RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273686/gaza-crisis-tipping-point-ari-lieberman

Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a test of sorts to determine whether unilateral concessions would be met with reciprocating goodwill gestures. The experiment in unilateral concessions was an abysmal failure, evidenced by three major conflagrations and countless minor flare-ups since.

The latest spasm of violence began on Friday when Hamas snipers fired on an Israeli patrol wounding two soldiers, one moderately and one lightly. Israel responded with accurate fire killing two Hamas operatives. Shortly thereafter, Hamas and its affiliate, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad began bombarding southern Israel with rockets and mortars.

An Egyptian brokered ceasefire went into effect on Monday at 4:30 a.m. but since Saturday, the southern Israeli cities of Sderot, Ashkelon, Beersheba and Ashdod, as well as a number of smaller communities along the Gaza periphery were subjected to unrelenting rocket and mortar bombardment.

According to Israel’s military spokesperson, Gazan terrorists fired some 700 rockets and mortar rounds at Israel over a two-day period. Approximately two-thirds of these landed in open spaces. Others were intercepted by Israel’s rocket defense system, Iron Dome. But a few managed to penetrate Israel’s missile defense shield inflicting death and property damage. According to published reports, four Israeli civilians were killed in this latest round of Hamas-provoked violence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/the-law-of-war-permits-israel-to-destroy-hamas/

The double standards imposed on the IDF are yet another symptom of international anti-Semitism.

As of this moment, a fragile truce holds in southern Israel. After Hamas volleyed 600 missiles at Israeli civilian targets on Saturday and Sunday, prompting Israel to attack hundreds of targets in Gaza, the air-raid sirens have fallen silent, for now.

But over the weekend, when the rockets fell, we saw all the old arguments against Israel’s acts of self-defense crop up. The air raids were “disproportionate,” we were told. There were arguments over individual civilian casualties, as if it would somehow discredit Israel if its precision strikes killed more than a handful of noncombatants. Yes, there were rote condemnations of Hamas’s efforts to kill as many civilians as it could, but once again all too many voices on the left rose at once, demanding that the nation under attack — the nation defending its schools, hospitals, and homes from an indiscriminate rocket barrage — exercise restraint.

It’s important, however, to be very clear about Israel’s legal obligations. When it comes to Hamas, “restraint” is Israel’s choice — one it may make for tactical and strategic reasons of its own. The actual law of war would allow Israel to invade Gaza, utterly destroy Hamas, and occupy Gaza City until Israel’s safety is ensured, even if it burned in the fight.

Let’s break this down as simply as possible. First, firing 600 rockets at civilian targets in a neighboring country is an act of war. It’s an attack by an army against a nation-state, and as such it grants the nation-state the authority under the international law of armed conflict not just to disable the specific military assets used to carry it out but to destroy those who carried it out.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-israel-reach-cease-fire-after-days-of-deadly-clashes-11557133042

TEL AVIV—Militant groups in Gaza said Monday they had reached a cease-fire with Israel after two days of the deadliest fighting since the 2014 war.

Israel lifted security restrictions in the south near Gaza in a sign that it expected calm, though it didn’t officially confirm the truce. Four Israelis and 27 Palestinians were killed since Friday evening after militants launched nearly 700 rockets, and Israel said it hit more than 350 military targets in Gaza in response.

The latest conflagration sparked fears of a wider war after a year of violent flare-ups and periodic cease-fires. But calm descended across Gaza and Israel on Monday after a weekend of rocket fire from the strip, blaring sirens over southern Israeli communities and explosions on both sides of the border.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273673/islamic-terror-rocket-hits-israeli-kindergarten-daniel-greenfield

There were no children in this room in an Israeli kindergarten when the rocket hit. But you can only get lucky so many times.

In the latest round of Islamic terror attacks on Israel, some got lucky, others did not. One man is dead. A number of others were wounded by the terror rocket attacks. And this kindergarten video of the aftermath of a rocket attack shows what might have happened.

The video shows what happened after a rocket landed in the yard of a Sderot kindergarten and shrapnel from the strike pierced the classroom.