Have You Seen The List

Hebrew - die stop squareThis morning Israel published the first few names of those we will release as part of the next round of failed peace talks.

It made me sick

The Israel Prisons Service publicized early Monday the list of the first 26 convicted terrorists who will be released as part of Israel’s confidence-building measures to help the restart of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.

The list included 17 names of prisoners who had murdered Israelis, including Abu-Musa Salam Ali Atia of Fatah, who murdered Holocaust survivor Isaac Rotenberg in a Petah Tikvah construction site in 1994.

According to Almagor, an organization of terror victims’ families that has campaigned against the prisoner release, Rotenberg’s family perished in the Sobibor extermination camp during World War II. Rotenberg escaped and joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe. He arrived in Israel in 1947, joined the IDF and fought in Israel’s Independence War on the Lebanese front.

A plasterer by trade, Rotenberg was attacked by Abu Musa and an accomplice at a construction site where all three men worked in March 1994. He sustained repeated blows to the neck with axes. His wounds induced a coma, and he died two days after the attack. He was survived by his brother and sister, who were also survivors of Sobibor, and by a wife and two children. Rotenberg was 67 when he died.

Rotenberg wasn’t the oldest victim of the prisoners who made it onto the list Sunday. Fatah member Ra’ai Ibrahim Salam Ali was jailed in 1994 for the murder of 79-year-old Moris Eisenstatt. Eisenstatt was killed with ax blows to the head while he sat on a public Kfar Saba bench reading a book.

Read the rest if you have the stomach for it.

I responded at the Times of Israel

Has the world had peace with Germany since the end of WWII?

When we finished WWII and the Germans were defeated did they remain proud of their Nazi “achievements”?

Did they hold true to their Nazi ideology, teach it to their children and harbour dreams of it one day rising to conquer the world?

Were Nazi camp guards who pushed Jews onto trains and into ovens held up in society as heroes?

Have Germans continued to teach their kids that one day Germany will be reunited and reclaim its sovereignty over the Sudetenland? Will all the descendants of the 500,000 Germans who were expelled from the Sudetenland by the Beneš decrees (many who had lived there for generations) expect to return to their “homes”?

Read and share the rest.

I illustrated my piece with a simple word in Hebrew: ??. Two letters: Daled – Yud.

It’s a short word that means enough or stop. It can be said in a pleading way: if you tickle a child too much he may say it to you. If a baby is crying you might calm the baby and say it in a soothing voice.

Trouble is it sounds just like “die”. Which was amusing when my mother-in-law sat in Brent Cross shopping centre in London soothing my new born child by saying “die-die-die” over and over to him. People stared.

I am, of course, not playing on this dual meaning at all here. Obviously. Never crossed my mind.

12 thoughts on “Have You Seen The List”

  1. The next time Kerry shows his face in Israel, let’s hope he becomes the target of demonstrations and gets asked tough questions by the media over this.

  2. As for the subject of this topic, it makes me sick too.

    Especially as we know it will be, at best, useless, and far more likely, actually counter-productive (if the aim is peace).

  3. E Pluribus Beagle

    Since their names are known their families can be found. I advocate kidnapping them and using them as bargaining chips.

  4. Given the shared history of the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, do the Palestinians deserve a state of their own? Probably not. Do the Israelis deserve the right to be accepted by their neighbors and live in peace? Definitely yes. How does one achieve this desirable and justifiable outcome? By accepting the reality of the less desirable and justifiable one and pursuing a peace process resulting in two states. What’s the alternative? Claim the high moral ground and wait for the rest of the world to accept it as well? Good luck with that approach.

    1. “How does one achieve this desirable and justifiable outcome?”
      Well, certainly not by empowering the worst offenders among the Palestinians by releasing their unrepentant murders so they can be received as celebrated heroes by the leadership and the “street” alike, making them all feel that much more assured of Israel’s ephemerality and their destined victory over us.
      That’s a process that leads us to peace is it?

      Any rational person would say, for a start, that we should be sending the opposite message, that Israel is here to stay and the path of violence is a dead end so they’d might as well make peace with us.
      And that’s without even considering the fact that these unrepentant murderers are going to be officers and foot soldiers in the next round of Orwellian “peace”.

      It’s not just “moral high ground”, it’s the practical process of ending the conflict. Gestures like this bitterly prolong it.

    2. Jim, how about a nice cuppa STFU? Every time Dave makes a post displaying the Arab world’s Hitlerian mentality, you just have to call Israel to Gandhian restraint. Did you have the habit of scratching your fingernails on chalkboards as a kid or something?

      America should have talked with Al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11, by your line of thinking.

      1. This is what you should do, Istra. Start your own blog where you would have the complete freedom and ability to tell me to STFU and make it happen. If you don’t like what I have to say here, just don’t read my comments. That seems simple enough to me.

        1. You just won the “Missing The Point Completely” award, Jim.

          Should America have talked with Al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11 or not? Al Qaeda and the Taliban have the same relationship to America as Fatah and Hamas have to Israel. How many standards will it be, then? One or two? A single standard for both America and Israel how they deal with terrorist enemies, or one standard for America and another for Israel?

          N.B. and you don’t get to escape the implications of a double standard by claiming Israel’s situation is different because it’s about a conflict between peoples and not between a state and a terrorist organization. The Pal-Arabs all support either of two terrorist organizations, Fatah or Hamas, so the equivalence of America and Israel is unchanged.

          1. But that is the main point for me when it comes to you, Istra. You seek to silence me. That is objectionable and reflects badly upon you. I’m willing to have a free and open discussion on the issues posed on this site, but I’ don’t take kindly to people like you who want to end a civil exchange of views just because you disagree with me.

            1. A free and open discussion would be in order if it made you stop holding those wrong views of yours on this conflict, but as you stubbornly keep to them in the face of a host of reasoned responses, you don’t deserve freedom of speech.

              People who persist in believing in a negotiated peace between Israel and her Arab enemies despite more than a century of Arab intransigence that hasn’t shown the slightest sign of letting up have forfeited the right to take part in a civil exchange. Post-Gush-Katif leftists and others who think “Israeli settlements” are an obstacle to peace are lacking the mental faculties required for a reasoned discussion.

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