Israellycool

George: Is that right? I just threw away a life time of guilt-free sex and floor seats for every sporting event in Madison Square Garden. So please, a little respect, for I am Costanza, Lord of the Idiots.

Woman cheering on marathon runners: You’re all winners!

George: But suddenly, a new contender has emerged.

- Seinfeld episode The Apartment

And here he is - meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert:

He makes our ex Defense Minister look like a veritable genius.

But Rice on Monday clarified that the US believes that portions of east Jerusalem are considered to be “settlements” and that Israel must stop building there as part of its commitment to implement the first phase of the road map.

The land that Har Homa is on was legally purchased by Jews from Sheikh Shehade al-Faghuri, through an Arab middleman named Ibrahim al-Dajani, in 1944 (source: Army of Shadows - read my review of the book here).

Great, just what we need on top of everything else.

Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon ordered Thursday the culling of all fowl in a three kilometer radius of the northern town of Binyamina.

Simhon’s order comes following the earlier detection of a deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in a Binyamina kindergarten petting zoo.

According to Professor Shmuel Rishpon, chair of the Health Ministry’s epidemiology and immunization steering committee, the virus generates a fatal disease for humans. However, no one is believed to be at risk at this point.

The strain was detected in the petting zoo of a kindergarten in which 60 children are enrolled. None of the children are believed to have come into contact with the fowl.

Last Friday, the kindergarten teacher found three dead chickens in the coop, and called in a local veterinarian, who took virologist samples from the chickens and passed them on to the Agriculture Ministry.

On Wednesday morning, 18 out of the 25 chickens were found dead and laboratory findings indicated that the cause was indeed the deadly bird flu.

The rest of the fowl were put to death Thursday and the area is currently being disinfected.

The Health Ministry said in response that the chickens were held in an enclosed cage and that no one is said to have come into contact with them, apart from the poultry farmer who removed their corpses.

The farmer, his relatives, and additional workers of the coop who have come into contact with the infected chickens in the past week have been prescribed anti-viral medication.

Health Ministry officials further stressed basic instructions for the prevention of the virus. Instructions include food products that have been bought in licensed stores, washing hands before and after the treatment of poultry, cooking chicken in a temperature of over 70 degree centigrade and eating only hard-boiled eggs.

Of course, this isn’t the first time bird flu has been detected in Israel. So I don’t think anyone should be pressing the panic button just yet.

Meanwhile, it looks like someone over at the JTA is trying to be funny.

Israeli authorities scrambled to contain a suspected outbreak of bird flu.

Only in Israel would the prize for the winning team in a weekly Survivor challenge be a Shabbat Dinner with Challah, honey, wine and Shabbat Candles for the whole team.

And only in Israel would the winning team share that prize with the losers because Jews don’t stop other Jews from eating a Shabbat dinner.

Yup I’m still stranded in Israel but it isn’t so bad. Come visit some time.

According to one of Wikipedia’s senior editors, David Shankbone, who is the most popular and most recognizable leader in the world among Internet surfers under age 30?

Here’s a clue:

Source.

I guess he can add that accomplishment to his Nobel Peace Prize and being called “the sexiest man alive” (by actress Kathleen Turner).

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a nugget of wisdom (taken from the linked article) from our popular and wise President.

Peres was asked his opinion of the younger generation of Israelis. “The 14- 15- and 16-year-olds need to participate in determining the world’s future,” the President explained. “If it were up to adults, they would want kids to keep dancing the hora or singing Slavic songs, but youngsters don’t listen and should not have to. Young women today also wear more risqué clothing than they did in the past and there is no problem with that since they look nicer.”

Tsk, tsk, Shimon. You know it was that kind of attitude that got your predecessor into all sorts of trouble.

From JTA:

An Israeli army rabbi is under investigation for putting a mezuzah up in an off-limits area of Hebron.The rabbi of the military’s Judea Brigade was photographed this week putting up a mezuzah in the casbah, or old city of Hebron, accompanied by Chabad supporters.

The Hebron casbah, from where many Palestinian residents have fled during the past six years of violence, is off-limits to Israeli civilians out of concern that settlers might try to squat in its buildings.

