_.html#footnotes

Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

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