Dear Family & Friends

We had a wonderful Seder; 11 family around the table – including a darling year old ‘nin’ great-grandchild! Lots of questions, discussions, some dramatic illustrations of the graphic points – esp. the 10 plagues! Four cups of wine (or grape juice), delicate shmurah hand-made matza, & lots of yummy food.

My computer crashed Friday day so I have a large group of excellent articles, stories, philosophical presentations, & news of 3 days stored up to send you tonight. My brilliant grandson fixed it. He literally untangled a mountain of spaghetti wires, re-attached them & I could function. One last peek at the silver full moon & so to bed. Let’s go!

Have a great night, a wonderful day & a total of an 8 day Chag (holiday). I’ll try to send stuff.

All the very best for a Chag Pesach Freilich, Kosher & Sama’ech!,

Gail/Geula/Savta/Savta Raba x 2/Mom

1.Hebron shooter Azaria released from detention for Passover

2.Our estranged generals by Caroline B. Glick

3.Passover, our festival of freedom and miracles By Isi Leibler

4.The victory of the Exodus narrative By Shawn Zelig Aster 5.Biden’s belligerent bluster By Michael Freund

6.My Passover of years past: Heralding the spring of a nation By Avi Shama

7.Netanyahu encourages Israelis: Visit Judea-Samaria on Pesach

8. Pollard claptrap: JPost Editorial

9.A great teaching moment By Eric R. Mandel

10.Arlene Kushner “Redemption!” April 20, 2016

11.It’s time for a Palestinian State by Daniel Greenfield

12.Unworthy of statehood: The insanity of a Palestinian state.

1.Hebron shooter Azaria released from detention for Passover By Noam Amir/Maariv Hashavua JPost.com 04/22/2016 10:26

· IDF prosecution confirms will indict Hebron shooter for manslaughter

Indictment filed against ‘Hebron shooter,’ Elor Azaria

Azaria is expected to return to his on-base detention on Sunday at 10 a.m.

Sgt. Elor Azaria, the soldier who was indicted for manslaughter after shooting a subdued Palestinian attacker last month, was released temporarily for Passover.. (photo credit:Courtesy)

Sgt. Elor Azaria – the soldier who shot a Palestinian terrorist in Hebron last month after he was already wounded and lying motionless [Gail Sez: NOT motionless. In second video with audio he was moving his head & his hand toward his chest.] on the ground – was granted temporary release from his on-base detention to visit his family for the Passover.
Azaria is expected to return to his on-base detention on Sunday at 10 a.m.
On Monday, the IDF prosecutor filed a manslaughter indictment with the Jaffa Military Court against Azaria. Azaria also was charged with conduct unbecoming of a noncommissioned officer. Once the indictment was issued, the gag order on his name was lifted.

Azaria, a Ramle resident who has been in the IDF for about a 1 ½ years, was ordered to remain in open detention on the IDF’s Nahshonim Base, near Rosh Ha’ayin, until the end of trial.
In the hearing on Monday, the prosecution pushed hard to keep Azaria in open detention on the army base until the end of the trial due to “the security situation, and to calm the security situation,” whereas the defense said Azaria has been mistreated by being put in detention for essentially doing his job and must be released. The prosecution lost an appeal to keep Azaria in full detention.
Judge Lt.-Col. Ronen Shor asked the defense how it could explain that Azaria genuinely thought he was in danger when none of his commanders did.
The defense responded that he was not as well-trained in all complex situations as they were and that this was a highly complicated situation.
The defense also requested that Azaria be given a brief vacation to spend the Passover Seder with his family in the event that the court continued his open detention, a request the court granted despite ruling against him on the general detention issue.
“The decision of the judge says to the prosecution: Stop here. Recheck ‘your evidence,’ & the phrase ‘your evidence,’ if I translate that into simple language, it is weak evidence that does not justify a conviction on the charge of manslaughter,” said defense lawyer Ilan Katz in response to the indictment.
“The judge essentially ruled that the story of the soldier, the first version, is not made-up,” but that his concern about an explosive vest was authentic.”

2.Our estranged generals by Caroline B. Glick

JPost.com 04/21/2016 20:41

· Column One: Obama’s political legacy

OUR WORLD: Where UNESCO and ISIS converge Our generals aren’t on the same page as the rest of us. In fact, they aren’t even reading the same book.

IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot (R), Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo credit:GPO) It’s been a long time in coming, but it finally happened.
The IDF General Staff has lost the public trust.
This is terrible for the General Staff. But it is more terrible for the country, because the public is right not to trust our military leaders. They have earned our distrust fair and square. The final straw came in less than optimal circumstances.
But such is life. Things are never cut and dry. On Purim, Sgt. Elor Azaria killed a terrorist in Hebron as he lay on the ground, shot, following his attempted murder of one of Azaria’s comrades.
Still today, we don’t know whether Azaria acted properly or improperly. He claims that he believed the terrorist had a bomb beneath the heavy jacket he was wearing in the middle of a heat wave.
Azaria claims that he shot him because he feared that the terrorist – who was moving – was trying to detonate the bomb. This view was shared by emergency personnel at the scene caring for the wounded soldier.
But even before he had a chance to tell his story, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had already declared Azaria guilty of murder. Based on an initial field investigation and a snuff film produced by the European-funded anti-Israel group B’Tselem, Eisenkot and Ya’alon excoriated Azaria and pronounced the soldier, who was decorated for his service just last year, a rotten apple.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially joined them in their condemnations. But when he realized that the public wasn’t buying it and that the evidence was far from cut and dry, to his credit, Netanyahu walked back his remarks.
Ya’alon & Eisenkot, in contrast, have refused to let the uncertainty of the situation affect them.
Their continued assaults on the soldier have compounded the damage. Their stubborn refusal to give Azaria the benefit of the doubt and admit that he may well have comported himself properly indicates that they have no idea how their statements are being viewed by the public, or worse, they may not care. They may simply be playing for another audience.
And here lies the beginning of the real problem.
For the public – including the five thousand citizens who came to the support rally for Azaria at Rabin Square on Tuesday – the critical moment was when the film of Azaria being led away from the scene in handcuffs was broadcast on the evening news. That image, of a combat soldier who killed a terrorist being treated like a criminal, was the breaking point for the public. Whether he was guilty or innocent was beside the point. The point was that his commanders – beginning with the defense minister and the chief of General Staff – were treating him like a criminal instead of a combat soldier on the front lines defending our country from an enemy that seeks our destruction.
This image, combined with Ya’alon’s & Eisenkot’s increasingly shrill and caustic condemnations of Azaria, was a breach of the social contract between the IDF & the public. That social contract says that we serve in the IDF. We send our children to serve in the IDF. The IDF values us & values our sons & daughters as its own.
The sense that our generals are not on the same page as the rest of us has been gnawing at us since at least April 2002, in the aftermath of the battle in Jenin, during the course of Operation Defensive Shield.
Back then, fearing CNN and the UN, IDF commanders sent a reserve battalion into Jenin refugee camp, the epicenter of the Palestinian murder machine, without air cover & without armored vehicles. Thirteen reservists were killed in one day. Twenty-three soldiers were killed in the three-day battle.
The sense of alienation continued through the war in Lebanon four years later when the IDF conducted one of the most inept campaigns in its history. Soldiers were sent willy-nilly into battles with no strategic purpose because the General Staff wanted to “stage a picture of victory.”
This sense has been maintained in successive inconclusive campaigns in Gaza.
Now, with the General Staff’s decision to turn Azaria into a scapegoat at a time when it is failing to defeat the Palestinian terrorist wave in Judea and Samaria, that gnawing sense that something is amiss has become a certainty.
Our generals are not on the same page as the rest of us. In fact, they aren’t even reading the same book.
Our generals are motivated by three impulses and strategic assumptions that are not shared by the majority of Israelis.
The first of those is their willingness to sacrifice soldiers in battles, and, in the case of Azaria, in show trials, in the hopes of winning the support of the Europeans and other Western elites. This impulse is not simply problematic. It is insane, because for more than a decade, it has been continuously proven futile.
At least since the battle in Jenin, it has been abundantly obvious that the Europeans will never support us. The Europeans, along with the UN and the Western media, ignored completely the lengths Israel went to prevent Palestinian civilian casualties in Jenin. They accused us of committing a Nazi-style massacre despite the fact that not only wasn’t there a shred of evidence to back their wild allegations. There were mountains of evidence proving the opposite. The Palestinians were massacring Israelis and would have continued to do so, had the IDF not retaken their population centers and so ended their ability to strike us at will.
And yet, despite the trail of UN blood libels from Jenin to the Goldstone Report and beyond, despite the faked media images of purported IDF bombings of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza, despite the hostility of EU diplomats and politicians and the open anti-Semitism of the European media and public, our generals still care what these people think about us.
Eisenkot and his generals still believe that by giving soldiers sometimes life-threateningly limited rules of engagement, by forcing every battalion commander to have a legal adviser approve his targeting decisions, the Europeans will be convinced that they should stop supporting our enemies.
The second impulse separating our generals from us is that almost to a man, members of the General Staff want a Palestinian state to be established in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and they want that state to be joined in some way with Gaza.
After 15 years of Palestinian terrorism and political warfare, our security brass still believe that the PLO is Israel’s partner. It doesn’t matter to them that the PLO is driving the current wave of terrorism just as it drove all the previous ones.
This is the reason that Eisenkot and his ideologically driven generals insist that we leave the Palestinian population centers after we spent so much blood and treasure fighting our way into them 14 years ago.
This is the reason that, while Eisenkot and his generals insist that the PA security services are helping us fight terrorism, even though no help would be necessary if the PA wasn’t inciting terrorism.
The generals’ stubborn faith in the notion that Palestinian terrorists who seek the destruction of our country will magically be transformed into allies the minute we turn the keys to our security over to them, sets them apart from the vast majority of Israelis.
Most Israelis support a theoretical Palestinian state that is at peace with us. Most Israelis would be willing to give up substantial amounts of territory if doing so would bring peace with the Palestinians.
But most Israelis also recognize that the Palestinians are not interested in peace with us and as a consequence, it makes no sense to give them any land. Most Israelis recognize that you can’t trust the good intentions of leaders who tell their school-age children to stab our school-age children.
The third impulse separating our generals from the public is their embrace and glorification of weakness. On every front, for more than 20 years, members of the General Staff have embraced the notion that there is no military solution to any of the security threats facing the country.
Until the Syrian civil war, the generals believed that if we left northern Israel vulnerable to attack and invasion by giving the Assad dynasty the Golan Heights, then the Assads would be magically convinced to ditch their Iranian sponsors and make common cause with an Israel that could no longer defend itself.
They have opposed attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, insisting that we can trust the US, even though it has been obvious for years that the US would take no action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
As for the US, the IDF embraces strategic dependency on the US. They insist that we can trust the Americans even though the Obama administration sided with Hamas in Operation Protective Edge. They continue to argue that we can depend on America even though the Obama administration is actively enabling Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Utterly foreign to them is the notion that Israel would strengthen its alliance with the US by acting independently against Iran’s nuclear facilities, because doing so would prove that Israel is not a strategic basket case but a regional power that commands respect.
They oppose destroying Hamas’s military capabilities.
As a consequence, they have conducted four campaigns in Gaza since the 2005 withdrawal that all lacked a concept of victory. And by the way, the General Staff enthusiastically supported the strategically irrational withdrawal from Gaza.
When the public gets angry at our generals for not striving to defeat Hamas, for instance, they look at us like we fell off of Mars. Why would they want to defeat Hamas? Their job is to contain Hamas. And they are doing their job so well that Hamas managed to dig a tunnel right under their feet.
What explains our generals’ embrace of positions that most Israelis reject? Why are they willing to sacrifice soldiers and embrace Orwellian notions that weakness rather than strength is the key to peace? It is hard to say. Perhaps it’s groupthink. Perhaps it’s the selection process. Perhaps it’s overexposure to Europeans or Americans. Perhaps they are radicals in uniforms. Perhaps it is none of those things.
But whatever the cause of their behavior, the fact is that behavior has alienated them from Israeli society. In treating Palestinian terrorists with more respect than it accords its own soldiers, the IDF General Staff is earning the public’s fury. And in their contemptuous dismissal of the public’s loss of trust, our generals – including Ya’alon – are demonstrating that they have become strangers to their own society. This of course is a calamity.
The IDF lost the public’s trust at Purim. Let us hope that at Passover, our generals will leave their bubble and begin repairing the damage they caused. They are not in Europe. They are here.
And they need to be with us.
www.CarolineGlick.com

3.Passover, our festival of freedom and miracles By Isi Leibler

JPost.com 04/20/2016 21:40 The central theme of the ancient Haggada resonates powerfully with the contemporary Jewish condition.

‘Ethiopian Haggada’ from El Al, with paintings by Michal Meron. (photo credit:courtesy reproductions) On the first night of Passover, the festive meal is preceded by the Seder, which chronicles our emergence from bondage into nationhood & recounts the miracles associated with the Exodus from Egypt.
The central theme of the ancient Haggada resonates powerfully with the contemporary Jewish condition. In the turbulent times in which we live, with the barbarians at our gates and the betrayal of Israel by much of the world, it is with a feeling of awe that we repeat the verse that our ancestors recited for over 1,000 years: “The promise made to our forefathers holds true for us. For more than once they have risen against us to destroy us; in every generation they rise against us and seek our destruction. But the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.”
Other recurring historical analogies appear in the Haggada. What was to become the template for Jews in exile for over 2,000 years – anti-Semitism, persecution, expulsion and attempted genocide – was initially experienced by our ancestors in Egypt.

We are told that while in Egypt, the Hebrews prospered and multiplied and “became very strong and numerous.” This led the Egyptians to consider them as aliens, as a fifth column, raising the specter of dual loyalties – that “when war occurs they will be added to our enemies & fight against us.”
What started as discrimination was followed by the appointment of taskmasters to oppress them – “and Egypt made the children of Israel labor rigorously” – and was ultimately extended to attempted genocide when Pharaoh decreed that all newborn Jewish males be killed.
This is the sequence that we effectively endured throughout our exile, with cycles of toleration, discrimination, physical persecution and exile or murder.
The most horrific experience was the Nazi era culminating in the Shoah, which to this day no theologian or philosopher can possibly rationalize.
It remains enigmatic that on Tisha Be’av, we lay almost all the emphasis on mourning the destruction of Jerusalem which resulted in our exile, but barely acknowledge the persecution and suffering that the Jewish people underwent subsequently and in particular the greatest disaster of all, the calculated murder of six million.
One can raise the same question about Passover, our festival of freedom. It is a reflection on our religious leadership that when we review our origins as a nation and marvel at the wonders associated with the Exodus from Egypt, we do not rejoice at and highlight our privilege to be the generation who are living witnesses to miracles no less profound.
On this festival we should be giving thanks that – notwithstanding the turbulent and barbaric region in which we are located, the exponential growth of anti-Semitism and the manifold challenges facing us – we are undoubtedly the most blessed and privileged generation since the exile.
WE HAVE witnessed the miracle of the rebirth of Jewish nationhood after 2,000 years of dispersion and persecution. In the entire history of mankind there is no remotely comparable example of a people which experienced a renaissance after such a lengthy interlude.
In 1947, at the height of the Cold War, in an unprecedented event the United States and the anti-Semitic Soviet Union voted together to endorse the creation of a Jewish state. Indeed a miracle.
Even more extraordinary was the ability of the fledgling Jewish state to militarily overcome a combined effort by a far more powerful combination of [seven] Arab states to destroy it.
But the greatest miracle of our time is the ingathering of the exiles that has taken place since Israel was created. Jews from all corners of the world have returned to their homeland. These have included those from diverse origins ranging from survivors of the Holocaust to Jews persecuted in Arab countries, from the developed world of the United States and Europe extending to Jews fleeing primitive societies such as Ethiopia.
What stands out is the miracle of the Aliya of a million Jews from the Soviet Union – an exodus we should surely be celebrating when we commemorate the Exodus from Egypt. We must recall that many had previously dismissed hope for rescuing these Jews, regarding them as assimilated and lost to the Jewish people. Furthermore, this exodus was launched by a few hundred heroic Soviet Jews from assimilated backgrounds who overnight discovered their Jewish identity and amazingly stood up against the most powerful totalitarian government in the world. With the support of world Jewry, they achieved their goals and in fact became a major contributing factor in the ultimate collapse of the Evil Empire. Nothing short of “miraculous” can describe these extraordinary events.
The incredible success in molding these Jews – most of them refugees from oppression – into a rejuvenated nation state based on Jewish culture and tradition and the resurrection of Hebrew into a spoken language, is surely a miraculous event.
After attaining nationhood, the people of the book, powerless for 2,000 years, almost overnight succeeded in creating the most powerful regional army which, despite its small size, would be classified as one of the strongest military powers.
Israel demonstrated an incredible capability of deterring aggression & defending the Jewish people.
It is thus regrettable that as we gather around and recite the Haggada dealing with our emergence as a people, as a rule our rabbis fail to highlight the link with those events and the privileged and miraculous status that we have achieved in our lifetime.
During the Passover Seder, atheists & agnostics should offer thanks “to Whom it may concern.”
Those of us who believe that there is a divine presence should express joy and thanks to the Almighty for engineering our miraculous rebirth and pray that He continues watching over His people.
Chag sameah! The writer’s website can be viewed at www.wordfromjerusalem.com.
He may be contacted at ileibler@leibler.com.

