1. Jeffrey Goldberg posted some thoughts about the Israeli action in
At least nine hundred people, maybe half of them civilians, have been killed in
Roughly one thousand Somalis were killed by American forces over the twenty hours or so of the First
Goldberg called Mark Bowden, the author of “Black Hawk Down,” who said 80 percent of the Somali deaths -- roughly eight hundred people -- were civilians. Goldberg asked if he thought this meant American forces in
“The parallel with
When a ten-year-old is running at your vehicle with an AK-47, do you shoot the kid? Yes, you shoot the kid. You have to survive. When push comes to shove, faced with the horrible dilemma with a gunman facing you, yes, you shoot. It's not just a choice about your own life. If you don't shoot, you're saying that your mission isn't important, and the lives of your fellow soldiers aren't important.”
2. At Boker tov,
.... We are forever chasing after those who degrade and demean and cry out that no, no, we’re not like that. Instead we should collectively ignore them and just do what we have to do without constantly offering up explanations as to why what is printed is wrong.
We should show the world the strength that we have had for close to 6000 years despite at least 3000 years of people trying to eliminate us from the earth. While almost all of them are gone and only heard from in the history books, we survive and will continue to survive.
And while we are surviving, we are the People who gave the world civilization and continue to give to the world everything from life saving medical procedures and equipment, technology that is even used by the Muslims to kill Jews and all other infidels, all manner of agricultural innovations that provide food to the world . . . and in Sderot, the town that the international community has found it to be perfectly acceptable for men, women and children to live with a barrage of thousands of rockets fired from the Arabs in Gaza for the last seven years remains the home of the underground pop music scene. What other people in the entire world can say things like this?
3. William Hone, Jr. left this comment to Yael’s post and
The well known declaration of Ze'ev Jabotinsky is still (if not more) pertinent: "Our habit of constantly and zealously answering to any rabble has already done us a lot of harm and will do much more. ... We do not have to apologize for anything. We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest. As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them. ... We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody's examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to." (From Instead of Excessive Apology, 1911)
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.
Posted by: Dan Alexander | January 15, 2009 at 08:21 PM
We must NOT forget to credit G-d with our success!
Posted by: yonason | January 17, 2009 at 09:29 PM
“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.
Posted by: Spoff | January 27, 2009 at 04:47 PM