RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mustafa Amine had been Hezbollah’s operations chief since February 2008, when his predecessor and brother-in-law, arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, was killed in a car-bomb attack in Damascus.

Last Friday, May 13, Badreddine, too, met a violent end—killed, according to reports, in a mysterious explosion near Damascus International Airport.

Badreddine’s terror activity with Hezbollah went back to 1983, when he led a cell that car-bombed the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. Captured and imprisoned in Kuwait, he managed to escape in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded the country.

Badreddine made it back to Beirut, his Hezbollah comrades, and terror activity—both against Israel and against U.S. and British forces in Iraq. But Badreddine’s most notorious exploit came on February 14, 2005, when he masterminded the vicious killing of moderate Sunni Lebanese leader Rafiq Hariri in Beirut.

As Israeli investigative writer Ronen Bergman describes it:

a suicide bomber driving a van loaded with explosives equal in damage power to three tons of TNT collided with Hariri’s armored convoy, turning it into a fiery hell.

Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.”

Miller was one of the great proponents of the Bush “road map” for Israel another clone of the endless policies promoting Israeli territorial concessions in exchange for blather….He wrote this in May 2005 in the Washpo…which give a good indication of his proclivities with respect to Israel:

“I’m not a lawyer by training,” Miller wrote. “But I know one when I see one. For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel’s attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations.” ….“With the best of motives and intentions, we listened to and followed Israel’s lead without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations.” so his opinions of Lieberman are tainted by bias….rsk

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Replacing Moshe Ya’alon, who announced his resignation Friday as Mr. Netanyahu publicly negotiated his replacement, would do a lot for Mr. Netanyahu: He stands to broaden his thin governing majority and to reinforce himself against right-wing pressure at home as well as U.S. efforts to press him on the peace process and settlements. He could better secure his position until 2018, when he would surpass David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-governing prime minister. The exit of Mr. Ya’alon, a longtime Israeli military figure, also sends a powerful signal that the Israel Defense Forces should be careful about challenging his government. Senior military officials, and Mr. Ya’alon, have been critical on several points, including the government’s defense of an Israeli soldier who shot a wounded Palestinian lying on the ground in March after the Palestinian stabbed another Israeli soldier.

In the short term, Mr. Netanyahu’s actions may bring peace to his governing coalition. But the price will be continued and possibly greater tensions with the Palestinians, the U.S. and others. Notably, though, Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t much care. This move illustrates his decision to look beyond the Obama administration toward what he hopes will be a friendlier face in Washington.

Mr. Lieberman’s party joining the Netanyahu government would add precious seats to Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition. But Mr. Lieberman is a problematic partner. He represents a secular party that has had its share of tensions with Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-orthodox coalition partners over national service. Mr. Lieberman resigned last year as foreign minister to protest what he considered Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to wipe out Hamas in Gaza and to build more settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. He also wanted more support for legislation to remove Arabic as an official language, strengthen the influence of Jewish law, reduce the Israeli Supreme Court’s powers, and, according to the New York Times, “entrench the automatic citizenship of Jews worldwide and Jewish symbols of the state.” Mr. Lieberman, who is known for provocative statements and lives in an Israeli settlement south of Bethlehem, has threatened to bomb the Aswan dam in the event of war with Egypt and has proposed transferring some Arab-Israeli towns to the Palestinian Authority to help preserve the Jewish Israeli majority in the north. CONTINUE AT SITE

Good riddings….to “Bogie”Ya’alon- his nickname is short for “bogus”- a political chameleon in hawk’s clothing….rsk

TEL AVIV—Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon resigned Friday from what is widely considered Israel’s second-most powerful position, amid maneuvering by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shore up his coalition.

Mr. Ya’alon, a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party, said in a Facebook post Friday that he decided to step down after the prime minister moved this past week to negotiate with the ultranationalist lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman, reportedly offering him the defense ministry.

Mr. Ya’alon said he was resigning his seat in the Knesset, or parliament, as well and would be “taking a timeout from political life.”

The prime minister expressed his regret and said he had offered Mr. Ya’alon the position of foreign minister, which Mr. Netanyahu currently also holds. Mr. Netanyahu denied there was any “crisis of confidence” between the two of them, but said he needed to “expand the government, in order to bring stability to Israel.”

Mr. Netanyahu, who has a one-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset, has been seeking to shore up his political base by negotiating to bring Mr. Lieberman’s ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party into his conservative coalition.

Talks began on Wednesday, according to a senior Israeli official. The official wouldn’t comment on whether Mr. Lieberman had been offered the defense ministry portfolio, saying talks were ongoing.

As head of an underground Jewish resistance group, David Raziel had been pursued by the British. Come WWII, he would offer his help.
On May 20, 1941, David Raziel, commander of the Etzel – the Jewish underground militia in Palestine affiliated with Revisionist Zionism – was killed while leading a commando mission in Iraq for the British army.

In its early years, the Etzel, the acronomyn of Irgun Tzvai Leumi – literally “national military organization” –treated the British Mandatory government in Palestine as an enemy. But after World War II started, Etzel made common cause with the British, which is how it was that Raziel was asked to assemble a team to travel to Iraq. Its mission was to destroy the oil refineries west of the capital, which were supplying the Germans with fuel critical for their war effort.

He was born David Rozenson, on December 19, 1910, in Smorgon, in modern-day Belarus. His father was Mordecai Rozenson, a Hebrew teacher, and his mother the former Bluma Gordin. The family, which also included a sister, Esther, were Zionists, and spoke Hebrew in their home. When Mordecai was offered a position teaching at the Tachkemoni School, in Tel Aviv, in 1914, they immigrated there, if not for long.

During World War I, the Turkish rulers of the Land of Israel exiled Russian-born residents, whom they considered enemy aliens, to Egypt. This happened to the Rozensons too, and they went back to Russia, only to return to Israel in 1923.

David studied at his father’s school, graduating in 1928, when he moved to Jerusalem to attend the Merkaz Harav yeshiva, where his hevruta (study partner) was Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. At the same time, he was a student at the Hebrew University.