Many Israelis say casbah properties were originally Jewish-owned and should be reclaimed.

“This gate is one of several gates through which people enter the casbah,” Noam Arnon, a Hebron settler spokesman, told Israel Radio on Thursday. “Chabad wanted to put up a mezuzah, a very welcome act. This, of course, did not bother anyone, particularly not the Arabs.”

Following protests by left-wing Israeli groups, the military top brass said the rabbi was under investigation and that the mezuzah had been removed.

The Jerusalem Post adds:

Rabbi Yossi Nachshon, a Chabad emissary in Hebron who helped organize the ceremony, said he did not understand the IDF’s extreme reaction.

“The media and the IDF have totally blown the whole thing out of proportion,” said Nachshon. “We affixed the mezuza in a place where IDF soldiers are stationed near a Jewish neighborhood. We do these types of things all the time. On the same day we affixed mezuzot in various settlements around the Hebron hills.”

Nachshon said that according to Jewish law there was no obligation to affix a mezuzah near the casbah. However, he added that a mezuza was believed to offer protection against physical dangers.

Nachshon said that a Jewish settler had been killed near the scene of the contentious mezuza.

So it was just a gesture of support for the IDF, a symbolic wish for their safety, not a political act.

But the left-wing reaction was furious:

Peace Now issued a statement calling for Rabbi Peretz and the soldiers who participated in the ceremony to stand trial.

Knesset members also weighed in on the contentious move. MK Ran Cohen (Meretz) said that “this is a thuggish act vis-à-vis Palestinians who have not been able to live their lives for years. Even worse than that, this time it was not only done under IDF auspices but by soldiers who were engaging in severe political provocation.”

MK Avshalom Vilan (Meretz) called on Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi to convene a discussion on the matter and deal with the perpetrators “to the fullest extent of the law.”

“A uniformed rabbi who participates in an act with lawbreakers disgraces the IDF and should be punished,” said Vilan.

Notice anything missing?

Even though it has been a full 24 hours since this event occurred, I have not seen one mention of outrage from any Arab or Muslim about this supposedly outrageous act. The people who riot at the drop of a hat, who obsessively follow Israeli media to find things to offend them, have not said a single word about affixing a small scroll with words of the Torah to the entrance to the old market. I have seen nothing in the Arabic press nor in their English-language press.

Israel’s left wing is now more offended on the Arabs’ behalf than the Arabs themselves are. Their eagerness to co-opt Arab outrage for their own leftist purposes show that their goal is hardly protecting Arabs as much as it is showing their seething hate for the Right - and religious Jews.

Ynet reports:

Livnat bill: Every student must visit museum

Proposal by MK Limor Livant would require every Israeli pupil to visit museum, attend two cultural events every year. Former education minister notes: ‘Not all students have such opportunities, especially in the periphery.’ Students’ parents to foot bill

So, seen any good theatre shows lately? A new bill proposed to the Knesset by MK Limor Livant means all Israeli students (grades 1-12) would have to do just that. Livnat’s bill would require all primary and high school students to attend three separate “cultural events” annually, including one obligatory trip to a museum.

A “cultural event”, as defined by this bill, is any culturally relevant theatre show, musical performance, or dance recital. A committee established by the minister of education will convene annually to compose a “cultural basket”, or list of cultural events and museums that students can choose to attend.

As for funding, the state will subsidize half the cost of attendance at these events, and local municipalities will chip in as well, but students’ parents will have to foot the remainder of the bill through school fees.

Justifying her proposed bill, Livant writes: “The arts and culture are an indispensable part of the educational process, helping to mold and inspire the citizens of tomorrow. Unfortunately, the Israeli educational system has done little as of late to invest in the arts, seriously compromising the future of art and culture in the state.”

Meanwhile, the Ynet reporter mispelled “Livnat” no fewer than 3 times.

Ynet reports:

Leaders of the majority Druze Galilee town of Peki’in, which was the scene of ethnic tensions two months ago, declared Thursday night that Jewish residents were welcome to return to live in the town at an assembly organized the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency.

