RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/waving-goodbye-to-the-jerusalem-waiver/90677/

Secretary of State Pompeo’s report that no further waivers are necessary in respect of the Jerusalem Embassy Act is a wonderful moment in these parlous times. It is a marker not only of principle but also of stick-to-it-ive-ness. And it puts paid to an account opened, so to speak, by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was at the peak of his power in the Senate.

That was in the mid-1990s. We were editing the Jewish Forward at the time, and the senator had asked if he could stop by. He was then chairman of the finance committee and we wanted to talk about — naturally — the gold standard. He, it turned out, had no more interest in the gold standard than the man in the moon. Instead, he thrust at us a copy of the State Department telephone directory.

Moynihan handed the book to us even before he sat down. “Here,” he said once a few colleagues were seated at a round table. “Let’s talk about this.” We were stumped. So he riffed through State’s phone book, stopping at Jerusalem. It wasn’t listed under Israel, he pointed out, or any other country. Alone among capital cities, it was listed under Jerusalem — as if it were a separate nation altogether.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/442905-expecting-israelis-to-pay-to-be-killed-proves-abbas-isnt-interested-in-peace

Gazan terrorists launched hundreds of rockets into Israel in recent days to overwhelm its Iron Dome anti-missile system, killing four civilians and forcing untold numbers of others to take cover. And on the West Bank, the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority planted the seeds for more killing – albeit less flamboyantly.

That Israel is more focused on Gaza of late than the West Bank is hardly surprising. One can only imagine the U.S. reaction, and reprisals, if hundreds of rockets were flying in from Canada or Mexico.

In a televised address on April 29, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas conceded that his organization faces a financial crisis but insisted that it will continue to reject all Israeli payments because the Jewish state had the audacity to deduct the cost of stipends that go to terrorists and their families.

“Our position on this issue was, and still is, clear,” the 83-year-old Abbas told the Palestinian people, looking into a camera as he sat behind a desk. “We refuse to receive the money if any amount is missing from it, especially the amount [that we pay to the families of] the martyrs, or any other amount that they owe us.”

Indeed, his position is crystal clear. Abbas announced the policy in February after Israel declared that it would withhold $140 million over the course of the year, which it said was what Abbas’ government pays to the families of “martyrs” who died while trying to kill Jews or who were now held in Israel jails for the same reason.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netanyahu-and-jewish-destiny-11557355547

After a resounding victory in the Israeli election, Benjamin Netanyahu is now free to continue forging the destiny of the Jewish people. A look at Mr. Netanyahu’s early political views offers revealing insights into his evolution from a fence-straddling moderate to the guardian of the right who promises to annex parts of the West Bank.

In January 1997, during his first term as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from 80% of Hebron, smothering the city’s tiny Jewish enclave. The following year, with President Clinton mired in the Lewinsky affair, Mr. Netanyahu was maneuvered into the Wye River Memorandum with Yasser Arafat, relinquishing further Israeli territorial control.

During parliamentary debate in 2004 over the Gaza disengagement, which uprooted 10,000 Jews, Mr. Netanyahu voted repeatedly in favor of withdrawal and refused to exercise his leverage as finance minister on a crucial budget vote that would have stalled the Gaza exit. His just-for-the-record resignation from the cabinet, a week before the withdrawal, was irrelevant.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14190/ilhan-omar-gaza-rockets

Does Ilhan Omar not realize that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, when Israel removed every soldier and settler from that area?

The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee issued a statement condemning Israel for “targeting and killing Palestinian civilians, including children and infants.” Irresponsibly, it never once mentioned the firing of 698 rockets by the rules of Gaza that target Israeli civilians, and it never mentioned the sad reality that Hamas and Islamic Jihad deliberately use “Palestinian civilians, including children and infants” as human shields in order to increase the number of Palestinian civilians who are inadvertently killed or injured by Israel’s legitimate efforts to protect its civilians from unlawful rocket attacks.

Israel is also celebrating its 71st year of independence. No nation has contributed so much to humankind in so short a period of time. No nation faced with threats compared to those faced by Israel has ever had a better record of human rights, compliance with the rule of law or concern with avoiding civilian casualties. The world should join Israel in celebrating its 71 years of statehood. The world should also recognize that if Israel’s enemies stopped attacking its citizens, there would be peace. But if Israel stopped defending its citizens, there would be genocide.

All decent people should be outraged at the terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip that fired 698 rockets at Israeli civilians, killing four, injuring 234 and traumatizing thousands of innocent children. Imagine what other countries, including the United States, would do if lethal rockets targeted their civilians. Yet, Israel has responded with restraint. To be sure, 30 Palestinians were killed and 154 injured by Israeli efforts to stop the rocket rampage. Many of these were terrorists, but some were civilians who were put in harm’s way by the terrorists.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273659/israels-tourism-triumph-part-3-edwin-black

The sizzling restaurant scene.