4.The victory of the Exodus narrative By Shawn Zelig Aster JPost.com 04/20/2016 21:37

The objective historical facts are extremely clear. No Egyptian historical text speaks of a mass exodus of Israelites.

In the annual run-up to Passover, it has become common to write on the topic, “Did the Exodus really happen?” Much can be said about this topic; much more can be done with it.
The objective historical facts are extremely clear. No Egyptian historical text speaks of a mass exodus of Israelites. But the inscriptions of Pharaoh Seti I (and others) speak of groups of “Shasu,” nomadic herders from somewhere in the Middle East, who repeatedly vex Egyptian attempts to reassert control over the Sinai region in the thirteenth century BCE.
`The “Shasu” consisted of many different tribes. By late in the thirteenth century BCE, archaeological surveys and excavations show that groups of herders, Shasu or otherwise, entered what became the Land of Israel from the east, and settled in the Jordan Valley. Further excavations and surveys show that they eventually moved westward into the hill country north of Shechem. Their pottery assemblages and habits resemble those of the people we know 200 years later as the Israelites.

By the end of the thirteenth century, Pharaoh Merneptah launched a failed attempt to reassert Egyptian control over the Land of Israel, and boasts of his victories over a people he called “Israel.” By the middle of the twelfth century, we know from both archaeology and inscriptions that Egypt permanently lost control over the Land of Israel. The region was taken over by small nationstates, one of which is Israel. None of these facts is in dispute.
But facts, as the noted historian E. H. Carr pointed out, are like a bag. They lie flat. One needs a narrative, a dramatic and interesting way of stringing them together, to make them stand up. The objective observer might note, “Egypt’s power over the southern Levant waned as the Late Bronze Age came to a close, and new nation states arose in the region as the Iron Age began.” Even such a laconic presentation contains an inkling of a narrative: Egypt down, nation states up.
Ultimately, though, a different narrative has won out over this laconic and objective one. It is this narrative that distinguishes the Exodus story from any other historical event in the Late Bronze.
The story in the biblical book of Exodus chooses a different focus, and tells us why it is creating a different narrative. Firstly, it focuses solely on the Israelites, noting the existence of the other groups as “a mixed multitude” with their own herds (Exod. 12:38). Secondly, it focuses not only on the Israelites’ departure, but on the bizarre insistence that Pharaoh allow them to depart. Bizarre because the end of the story shows that they don’t need Pharaoh’s permission to leave.
This insistence is intended to lead to the plagues Egypt suffers when Pharaoh refuses to agree.
It is important to realize that the plagues are nowhere justified as punishment for Pharaoh. Rather they have a single objective, repeated over and over again like a refrain: “so that you will know that there is none like the Lord our God” (Exod. 8:6); “so that you will know that I am the Lord in the midst of the Land” (Exod. 8:18); “in order to show you My power” (Exod. 9:16).
God seeks not Pharaoh’s permission, but Pharaoh’s submission: “Until when will you refuse to abase yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship Me” (Exod. 10:3).
The potential exodus of the Israelites can only be narrated once God’s permanent supremacy over Pharaoh has been demonstrated.
Exodus knows that it is intentionally creating dramatic narrative.
In fascinating example of narrative awareness, God tells Moses that Pharaoh refuses to submit “so that you shall tell in the ears of your son and your son’s son what I wrought upon the Egypt, and My signs that I placed among them, so that you will know that I am the Lord” (Exod. 10:2). The dramatic story of the plagues has Pharaoh’s submission as its proximate goal, but its ultimate goal is to provide a dramatic (and educational) story to future generations of Jews. The goal of the narrative of Exodus is to create a future, eternally-perpetuating narrative.
Before the Israelites are allowed to leave Egypt, they must perform the Passover offering, whose goal is to provoke the children to ask, “What is this work that you are doing?”(Exod.12:26). Just like the plagues were designed to create the narrative for future generations of story-telling (the Haggada), the Passover offering aimed at creating the setting in which the narrative would be told: in a family group, around a meal, the setting we re-create at the Seder.
The Passover offering (the setting) and the narrative of the plagues aim at three interrelated goals: teaching future generations of Israelites that God is supreme (Exod. 10:2); that He protected us; and that we “owe Him” allegiance (Exod. 12:27).
The events of the Exodus can be told (and have been told!) in so many ways. The Torah explicitly acknowledges that it is creating a narrative, and implicit in this is the possibility that the story can be told in so many other ways. It can be told as a story of an emerging nation state, as a story of a nation liberating itself, as a universal story of powerful and powerless. Because the Torah mandates that the story be told, and retold, over and over, by future generations, the choice of what narrative will win is ultimately in the hands of those future generations.
The future generations, in effect, are given a choice over what narrative to tell.
It is interesting, therefore, that the classic Jewish Haggada does not choose to base itself around the story in the Book of Exodus. Rather, it chooses to base itself around the four verses in the Book of Deuteronomy (26:5-10) which tell the story of how the people of Israel developed from landless wanderers to settled farmers, living in the Land of Israel. The turning point of the short, five-sentence story is divine intervention: “The Lord took us out of Egypt with a strong arm and an outstretched arm… and He brought us to this place, and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deut. 26:8-9).
Relating to the land has been a challenge for the Jewish people, landless for two millennia, and is even more of a challenge now that an independent Jewish state governs that land. The land-centered focus of the biblical passage chosen as the basis for the Haggada is clear. The classic “Dayenu” song, which enumerates 15 benefits Jews received from God ends by thanking God for giving us the Land of Israel, and for building the Temple. This narrative climax express the classic Jewish view that sees God as giving the Land of Israel, conditionally, to the Jews, and sees that conditional gift as fundamental to Jews’ relationship with God. Can we relate to these passages as part of the Seder? Can we relate to the land as part of modern Jewish identity? The narrative of the Exodus is in the hands of its intended narrators: us, the Jewish parents of the “children and children’s children” referred to in Exodus 10:2. It’s up to us to tell the story.
The author is senior lecturer in Land of Israel Studies at an Bar-Ilan University.

5.Biden’s belligerent bluster By Michael Freund

Everyone from Time magazine to the UK’s Daily Telegraph has compiled competing lists of Biden’s biggest blunders.

VP Joe Biden departure from Israel. March 10, 2016.

(photo credit:Matty Stern, Us Embassy Tel Aviv)

Over much of the past decade, US Vice President Joe Biden has made a name for himself as one of the most gaffe-prone American politicians in recent memory.
His habitual howlers and frequent missteps, such as when he called on a wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator to stand up at a rally, insisted that “jobs” was a three-letter word and couldn’t recall his running-mate Barack Obama’s last name, have become the stuff of political legend.
Indeed, everyone from Time magazine to the UK’s Daily Telegraph have compiled competing lists of Biden’s biggest blunders, and there are undoubtedly many late-night television comedy hosts who thank the good Lord for providing them with such a consistent source of material.