“We are calling on the Jews of Peki’in and all those who are interested to come back and live in Peki’in, however we will not agree to again take in provocateurs,” the leaders said.

The speakers described the riots of October as an anomaly that would not have long-term consequences on Jewish-Druze relations in the Galilee or in Israel as a whole.

I don’t have anything to really add to this story, except an admission that I posted it solely because it gave me the opportunity to use that title.

Maariv (Hebrew only) reports that Baron Rothschild purchased thousands of acres of Syrian land in the 1920s that may today legally belong to the Jewish National Fund.

Rothschild’s real estate company, named Pika or Pekka, bought the lands and the ownership of most of that land was transfered in 1957 to the JNF. About 59,000 dunams (15,000 acres) were purchased - 6,000 in the Golan Heights and 53,000 in the plains of Haran, 35 kilometers from Damascus and near Bashir Assad’s palace (according to Palestine Today’s report.) Taxes were paid on the land at least until 1942. If I am reading the article correctly, the Syrian Waqf in the 1940s tried to claim that this was Islamic land that was not legally allowed to be sold, and now Israeli lawyers are studying the matter to see if they still have any legal claim on the land.

One of early Zionism’s slogans that took hold of the imagination of the proponents of a Jewish state was “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Coined by Israel Zangwill, it evoked a desolate, empty desert where the industrious Jews could build a modern state.

Israel-bashers are fond of using this quote as proof of early Zionist mendacity, ignoring the 400,000 Arabs that lived in Palestine at the beginning of modern Zionism. To an extent they are right - certainly there were people there - but the slogan was more accurate than they claim.

Firstly, while there were people there, they weren’t “a people” - Arabs at the time identified with the Arab people as a whole, or often as a part of southern Syria, but Palestinian Arab nationalism did not appear until after the phrase was coined, in no small part as a direct reaction to Zionism itself.

Secondly, it is hard to claim that the land was anything but sparsely populated, considering that today some ten million people manage to fit in that same space. In other words, the claim that pre-state Zionism was displacing the existing Arab population is simply a lie, as the aim of Zionism was to build and grow in places where no one was living.

And thirdly, it is patently obvious that the Jews were a people without a land, except for those bigots who deny Jewish peoplehood to begin with.

For all the outrage that the slogan causes in Arab circles for being immoral and inflammatory, though, it was used by the Arab League delegate to the UN yesterday trying to give it a PalArab twist:

YAHYA A. MAHMASSANI, Permanent Observer for the League of Arab States, reading out a message from the Secretary-General of the League, Amre Moussa, stressed the Committee’s vital role. The International Day of Solidarity coincided with the ninetieth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which had paved the way for the expansionist Zionist policy, thereby creating a land without people and people without a land -– the source of the conflict that lasted to the current day.

The bigotry and hypocrisy of the Arab states is neatly on display here:

* He dismisses millions of Jews living in Israel nowadays as being effectively nonexistent, invisibly living in a “land without people.” Similarly, he denies the fact of Jewish peoplehood.

* He dates the beginnings of the Palestinian Arab refugee problem as 1917, not 1948, showing that in the Arab League’s opinion it is the very existence of Jewish national aspiration that is the problem, not the establishment of the State nor the flight of the original refugees.

* He defines the “source” of the conflict to 1917, ignoring that the Arab violence against Jews predated Balfour and that practically all of the attacks would be one-way for decades after that. In other words, in his mind the existence of Jews in Palestine was inherently provocative to the extent that the poor Arabs, who seem to exist without free will, had no choice but to start massacring them.

And, without intending to,

* He subconsciously admits that there were no Palestinian Arab people existing before 1917.

In this case of Arabs attempting to turn the tables on Zionists by using their language, it only proves their own hypocrisy and bigotry.