Israel’s adversaries in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement [BDS] thought they could starve Israel through economic warfare that included even its food sector. Many remember the BDS furor over SodaStream, Sabra hummus, ordinary fruits and vegetables, as well as Israeli cuisine and the country’s culinary scene. But none of it has stopped Israel’s restaurant sector from exploding into an audacious, red-hot success, now leading the planet in culinary excellence and bravado.

As far as the Israeli restaurant scene is considered, “BDS” stands for only one thing: “Breakfast, Dinner, and Sweets.” Across the country, Israeli restaurants sizzle with celebrity chefs and horizon-expanding culinary wizardry.

Decades ago, Israel’s culinary scene was largely defined by omnipresent falafel, shawarma and pizza stands, tomatoes and cucumbers sliced with endless variation, carrot juice vendors, over-glitzed coffee and pastry bars, and truck stop-style roadside eateries offering spiced Moroccan-style salads in drab arrays. Sameness and no sophistication were the main flavors of the day—every day. All that’s over.

In recent years, highly trained and innovative, if feisty, chefs have been opening one trendy restaurant after another. Now hip dining spots can be found everywhere—from hotel rooftops with majestic views to disused warehouses, converted old homes, tight alleys and sidewalks, rooftops, seaside balconies, hilltop niches, spots overlooking the seashore, a hillside, or even a wall—and the sometimes just the cramped space between two other cramped spaces.

http://thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2019/05/06/peace-peace-but-there-is-no-peace-

The Jewish prophet Jeremiah said those words millennia ago and it is telling when applied to peace between Israel and the Arab aggressors, yet still the hope for a true and lasting peace is resurrected again and again. But is it a case of “blessed are the peacemakers” or just another attempt to disinter a rotting corpse, just like Chamberlain’s “peace in our time?”

As I write this article, more than 500 missiles have been launched against the embattled Jewish state and Israeli civilians have been killed and wounded. The hate riddled junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, takes “credit” for this relentless act of genocidal war. This is reality, and it is upon this chimera that we wait for the Middle East peace proposal that President Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, has said, “is realistic … it’s executable and it’s something that I do think will lead to both sides being much better off.”

Kushner also noted that the peace plan, which is expected to be unveiled in June, “will provide answers to the final status issues” between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs – whatever that means.

https://dallasjewishmonthly.com/a-tribute-to-israeli-mothers/?fbclid=IwAR1ipPvCGhLgut9QsB2k_FXVt8_0Nn7SDZ5fh9vUkQWofzBhnzS86rs5n08

In a well-deserved tribute, Rachel Frenkel, Bat-Galim Shaer and Iris Yifrach – the mothers of the three teenaged boys whose abduction and murder at the hands of Palestinian terrorists in the summer of 2014 sparked Operation Protective Edge in Gaza – were invited to light a torch at Israel’s Independence Day ceremony on May 9.

The annual event is held on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the site of the Israel’s national military cemetery. It takes place at the end of the day of mourning for all the country’s fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, and marks the beginning of joyful birthday celebrations for the Jewish state, which turns 71.

The jarring juxtaposition of the somber and the sweet is purposeful. Before partying with nighttime fireworks and all-day barbecues, Israelis pause for a 24-hour period to commemorate, weep for and thank all the men, women and children killed either defending the nation from incessant enemy assault – or simply for going about their daily lives in the ancient Middle East homeland that they transformed into a flourishing Western democracy.

It is rare to find a family in Israel that has not been touched in some fashion by this particular form of bereavement. Indeed, funerals are just as much a part of the Israeli experience as weddings and baby-namings. And fear of losing one’s offspring in bombings, rocket-fire, car-rammings and stabbings is as present as anxiety about whether those same kids eat their broccoli or do their homework or find a suitable mate or get a good job. It is a country of Jewish mothers, after all.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/jihadi-missiles-israeli-mourning/

Four families’ names will now be noted and quoted together by virtue of their shared tragedy over the course of a single fateful weekend.

Reeling after three days of nonstop rocket barrages from Gaza, and fully aware that the ceasefire with Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists is temporary, Israelis are preparing for this year’s Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) ceremonies with particular sadness and no small degree of frustration.

This evening, when the Jewish state enters into a 24-hour mourning period for all the fallen soldiers and civilian victims of terrorism who have been killed since its inception, four new names will have been added to the list. Four new sets of spouses, children, parents and siblings will have earned the dreaded label of “bereaved.”

Each will wish he or she could have turned the clock back to the minute before Moshe Agadi, Moshe Feder, Ziad al-Hamamda and Pinchas Menachem Pashwazman were murdered by missile fire that changed the course of their history.