But in an address on Monday evening in Washington, Biden’s latest bungle was anything but funny.
Speaking to the far-left J Street organization, the vice president launched into a blistering public tirade against Israel barely a few hours after a No. 12 bus in Jerusalem exploded.
Even as doctors were battling to save the lives of a number of the attack’s victims, and the smoldering shell of the vehicle was still being inspected by Israeli security forces, Biden chose to berate the Jewish state in a manner no other American ally is treated.
“I firmly believe that the actions that Israel’s government has taken over the past several years – the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures – they’re moving us and more importantly they’re moving Israel in the wrong direction,” Biden said, sounding like he was reciting talking points prepared by the Palestinian Authority.
Israel, he insisted, is creating a reality that is “dangerous,” and he pointedly stated that the Obama administration feels an “overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government.”
“We have an overwhelming obligation, notwithstanding our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government, to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only ultimate solution, a two-state solution, while at the same time be an absolute guarantor of their security,” the vice president said.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, Biden even chose to interfere in Israel’s internal politics, singling out for praise a left-wing Knesset member and telling her, “May your views begin to once again become the majority opinion in the Knesset.”
Well, Joe, since you mentioned the issue of frustration, let me share with you a bit of Israel’s own exasperation with you and your boss.
How dare the vice president of the United States speak in such terms to its only true and reliable partner in the Middle East, particularly at a time when the Jewish state has been enduring an unprecedented string of stabbings and shootings.
Israelis don’t need to be lectured by a former politico from Delaware whose judgment on foreign affairs has been dubious at best.
Just ask Robert Gates, who served as Obama’s secretary of defense. Two years ago, Gates published a memoir in which he said regarding Biden that, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
That is a pretty impressive track record, and it appears that Biden is looking to extend it into a fifth His assertion that Israel needs to be “pushed” as hard as possible is both patronizing and profoundly undemocratic, and his contention that he is able to peer into Israelis’ “gut” and know what they truly want is condescending and demeaning.
What Israelis want is expressed at the ballot box, most recently 13 months ago, when they once again soundly rejected the Left and its proposed two-state solution.
But that doesn’t faze Biden, and for him to brazenly express the hope that the Labor Party (aka Zionist Union) should become the majority in the Knesset is scandalous in the extreme.
Does anyone recall him voicing a preference as to who should control the British Parliament, the French National Assembly or the Australian House of Representatives? Of course not, because to do so would be considered inappropriate.
The fact that Biden feels free to do just that in Israel’s case, even as he unreservedly hurls belligerent bluster at Jerusalem, speaks volumes about the haughtiness that characterizes the administration in which he serves.
Perhaps realizing that he had gone too far, Biden made sure to tell his audience that, “No matter what political disagreements we have with Israel – and we do have political disagreements now – there is never any question about our commitment to Israel’s security.”
Well, Joe, guess what: your treatment of the Jewish state indicates otherwise.

6.My Passover of years past: Heralding the spring of a nation By Avi Shama JPost.com 04/16/2016 22:12

· Veeam reports 24% global customer growth, 30% in Israel

As customary in our family, we left our sterilized, Passover-ready home and flocked to do the Seder with Aunt Georgia and Uncle Ephraim and their family.

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A JEWISH shrine containing the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel in the Iraqi town of Kifl, south of Baghdad. The author describes his last Passover in Iraq. (photo credit:Reuters) In 1948, Passover in the ghetto of our little town of Hilla, Iraq began like all past Passovers, but it led to a life-changing realization that our 2,000- year sojourn in Iraq had run its course.
Preparations for the Seder that year, like in all past years, started weeks earlier with thorough cleaning to rid our home of any leavened food, hametz. Every corner of our home had to be thoroughly scrubbed as if it were an operating room, and every plate, spoon and glass boiled as if they were operating tools that must be sterilized, otherwise the patients – we – might not make it. My mother & 5 older sisters would wake up earlier than usual in the mornings approaching Passover Eve, because one can never be too sure how many corners would have to be rescrubbed & utensils reboiled.
As customary in our family, we left our sterilized, Passover-ready home and flocked to do the Seder with Aunt Georgia and Uncle Ephraim and their family.

Because of recent terrorist acts against Jews all over the country, including our little town 100 km. south of Baghdad, we avoided walking at night to the Seder and made our way to their home when the sun was still high.
Nearing our aunt’s home we saw Uncle Ephraim standing by the entry door. He was a member of the defense section of the local Zionist movement, but now seemed serious and a bit nervous. Ephraim pointed to the door without saying much, as a night guard in an army camp would do. He was guarding the home lest a passerby hear anything suspicious and report it to the authorities. He came inside with us and sent his son to guard the entry.
During the Seder, we read the Haggada, a section of which instructs all Jews to talk about their Exodus not only from Egypt thousands of years earlier, but about any Jewish exodus, past & present. This, of course, opened the discussion of the unnerving anti-Jewish terrorist acts in our town recently.
A few weeks earlier our synagogue and many others around Iraq were set on fire. This was followed by bombing of Jewish businesses in large cities like Baghdad and Basra. No one knew then who was responsible for those acts, but many suspected local Muslims.
Though the physical damage was relatively minor, the psychological wound was deep and transformative.
Also, shortly after the fires and bombings, the Iraqi police arrested hundreds of Jewish men, including one of my uncles, accusing them of being Zionists and sending fears into the Jewish community. These events, especially the arrests of the young men, made everyone in our community fearful and nervous.
Sitting around the Seder table, my father said that despite these events, our peaceful life in Iraq would continue. “Iraq is our home,” he said. “Our history here goes back thousands of years. This is where our culture is, where the Talmud was written, where our great prophet Yehezkel [Ezekiel] is buried.”
My sister Tikva, who was a member of the Zionist cell in our town, gave him a look but did not say a word. It was not a woman’s role in Iraq to disagree with her father, especially not in public. But Uncle Ephraim said: “The fires, the bombs and the arrests have changed everything for all Jews in Iraq, and maybe for Jews worldwide.” He took a deep breath and added: “No matter how comfortable our life is in Iraq, we must be ready to end our long and impressive history here, because Iraq is not our homeland; Israel is.”
About a month later, on May 14, 1948, the state of Israel was reborn. Within three years, most Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Jews, three quarters of a million in all, made a modern exodus and doubled the population of the infant state.
I was six years old then, when I realized that Passover meant independence from all pharaohs, anywhere, anytime.
The author is a professor of International Business at the University of New Mexico. His book, Finding Home: An Immigrant Journey, is soon to be released.

7.Netanyahu encourages Israelis: Visit Judea-Samaria on Pesach

Judea-Samaria residents have established their own freedom, like the State of Israel itself, PM says in pre-Passover message. By Uzi Baruch Arutz Sheva IsraelNationalNews.com 4/20/2016,

Binyamin Netanyahu – Miriam Alster/Flash 90

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu released a letter of encouragement to regional council leaders and residents of Judea and Samaria Wednesday, ahead of the upcoming Passover holiday.

Netanyahu thanked the residents and the local leaders for standing strong against months of terror attacks, and encouraged Israelis nationwide to hike in the region – as well as across the country – during the weeklong holiday.

“Yesha Council leaders, residents and dear friends,” he began, “Passover embodies important themes that have marked our national existence for thousands of years. This holiday of freedom celebrates the breaking of cables of slavery.”

”Passover is a holiday carries the message of renewal and freshness … and also the starting point for the long journey that Moses led, in which he returned us to our homeland,” he continued. “This reflects the importance of memory and the legacy that pass from generation to generation, and the unity between all parts of the nation.”

Regarding Judea and Samaria, as well as the State of Israel at large, Netanyahu implied that Israel determined its own freedom. “We established our sovereignty and returned control of our destiny to ourselves,” he said. “We build and develop the country without respite.”

“My friends, I admire your ability to maintain a daily routine despite heightened security in times of tension,” Netanyahu wrote, adding, “The IDF fighters and security forces stand guard to protect you all over the country.”

The letter concludes by addressing the Prime Minister to all citizens of Israel face a personal and unique struggle. “I call upon the citizens of Israel to go out during Passover and to see nature, visit the sites of the Bible and heritage sites scattered across the country.”

From: Women-In-Green Nadia Matar & Yehudit Katsover

8. Pollard claptrap: JPost Editorial April 20, 2016 It behooves Obama to do for Israel what he has done for so many others. US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s recent letter to the US Parole Commission hyping the enormous threat to America’s national security which he claims Jonathan Pollard still poses is so much claptrap.

