Here’s a challenge: Go read this NY Times editorial and see if you can find a single reference to the messages—in the form of rockets loaded with ball-bearings that just destroyed two young boys’ legs—that palestinian terrorists have been sending Israel since the “cease-fire” took effect.
Israel’s Mixed Messages
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, took some encouraging steps over the weekend to ease the frustrations Palestinians face at West Bank and Gaza checkpoints. He hoped in that way to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas, the embattled moderate who presides over the Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately, Israel’s defense minister, Amir Peretz, has undercut these moves by approving the first new West Bank settlement in more than a decade.Israel’s space for peace diplomacy is tightly constrained. It must reckon with a Hamas-led Palestinian cabinet that denies its right to exist and rejects the very notion of a negotiated peace. Yet those facts of Mideast life do not justify authorizing a new settlement. That self-defeating move adds nothing to Israel’s security and needlessly complicates the quest for an eventual negotiated peace.
We hope Mr. Olmert or Israel’s Parliament can reverse Mr. Peretz’s damaging decision, taken in defiance of the international road map for Middle East peace, which Israel’s governing coalition has pledged to support.
Meanwhile, Mr. Olmert’s positive gestures still deserve recognition, although the hoped-for benefits to Mr. Abbas may now be lost. More than two dozen military checkpoints in the West Bank will be removed and Israel will take steps to ease the passage of goods in and out of the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip. These steps should reduce the day-to-day humiliation and economic suffering of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Palestinians.
Yeah, that all-encompassing “humiliation” that the pals suffer by having to go through checkpoints—because it’s not like they’re not trying to smuggle in suicide belts and other weapons to murder more Israelis.
I’m about done with being able to post on Israeli issues. I am simply seeing the same scene played over and over again, on different days, and sometimes with different players.
I’m going to start assigning numbers, like in that old joke about the prisoners.
Let’s see, Israel being bashed for settlements and checkpoints with no mention whatsoever of the need for those checkpoints: We’ll call that 2. One will be the “exercise restraint” after the pals get a suicide belt through the area that was previously checkpointed, and Israeli civilians are murdered.
Cynical? Moi? Surely you jest.
No jest. You are cynical. But sometimes that can be the only way to stay sane when you’re watching hamatzav.
2? No effect, Meryl. I guess you just don’t know how to tell a story.
It is infinitely clear that Olmert, like Sharon and Barak before him, is a treasonous quisling who, if and when the Jews regain a semblance of sanity, will be tried for high treason and complicity to murder. Then promptly executed, along with the other insane, suicidal leftists who seek to destroy Israel and bring on a 2nd Holocaust, as if they would be spared the muslim/nazi sword.
Meryl,
Just a note that, AFAIK, “rockets loaded with ball-bearings,” would be referring to Katyusha missiles, like those fired throughout this summer’s war against Hizbullah, and not Kassams or mortars – although the damage from the latter is great, as you wrote – with one youth losing a foot, and the second also seriously wounded.
Note results of estimated 40,000 red-hot ball-bearings packed into Katyusha rockets here and here.