After the failure of Camp David and the resultant intifada, Ehud Barak spoke about what went wrong:

Barak today portrays Arafat’s behavior at Camp David as a “performance” geared to exacting from the Israelis as many concessions as possible without ever seriously intending to reach a peace settlement or sign an “end to the conflict.” “He did not negotiate in good faith, indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying ‘no’ to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own,” he says. Barak continuously shifts between charging Arafat with “lacking the character or will” to make a historic compromise (as did the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977–1979, when he made peace with Israel) and accusing him of secretly planning Israel’s demise while he strings along a succession of Israeli and Western leaders and, on the way, hoodwinks “naive journalists”—in Barak’s phrase—like [Deborah] Sontag and officials such as former US National Security Council expert Robert Malley (who, with Hussein Agha, published another “revisionist” article on Camp David, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors”^[*]). According to Barak:

What they [Arafat and his colleagues] want is a Palestinian state in all of Palestine. What we see as self-evident, [the need for] two states for two peoples, they reject. Israel is too strong at the moment to defeat, so they formally recognize it. But their game plan is to establish a Palestinian state while always leaving an opening for further “legitimate” demands down the road. For now, they are willing to agree to a temporary truce à la Hudnat Hudaybiyah [a temporary truce that the Prophet Muhammad concluded with the leaders of Mecca during 628–629, which he subsequently unilaterally violated]. They will exploit the tolerance and democracy of Israel first to turn it into “a state for all its citizens,” as demanded by the extreme nationalist wing of Israel’s Arabs and extremist left-wing Jewish Israelis. Then they will push for a binational state and then, demography and attrition will lead to a state with a Muslim majority and a Jewish minority. This would not necessarily involve kicking out all the Jews. But it would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. This, I believe, is their vision. They may not talk about it often, openly, but this is their vision. Arafat sees himself as a reborn Saladin—the Kurdish Muslim general who defeated the Crusaders in the twelfth century—and Israel as just another, ephemeral Crusader state.

Barak believes that Arafat sees the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants, numbering close to four million, as the main demographic-political tool for subverting the Jewish state.

Arafat, says Barak, believes that Israel “has no right to exist, and he seeks its demise.” Barak buttresses this by arguing that Arafat “does not recognize the existence of a Jewish people or nation, only a Jewish religion, because it is mentioned in the Koran and because he remembers seeing, as a kid, Jews praying at the Wailing Wall.” This, Barak believes, underlay Arafat’s insistence at Camp David (and since) that the Palestinians have sole sovereignty over the Temple Mount compound (Haram al-Sharif—the noble sanctuary) in the southeastern corner of Jerusalem’s Old City. Arafat denies that any Jewish temple has ever stood there—and this is a microcosm of his denial of the Jews’ historical connection and claim to the Land of Israel/Palestine. Hence, in December 2000, Arafat refused to accept even the vague formulation proposed by Clinton positing Israeli sovereignty over the earth beneath the Temple Mount’s surface area.

Barak recalls Clinton telling him that during the Camp David talks he had attended Sunday services and the minister had preached a sermon mentioning Solomon, the king who built the First Temple. Later that evening, he had met Arafat and spoke of the sermon. Arafat had said: “There is nothing there [i.e., no trace of a temple on the Temple Mount].” Clinton responded that “not only the Jews but I, too, believe that under the surface there are remains of Solomon’s temple.” (At this point one of Clinton’s [Jewish] aides whispered to the President that he should tell Arafat that this is his personal opinion, not an official American position.)

Repeatedly during our prolonged interview, conducted in his office in a Tel Aviv skyscraper, Barak shook his head—in bewilderment and sadness—at what he regards as Palestinian, and especially Arafat’s, mendacity:

They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as “the truth.”

Speaking of Arab society, Barak recalls: “The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation once told me that there are societies in which lie detector tests don’t work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance [on which the tests are based].”

Now, Abbas and his colleagues are saying exactly what Arafat said in 2000 - their goals are identical and the 2000 Barak offer is considered “completely unacceptable and out of the question.”

It is more than a bit ironic for Ehud Barak to talk about “cognitive dissonance” on the Arab side in 2002 and then to sit at a table with them again, willing to go beyond the Camp David and Taba offers - all in the name of a “peace” that is simply a reward for a six-year intifada.

cross-posted on Elder of Ziyon 

Israeli President Shimon Peres meets visiting American comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Shimon Peres: “No, really. I did win the Presidency.”

Related: Cosmo Peres