So is Clapper’s contrived contention that Pollard spied “against the US.” Pollard was indicted for spying for “the benefit of an ally” – Israel – not against the US.

Clapper’s lame attempt to inflame public sentiment against an aging & very ill Pollard who spent 30 years in prison for an offense whose median sentence is two to four years, is at best laughable.

Like his predecessors, Clapper hides behind a veil of secrecy and relies upon hyperbole and ad hominem to obscure the absence of evidence against Pollard. This, despite the now-public knowledge that former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger (the man who drove Pollard’s life sentence) admitted before he died that the Pollard case was “a minor mater” which had been exaggerated to serve another agenda. Clapper continues the hyperbolic spin, regardless.

Here is the real scoop.

Jonathan Pollard, who spent an unprecedented 30 years of a 45-year life sentence in prison for the one count of spying for an ally, Israel, with which he was charged, while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for US Navy, was released from prison last November.

Because he was released on parole, not pardoned, Pollard still has the balance of his life sentence – 15 years – hanging like a sword of Damocles over his head. Any violation of his parole conditions – which are unusually harsh and restrictive – could send him back to prison for what could well be the rest of his life.

Pollard’s unprecedented life sentence was shrouded for years by a veil of secrecy and lies, which have been discredited recently with the declassification of most of the key documents that served as evidence against him.

A series of exclusive articles and editorials in The Jerusalem Post first detailed these new revelations, calling into question the entire judicial process and its blatant politicization. For decades the case has been used by US officials to promote and sustain tension in the otherwise close relationship between the US and Israel.

Although it was known that Pollard did not commit treason (which is defined by the US Constitution as aiding and abetting an enemy in time of war) US officials have often branded Pollard a “traitor” to politically redefine the nature of the US-Israel alliance whenever desired.

Successive Israeli governments generally demanded Pollard’s freedom in Jerusalem before a domestic audience, but were timid and pro forma in their demands in Washington.

Washington regards Pollard, to this day, as a high value hostage to keep Israel off balance, and as a bargaining chip for any number of future Israeli concessions.

When he was finally freed at the age of 61, Pollard was welcomed by his wife, Esther, with whom he is now living in New York. Pollard is battling Draconian parole conditions in court and fighting to come home to Israel. His parole conditions prevent him from being gainfully employed and from observing his religious beliefs, and make it impossible for him to reintegrate into normative society.

His attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, state there is absolutely no justification for these conditions, which are in their words, ”onerous, punitive, vindictive, cruel and unlawful.”

When he last met with President Barack Obama in Washington, PM Benjamin Netanyahu requested the return of Pollard, an Israeli agent, and gave Washington guarantees for his supervision.

It behooves Obama to cut the claptrap and to do for Israel what he has done for Iran, for the Taliban, for Cuba, for Russia , for China and for numerous Guantanamo prisoners when he signed orders to simply send them home to other countries unconditionally.

In addition to the 100 holiday commutations that Obama just signed this past year, he also recently cut the sentences and released thousands of hard-core drug offenders – who are untrained for any lawful profession and will likely reoffend.

In that light, Israel’s request for one elderly, ill, harshly punished Israeli agent to be sent home for Passover after 30 years in US jails is not much to ask.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/JPOST-EDITORIAL-Pollard-claptrap-451883

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9.A great teaching moment By Eric R. Mandel

JPost.com 04/16/2016 22:14 Being heckled for speaking against BDS.

Boycott Israel sign. (photo credit:reuters) “He is brainwashing you, don’t believe anything he tells you, it’s all lies.” This was the parting diatribe of a pro-boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activist, which he screamed at a group of students at Manhattanville College during my lecture on BDS.
On my spring semester speaking tour, I was invited to speak by Mellysa, an Emerson Fellow of StandWithUs at Manhattanville College, and their Hillel director. I was asked to give them a choice of topics that I usually speak about; Israel, the Middle East and regional conflicts, for a multicultural group of students on campus.

When it came time to choose a topic, I suggested that they consider a new lecture I had been asked to give to three northern New Jersey colleges just two weeks before, where the students wrote the title, “Attacks from the BDS Crowd: 10 of the Nastiest Things and Falsehoods Thrown at Israel, and What To Do about Them.” I asked Rachel Klein, the Hillel director of Westchester County New York, if I could present the same topic, and she reluctantly agreed. She hesitantly said, “We don’t have a BDS problem on this campus, so I hope it doesn’t create one.”
Well, either I caused a BDS problem or there was a problem hiding just beneath the surface of this beautiful, leafy campus.
Manhattanville College is a liberal arts university in Westchester County New York with 1,700 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students from 76 countries and 48 states. Manhattanville’s mission is to “educate students to become ethically and socially responsible leaders for the global community” The group that came to hear me that Thursday night in April was a multicultural group of students, who on the whole were similar to other students that come to hear me speak on other campuses, not particularly knowledgeable on the issues of the Middle East, Israel, or the BDS movement to delegitimize Israel.
Lack of information or interest is the greatest enemy of those of us who want to create a factual understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and explain the 1,400-year hatreds within the Sunni and Shi’ite world.
When I speak to any college or high-school group, I watch the eyes of the audience during my talk to see if I am losing anyone, and will then immediately re-adjust the talk. But this group remained attentive right up until the time that a fifty-something member of the audience, sitting front-row center, interrupted my presentation.
A few weeks ago I wrote about pro-Israel speakers being shouted down by “social justice” activists, as far-left Progressives, in the name of human rights, claim that they should deny Israel’s defenders the right to speak.
The language of human rights, i.e. apartheid, ethnic cleansing, racism, is the bludgeon they use to delegitimize Israel. Part of the reason for this illiberalism is that today, education and academic discourse at many of universities has degenerated into narrow- minded political indoctrination by teachers with a one-sided mission.
So it is instructive to describe what I and the students experienced, what it is like to be heckled.
Rachel Klein, the Hillel director, said, “What students saw at Manhattanville College was all too real – even when ‘armed’ with the facts, discourse is not possible when the other party is engaging in harassment and bullying, and clearly not interested in facts. The real issue on campus is that colleges and universities are becoming places where harassment, intimidation and bullying silence civil discourse.”
So this became a teaching moment to help undergrads see the intolerance on today’s college campus firsthand, and begin to understand that this is a terrifying growing phenomenon.
(This was not the first time I have been heckled speaking on campus.) This gentleman who became my heckler at first began mouthing to himself that the information in my PowerPoint presentation wasn’t true.
Only I could see him becoming agitated; the students were unaware of what was about to happen.
Next came the hostile questions. He was particularly angry that I talked about the five times the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza could have had an independent state, and how each time either the greater Arab world, or the Palestinian leadership had rejected or didn’t respond to the Israeli offers.
He said that everything was about the settlements, that Israel stole the land, and that the 22 percent of the land the Palestinians were forced to accept was being taken away from them by settlement growth. These types of statements are usually followed with the claim that Tel Aviv is a settlement on stolen land.
When I asked him why no Palestinian state was created in the 19 years from 1949-1967 when there were zero settlements, while Egypt & Jordan occupied those territories, he said it wasn’t true, & then went on to attack me further. I decided to pursue the argument with him in front of the students.
I asked him, if this were about the settlements and is a purely territorial conflict, then why in 1967 when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in a defensive war, did the Arab League respond to Israel’s offer of returning all of the land with the response of “No Peace, No Negotiation, No recognition” of Israel. He said that was not true. I told him I could not debate with someone with his or her own set of facts, but he again simply said it wasn’t true, and I could see him seething with anger.
I told him about the Camp David and Taba peace talks in 2000 and 2001, where Israel offered control of the Temple Mount to the Arabs, east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and over 90% of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state, I asked why the response to that offer was the suicidal violence of the Second Intifada.
He merely asserted that was a lie.
I asked him if he knew about the Olmert offer in 2008 where Israel offered 100% of the West Bank with land swaps, the Temple Mount and east Jerusalem as the capital of the new Palestinian state, which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had never bothered to respond to. He said that was a lie. I told him I had even spoken to the cartographer who had been in the room with Olmert and Abbas to confirm the offer, but my heckler was not impressed; these things had to be lies, as they did not conform to his view of reality.
What about 2014, I asked him, when Israel accepted US Secretary of State John Kerry’s offer of negotiations without preconditions, but the Palestinians rejected the proposal unless all their preconditions were met beforehand.
All lies, of course.
His “facts” neatly fit into a hostile political agenda the goal of which is to destroy Israel – within any border.
That is what BDS is about, not a two-state solution.
After he starting ranting about Israelis never ever prosecuting anyone who commits a crime against Palestinians, I asked him to wait until my lecture was over and I would answer some more of his questions.
He became more belligerent and the organizers of the event asked him to leave, at which time he started confronting the students by screaming, “you are all being brainwashed, and it’s all lies.”
I wish I were the only speaker who has been verbally attacked in what is suppose to be the marketplace of ideas on a college campus. In fact America as a whole is supposed to be a place where free speech flourishes.
Just ask Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, whom pro-BDS advocates recently shouted down in San Francisco.
So what did I tell students to do? If they want to support Israel I recommended a few options: • First, educate yourselves • Tell personal narratives, which are more powerful than a list of facts • Build partnerships on campus with different organizations • Help someone connect to Israel via common interest • Tell the great story of Israel’s humanitarian record • Don’t give up or give in to those who have their own set of facts Why tell this story about a confrontation typical of those we run into as public speakers favoring a strong Israel? The moral of the story is that we all need to know enough of the history, enough of the facts, to be ready to push back wherever we can against the tide of misinformation that otherwise gradually seeps into the general consensus. Look at Europe, where a large percentage of ordinary people think Israel is a bully that should be brought to its knees.
Could this happen here? The enemy is working hard at it.
The author is the director of MEPIN™.
MEPIN™ (mepinanalysis.org) is read by members of Congress, their foreign policy advisers, members of the Knesset & journalists. He regularly briefs Congress on issues related to the MidEast.

10.Arlene Kushner “Redemption!” April 20, 2016

That, in the end, is what Pesach – which begins Friday night – is about for the Jewish people.

We talk about Pesach as Chag Ha’matzot (the festival of matza) and Chag Ha’aviv (the spring festival); it is all of this, as well as being the festival of freedom (Zeman Heruteinu). But first it is about remembering that the Almighty took us out from Egypt with a strong hand.

We were, without a question, freed of forced labor and of the burden of being in Egypt. But that is just the beginning. We were redeemed – which means brought back to God, who claimed us as His people, and gave us Torah.

And lastly, which is a part of the redemption, we were brought to the land that had been given to our ancestors as an inheritance. Though some Jews try mightily to to do this today, there really is no way to separate spiritual redemption from Israel.

I write of this now because – in these terrible times – we so badly need to keep our eye on our redemption. We are God’s people. We must believe it, and act as if it is so.

Our redemption is, of course, incomplete. It is a process. The hope is never to be abandoned, but rather, to be strengthened in every generation.

I think Pesach is also about the miraculous. Certainly our being brought out of Egypt was a miracle.

Today, we can look around and know that the continued existence of Jews as a people is a miracle. Just as the founding of modern Israel – which persists and succeeds unbelievably – is a miracle. If we but have eyes to see.

This is what Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz says about Pesach and redemption: “Pesach – the Hebrew name for Passover– comes from the Hebrew root PSH which means to skip over, to pass over. It appears first in the context of the ten plagues, in which God skipped over the homes of the Israelites while the rest of Egypt suffered.

“On a deeper, more fundamental level, the Passover festival is based on this idea of passing or skipping over the regular order of things. The Jews did not leave Egypt as part of an evolutionary process. Their departure was a leap, a shortcut. While the exodus was a move from slavery to freedom – a practical, political situation – it was also a transition from oppression to redemption. From beginning to end, the Passover redemption is a leap over an orderly, consistent historical course into a new, different and better state, and into a much higher level of existence.” (emphasis added) Is not the leap over an orderly, consistent historical course a miracle?

Credit: Dr. Lidia Kozenitzky/ Wiki Commons

Being mindful of God’s redemption, and of the miracles and the promise of what is yet to come, gives us strength to continue.

We see injustices and inversions of truth and decency that, if we were to allow them to fill our hearts, would destroy us. But they will not.

It is with incredible sadness that I recognize the growing alienation from Israel and traditional Jewish values of many young Jews in America, who see themselves as progressives who are able to read out Israel as a core value – and manage to convince themselves that doing this brings them to a higher moral plan, to boot.

And it is with unending disgust that I see how many in the world respond to Israel:

Our prime minster let it be known this week that Israel will not relinquish the Golan Heights. Historically connected to the Jewish people, it is now an area – developed peacefully for almost 50 years – that is critical to Israeli security. But world leaders – choosing to be oblivious both to the horrendous security implications of Israel surrendering the Heights and to the fact that there is no more Syria, but only a number of battling factions that would all like to claim the Heights – chastised Netanyahu, telling him this is not Israeli land. The EU led the way here.

On Monday, a terrorist in Jerusalem set two buses on fire by exploding an incendiary device – injuring over 20 people. Just hours later, the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, addressed a JStreet Conference, saving his harshest criticism for Israel. Lovely. Whatever we have done in the way of concessions, expressions of good will, has not been enough for him or for his boss, Obama, he told the crowd. No surprise here. He said that sometimes the Obama administration has “overwhelming frustration” with Israel’s leaders, who are taking Israel in “the wrong direction.”

It never is enough: that is the lesson yet to be learned.

As to that terrorist, Biden said he was “misguided.”

Misguided?? There are no words

Credit: zazzle

And the UN? Its anti-Israel bias is so overwhelming that it is beyond beyond.

The latest outrageous move concerns UNESCO, which in a recent resolution referred to the Temple Mount – Judaism’s holiest site – only as Haram Al-Sharif, as the Muslims refer to it, thereby reading out the Jewish connection to the site. The resolution referred to Jews who visit the Mount as “right wing extremists.”

A battle is growing over Jewish rights to the Mount. Jordan – which has day to day responsibility for the site – was supposed to install cameras to track violence there. But it has abandoned these plans in the face of objections by the Palestinian Arabs, who obviously do not wish to be exposed. Netanyahu has said that Israel, in favor of transparency, still supports the use of those cameras.

So, we have our work cut out for us. Each and every one of us. On many of these topics I refer to here, I will be writing much more in days and weeks ahead.

The flip side of the above is the way that Israel continues to thrive, despite the problems.

The great majority of Israel’s citizen’s want to be here. In polls, they express a high degree of happiness, because they have a sense of purpose. Of the 28 nations in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), Israel has the lowest rate of suicide.

We have the most moral army in the world, barring none. Do not ever be fooled that it otherwise.

And Jews here make babies – our ultimate expression of hope for the future – as Jews in galut (diaspora) do not. We embrace our children and celebrate them.

Hope is implicit, as well, in the marvels of Israel’s medical and technological advances.

In the way that little Israel rushes to help other nations in times of crisis, and offers assistance for their on-going struggles – whether with terrorism or drought or disease. We truly are “Or l’goyim” – a light unto the nations, who more and more actually admit they need us and appreciate what we do (OK, not the US or the EU, but others).

And in the shifting relationship we have with some Muslim/Arab countries.

Yes, miracles.

I often say in my postings that there is more going on than I can write about. Nowhere, my friends, is this more true than with regard to our accomplishments and achievements and good deeds.

So we hold our heads high, and maintain proportion and the long view. And fight like crazy on behalf of Israel. With contempt for the way the world behaves, but without discouragement.

And now, Pesach approaches and I turn my attention away from these postings for a bit.

PLEASE! Over the Pesach holiday week refrain from writing to me, except for truly important information. I will be checking the news, so don’t need to be informed about happenings here, certainly. But attention I routinely devote to my computer will be devoted instead to my family, and to my 12 grandchildren, sabras and Zionists all, who are my own greatest blessing. I will post infrequently, if at all, over Pesach.

To each and every one I wish a Chag Pesach Kasher v’Sameach! May you be uplifted and strengthened by the holiday.

Credit: dreamstime

I posted a beautiful version of Yehi She’amda recently and said I would repeat it before Pesach. I do provide Yehi She’amda here, but yet another version, I think even more beautiful. This one, as the other, is using the music and arrangement of Yonaton Razel. Don’t miss this! IDF Cantor Shai Abramson and Cantor Michael Azogui (who is new to me and fantastic here).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF0ODumqcFc

Vehi She’amada is from the Haggadah. It offers us an eternal promise: “And this is that which sustained our fathers and us. “That is is not one alone that stood up against us to destroy us.

“But that in every generation there are those standing up against us to destroy us.

“But the Holy One Blessed Be He saves us from their hand.”

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution. If it is reproduced and emphasis is added, the fact that it has been added must be noted. See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner18@gmail.com

11.It’s time for a Palestinian State by Daniel Greenfield JewishPress.com Published: April 20th, 2016
Flag worthy of “Palestinian” state – Photo Credit: Art by Bosch Fawstin

{Originally posted to the author’s blog, Sultan Knish}

A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that.

The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth.

We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was shot up when terrorists turned it into a base) for decades. It’s time to finally get our Palestinian jackpot.

But to make it happen, we need to be realistic.

Forget the peace process. Forget negotiations. They’ve never worked before. They’re not going to now. And there’s nothing to negotiate anyway.

There are almost a million Jews living on territory claimed by the PLO. Removing them would be the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing against an indigenous population today. It would also be impossible.

But the same people who insist that the United States, a country of 318 million, can’t deport 11 million illegal aliens, think that Israel will somehow deport 1/8th of its own population if they just chant loudly enough about “occupation” outside Jewish businesses in London or San Francisco.

Ethnically cleansing 8,000 Jews from Gaza/Gush Katif led to nationwide civil disobedience, riots and, eventually, the fall of a political party and three straight terms for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Now imagine trying to deport 800,000 people from their homes simply because they’re Jewish.

And it wouldn’t just be the Jews alone being rounded up into trucks, buses and maybe boxcars.

52 percent of Arabs in East Jerusalem would rather be Israeli citizens than live under the PLO. Are we support to deport 100,000 Arabs from Jerusalem to make way for this imaginary “Palestinian” state?

How much ethnic cleansing do we have to do to make the Islamic colonial fantasy of Palestine real? It’s not going to happen.

Let’s create a real Palestinian state instead. And I don’t mean the PLO’s President for Life Mahmoud Abbas going down to the UN to give another speech. Abbas is on his 11th year of a 4-year term. The US spent $4.5 billion promoting “Palestinian democracy” and the last PLO election was ten years ago.

Hamas won. It would win today all over again.

Current polling shows that 2/3 of “Palestinians” want Abbas to resign. Abbas has no political authority to form a Palestinian state, a Palestinian shwarma stand or a Palestinian anything.

If there’s going to be a Palestinian state, it has to be based on the will of the people. That means it will be a Hamas state. A Palestinian state that is not based on the will of its people has no legitimacy. The only legitimate Palestinian state is therefore a Hamas terror state.

And that’s the only kind of state you can have when 2/3 of “Palestinians” support stabbing Israeli civilians, 89% want to live under an Islamic State run by Sharia law, 84% want to stone adulterers to death and 66% support killing any Muslim who leaves Islam.

Only an Islamic terror state can truly represent the homicidal aspirations of the Palestinian people. Is this some sort of sick joke? Yes it is. But it’s not my sick joke. It’s the sick joke that is Palestine. Now let’s begin the process of turning this sick twisted joke into its own state.

The first thing to do is dismantle the UNRWA, a UN agency specifically dedicated to catering to “Palestinians”. The UNRWA is one of the key elements of the Palestinian welfare state. And the US kicks in around $300 million to the organization which fulfills many of the functions of a state. But a state doesn’t need its own refugee agency. And a Hamas terror state doesn’t need a further $350 million dollars in US foreign aid to promote “democracy” and improve its infrastructure and institutions.

This is going to be a problem because the imaginary Palestinian state also has a fantasy economy. The largest employer in the Palestinian Authority is the Palestinian Authority. Most of its money comes from America, Europe, Israel and, for some inconceivable reason, Japan.

The terror state gets its electricity from Israel. It gets its water and internet through Israel. So let’s get a clear look at what a real Palestinian state would look like. It would be Gaza writ large. But without the UNRWA and the rest of the NGOs lining up to provide jobs and social services. It would be an “open air prison”, as anti-Israel activists screech of Gaza, but a prison created and maintained by the inmates. It would be constantly at war with Israel and the rest of the world.

The way it is now.

The economy will be a thinly disguised feudal system of Islamists with engineering degrees in mansions paying starvation wages to laborers to harvest olives to be shipped to China. There will be shopping malls for some and little shacks on the edges full of smugglers, drug labs and brothels for everyone else.

That’s the Islamist dream.

Palestine’s political system will consist of Hamas and more Hamas. Or maybe once the Hamas alliance with ISIS in the Sinai lapses, there will finally be a democratic election between Hamas and ISIS to decide just how horrible of a place the misshapen slices of Gaza and the West Bank under terrorist occupation will become. Nothing will function except the religious police and the gallows in the dusty squares.

There will be wars every two years. That will be just long enough to rebuild the hospitals, mosques and schools that were being used as launch sites in the last wars. In between the big wars, the terrorist groups, Hamas factions, ISIS, Islamic Jihad and anybody else, will fight each other in the streets.

It will be glorious.

Imagine the last few decades of terror, bombings, missile strikes, firefights, corruption, thievery and utter dysfunction made into a permanent state of affairs. That’s Palestine. That’s the two-state solution. Just don’t ask what it solves except the Middle East’s severe shortage of terrorist states and terrorists.

If you will it, it is no dream. This nightmare already exists and it can be a real country. It already has an anthem, a flag, no elections and no reason to exist except killing everyone else. It’s a foreign aid funded ISIS with more olive harvests and a more robust campus presence.

Everyone talks about creating a Palestinian state, but no one actually wants to do it.

It’s time for Palestine to stop being a pipe dream full of pipe bombs that we spend billions of dollars on. Just pull out a seat at the UN, hold democratic elections and then step away from the explosions.

A real two-state solution is just that simple. And it can happen tomorrow.

Let’s stop fantasizing about peace. Peace and Palestine go together like oil and water. This is what a real Palestinian state would look like. And the moment it comes into being, any possibility of peace dies.

Daniel Greenfield

About the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ These opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Jewish Press.

12.Unworthy of statehood: The insanity of a Palestinian state.

by Barry Shaw Arutz Sheva IsraelNationalNews.com Wed, April 20, 2016 9:04 pm

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism’ and was the co-founder of the Netanya Terror Victims Organization.

Incitement and anti-Semitic hate spewing out of the mouths of Palestinian leaders, empty words designed to perpetuate Palestinian self-promotion as the perennial victim when, in truth, they are only the victims of their own emptiness, the constant eruption of violence against Israelis from Palestinian Arabs raised to hate Jews and destroy Israel.

If anyone is so utterly unworthy of statehood it is the Palestinian Arabs.

Fraudulent history, internal divisiveness, wastage of massive global assistance, the diversion of international funding to propaganda purposes, incitement, lessons of hate, the financing and support of terrorism, their predilection to violence and the total inability to display to the world any respect for their neighbors, whether it be Israel from the Palestinian Authority, or to Egypt from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

How can any international diplomat or journalist worth his salt in honesty make out a case to grant this dysfunctional, inefficient, unwilling entity sovereignty?

If you think that the Palestinian Arabs are not all about terror, think again
A brief explanation of Palestinian terrorism shows the inanity of such a proposition.

The spectrum and ideologies of Palestinian terrorism range from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are both Islamic terror organizations pledging allegiance to the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia law, to the Marxist PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). This is the largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization of which most of the Palestinian Authority leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, belong.

Both terror organizations are openly bent on the destruction of Israel and have founding charters declaring this aim.

If you think that the Palestinian Arabs are not all about terror, think again. Just as Arafat was the commander in chief of all the Palestinian terror groups, so Abbas and his henchmen, including Jibril Rajoub are intimately involved with the minutiae of the terror groups under the wing of the PLO.

So the establishment of a Palestinian state would comprise two major terror organizations, one Islamic, the other Communist, currently at logger-heads with each other but united in their desire to see an end of Israel, regardless of signed agreements.

And yet, the world has nothing to say about this apart from their ridiculous belief that the creation of Palestine is the only way to achieve peace!

Puzzling!

A little known dangerous fact that more knowledgeable two-staters prefer to keep under wraps is that in the case of Mahmoud Abbas stepping down as Palestinian president or dying while in office, his replacement would be the speaker of the Palestinian parliament – and he happens to be a member of HAMAS!

This is supposed to be for an interim period, but we know that Abbas was elected for a 4 year term and that was way back in 2004!

So much for Palestinian obligations to abide by the rule of law and respect the democratic process. Can we expect any better from Hamas? I think not.

Can anyone doubt another certainty wrapped in silence that, either by the ballot or by the bullet, Hamas will take control of this new Palestine? So I ask my diplomatic contacts, is this the new peaceful state you have expended your energies on establishing for several decades?

By the way, the Palestinian parliament hasn’t sat since 2007.

Some democracy!

This is the Palestine that naive liberal Westerners are so frenetic to create? Give me a break!

Marwan Barghouti sits in an Israeli jail. He is serving five consecutive life sentences for orchestrating the murder of Israeli civilians in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Givat Zeev, and injured others.

The Palestinian Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas calls his imprisonment a “war crime.” Now the Palestinians are running a global campaign to have this unrepentant murderer nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize no less.

Why not, the Norwegians gave one to arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat who launched his fatal intifada after flying to Oslo to pick up his award.

This campaign on behalf of Barghouti is supported by Adolfo Perez Esquivel, an Argentinian who is called a pacifist and a human rights activist and who was himself awarded the Peace Prize back in 1980. You really couldn’t make up such an insane story.

Barghouti is also touted as the leading candidate to replace Abbas and has been endorsed by Saeb Erekat.

Is this the best alternative the Palestinians have for their next president? Well, sadly, yes it is, unless they vote for Hamas.

Barghouti’s election to be the next Palestinian president, irrespective of him receiving the nonsensical Nobel Peace Prize, will further perpetuate the conflict.

In the meantime, the Palestinian on Palestinian violence continues. A Palestinian Fatah official, Fathi Zaydan, was killed by a bomb in Mieh Mieh, Lebanon, in a camp operated by UNWRA. This place has been the scene of numerous violent disputes between rival Palestinian factions. In Gaza, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a title which stands for the elimination of Israel) burnt images of Mahmoud Abbas.

When they are killing Israelis they are killing each other. Several thousand Palestinians have been killed by other Palestinians due to their internal political and religious enmity? Palestinian society is, within itself, divisive and violent.

If the international community wishes to continue promoting the benefits of a Palestinian state it really needs to address the deep Arab schisms that make such a notion not only impossible to execute, but insanely impossible to execute.

Putting aside the moral inversion of Western governments applying one-sided pressure on the only liberal democracy in the Middle East in order to establish another Arab state that cannot decide which way it wants to go, one need question why apparently reasonable logical-thinking European diplomats can abstain from United Nations resolutions brought to the vote by Palestinian-supporting regimes proposing that Israel is the world’s worst offender on women’s and children’s rights as well of other obnoxious allegations.

Why do they not, in all honesty, object to such slanders and vote against these preposterous proposals? Where is their political morality? Why do they close their eyes to these obsessive assaults on Israel?

Currying favor to these Israel-hating regimes is not an option for those who try to tell us of their commitment to a better Middle East. Neither is the lack of interest in the diplomatic world of the consequences of a Palestinian state gone wrong. Too many diplomats have told me that “it is up to the parties to make an agreement work.”

Sorry, not good enough! They cannot force their “solution” to the Palestinian problem on the parties and simply walk away when the consequences hit the proverbial fan. It will be primarily Israelis, but also the Arab citizens of this errant forced-birth state, that will inevitably suffer those consequences, and Israel would suffer them from a strategically weaker position that where we are right now.

All in all, the consequences of the establishment of a Palestinian state, based on the reality of Palestinian politics and Palestinian society, are too intensely frightening to be seriously considered.

One of the minor victories of Israeli rightwing pundits has been fueled by the gruesome holocaust taking place over the past five years in Israel’s northern neighbor, Syria. Back in April 2008, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agrees to fully withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace with Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad confirmed Olmert’s remarks at the time that Jerusalem and Damascus were holding talks through a third-party in an attempt to resume the negotiations between the two countries.

“There are efforts exerted in this direction,” Assad told reporters. “This is nothing new, and we have discussed this in the past.” Assad added that “Syria takes every opportunity to express its willingness to establish just and comprehensive peace in accordance with the international decisions… The criterion for the acceptance of any negotiations is that they will be held seriously and that there will be a commitment to implement the UN resolutions, particularly as the Israeli side knows very well what is acceptable and unacceptable by the Syrian side.”

What was acceptable to the Syrian ruler back then was a complete return of every last inch of the Golan Heights to Syrian control, removal of every last Jew and Jewish property from the area, and a return to the 1967 borders, when Syrian snipers ruled the lives of Israeli farmers along the eastern shores of the Kinneret.

Imagine, a long string of Israeli columnists, bloggers, Facebookers and Tweeters have been saying, if Israel had indeed returned to the 1967 border just before the scum of the Middle East — Sunni rebels, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Syrian chemical warfare operators were to crowd the basalt hills overlooking Tiberias — where would we be today?

It’s a winning argument, open and shut, other than Gideon Levi and a couple other useful idiots there really is no Israeli who would ever entertain returning the Golan Heights.

But at Foggy Bottom, where life behaves according to more sublime rules than the Jewish aspiration to stay alive, no lessons have been learned regarding the wisdom of returning Syrian murderers of whatever ilk to the hills above the Kinneret.

It began during the State Dept. Monday press briefing this week. Spokesman John Kirby was asked about the official US recognition of Syria. Essentially, the reporter wanted to know, if the US is so invested in ousting President Bashar al-Assad as a prerequisite for ending the civil war in Syria, why does it still recognize him as the legitimate sovereign of that tortured land?

The reporter asked (redacted): “Legally and diplomatically you only recognize Syria, as you have in the past. In fact, you still issue press briefings in the name of the US Embassy in Syria and so on. From time to time I see that you recognize the government of the Arab Syrian Republic. You have not recognized anyone else as exercising any kind of authority or any kind of sovereignty over any territory of Syria.

Kirby: I’m not sure I understand your question.

Reporter: My question is very simple. Do you recognize any other entity in Syria to have sovereignty over that territory?

Kirby: We recognize that there is a Syrian Government in place. We also recognize that it’s led by a dictator who continues to barrel bomb and gas his people. And the government that’s in place right now, led by Bashar al-Assad, can’t be part of the long-term future of Syria, which is why we’re doing this entire political process to begin with. It’s why so many nations have come together to try to resolve the civil war and the conflict there so that people can have a government in place that they’ve actually had a voice in putting there and that is responsive and responsible for them.

So, Kirby established that the US is very unhappy with Assad’s human rights record and all that, but he is the current sovereign, like it or not. Then came the inevitable follow-up question.

Reporter: Could I follow-up on the issue of Syrian sovereignty? This weekend, the Israeli prime minister held a meeting in the Golan Heights, basically saying that they will never withdraw from the Golan Heights, which you recognize as occupied territory. Do you have a comment on that?

Kirby: I’m not going to react to everything that’s said at cabinet meetings. I’m also not going to react to every bit of rhetoric, as I’ve routinely not wanted to do. I would, however, reiterate that the US position on the status of the Golan Heights is longstanding and is unchanged. Every administration on both sides of the aisle since 1967 has maintained that those territories are not part of Israel. The conditions under which those territories are ultimately returned should be decided through negotiations between the respective parties. And obviously, the current situation in Syria makes it difficult to continue those efforts at this time.

In other words, there were no lessons learned, the Israeli experience and trauma over the decades has no validity, Israel’s claim regarding the things Syrian soldiers would do to Jewish civilians if only they were given the leverage point — it means nothing to the State Dept. When the time comes and a Syrian ruler other than Assad take over, US pressure on Israel to begin negotiations on returning the Golan Heights would begin afresh, as if nothing had happened.

And this would take place regardless of who sits in the White House, because presidents come and go, but the men and women who run the State Dept. stay forever.