RUTHFULLY YOURS

On the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War — another chapter in Israel’s long, painful, and unfinished conflict in Lebanon — an excerpt from the new book ‘Pumpkinflowers’ examines the impact of decades in Lebanon on the Israeli psyche.

Author and journalist Matti Friedman spent much of his IDF service in the late 1990s in South Lebanon at an isolated base called Outpost Pumpkin, an experience he details in his acclaimed new book,Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story. In this excerpt, published here to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, Friedman examines the effect that Israel’s Lebanon entanglements have had on its leaders and people. The years of the Lebanon “security zone,” he believes, taught Israelis that they cannot shape the Middle East to their will and that their fate is not entirely in their own hands. Instead of despairing, however, Israelis have found an admirable way of living with a profoundly troubling reality.

I was sitting not long ago along one of the boulevards in Tel Aviv. The Middle East had succumbed in recent years to chaos and butchery dwarfing our own conflict in one tiny corner of the region. But our country was relatively calm, at least for a time, thanks not to anyone’s goodwill but to the force of our arms.
The promenade was full of teenagers in tank tops, tattooed riders of old-fashioned bikes, men with women and men with men and women with women, speaking the language of the Bible and of Jewish prayer. There were old people sipping coffee outside a restaurant, and some music. The country was going about its improbably cheerful business on a weekday evening.

Beyond the city were the neighborhoods of middle-class apartments with parking lots of company Mazdas, the kinds of places where I found many veterans of Outpost Pumpkin when I went looking for them to write this book, most having first passed through Goa or the Andes for decompression before coming back to their families, finding work as programmers and accountants and settling down to watch their kids on the swings. All of this is more than our grandparents, the perpetual outsiders of the ghettos of Minsk and Fez, had any right to expect.
Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

But it seemed for a moment — and this can happen to me in a cafe in my corner of Jerusalem, or picking up my children at school, anytime — that the buildings on either side of the boulevard were embankments, and the sky a concrete roof.

Even in the heat of summer, when the streets of downtown New Haven have emptied of students, Yale can’t escape the clutches of controversy.

The most recent incident in the long-running saga of Yale’s Calhoun College, named after the former South Carolina senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, comes at a time of national racial tensions that only heightens the sense of drama. Calhoun, who served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, was famous in his day for his staunch advocacy of slavery. Months of student agitation to change the college’s name came to naught this spring when Yale refused to do so. Corey Menafee, a black man who worked as a dishwasher in Calhoun College, smashed a windowpane in the college’s dining hall that depicted two slaves carrying bales of cotton on their heads. According to his remarks in the New Haven Independent, he acted on an impulse and climbed up with a broomstick to smash the panel. He was promptly arrested and has now resigned from his job; he says that Yale agreed not to press charges if he resigned.

Yale is keeping its part of the bargain, but that probably doesn’t matter to Menafee right now, because the state is doing what Yale refused to do. Despite Yale’s stance, Connecticut is charging Menafee with a felony and a misdemeanor, leading to a progressive outcry over the incident. Charging Menafee with a felony might seem harsh (convicted felons lose voting rights), but it is in compliance with the letter of the law: In Connecticut, first-degree criminal mischief, the felony with which Menafee is charged, involves property damage in excess of $1,500 (which, if you ask me, seems rather low for a felony charge, but the law is the law. The window he smashed was worth at least that much). Yale’s administration, ever the butt of criticism from student activists, does not support the criminal charges, is not seeking restitution, and seems content to sever ties with Menafee. Yale is also removing from the common room other stained-glass windows that depict scenes from the life of Calhoun.

None of that, of course, has stopped the usual brigade of progressive crusaders from defending Menafee, to the point of demanding that he be rehired by the university whose property he destroyed. “Thank you for taking down racist imagery,” read one sign hoisted by demonstrators outside the New Haven courthouse where Menafee appeared earlier today. According to another protester, Yale must also “stop exposing workers to racism,” whatever that means and however one might go about it. John Lugo, a frequent activist in New Haven, has said that Yale should rehire Menafee. In a statement reported in the New Haven Independent, Lugo asked, “What is more valuable to Yale: a stained glassed window of enslaved people picking cotton, or the humanity of the African American people who work at Yale?”

The war Israel fought in the summer of 2006 against Hezbollah was not the same as the war Israel fought against the PLO in 1982. The war of 2006 was not a Lebanese war. It was an Iranian war.

July 12, 2006 was the first day of what has become known as the Second Lebanon War. The name of the war, like most of the lessons taken from it, is off.

It was the first Iran war.

Hezbollah, acting as Iran’s foreign legion, initiated the war with a massive mortar and rocket assault on communities in northern Israel. Under mortar cover, a Hezbollah unit crossed the border and attacked an IDF convoy traveling close to Kibbutz Zarit.

Five soldiers were killed in the missile attack. Members of the Hezbollah squad stole the bodies of two of the dead, IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and spirited them to Lebanon.

A rescue mission to bring them back failed, after the tank, tasked with the job was hit by a land mine. Five more soldiers were killed.

Hezbollah’s assault was not the opening salvo of the war. That happened two and a half weeks earlier along the border with Gaza. The July 12 attack was a carbon copy of Hamas’s June 25 assault.

At dawn that day, Hamas forces opened a salvo of mortar fire on IDF positions along the border with Gaza. Under cover of the fire, a Hamas cell penetrated Israel through an underground tunnel. The terrorists attacked a tank, killing two soldiers and abducting IDF corporal Gilad Shalit.

Following the opening assault, Hamas maintained its mortar, missile and rocket offensive against Israel for weeks.

In 2006, Hamas acted as a wholly-owned and operated Iranian proxy. Iran began massively funding the Muslim Brotherhood group in 2005. Hamas operatives, like their Hezbollah counterparts and colleagues from the Muslim Brotherhood in Sinai, were brought to Iran for training. Iran smuggled massive quantities of weaponry to Gaza, through Egypt.

In other words, the misnamed Second Lebanon War was a two-front war. It was a coordinated assault on Israel by two Iranian controlled terror armies. They operated with a near identical doctrine and operations guide, albeit, with different capabilities.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8459/gangster-islam-europe “Gangster Islam,” a crime wave packing prisons and overtaking Europe, is a problem the mainstream media will not report. Ordinary Europeans — for fear of being called “racist” or even being imprisoned for “hate speech” — are afraid even to talk about it. Timon Dias, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, discusses the […]

“A former senior Israeli official,” Bloomberg reports, “said his country has conducted numerous drone attacks on militants in Sinai in recent years with Egypt’s blessing. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential military activity.”

“Militants in Sinai” refers primarily to ISIS, which has a branch there called Sinai Province. The Sinai Peninsula is a part of Egypt that Israel, after wresting it from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War, handed back as part of the 1981 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

In light of the fact that, since Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013, Israel and Egypt have maintained tight security cooperation, such Israeli drone strikes come as no surprise. ISIS in Sinai has mounted dozens of attacks on Egyptian security personnel there, and threatens Israel as well.

Sisi, who in 2013 overthrew Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, has also moved aggressively against a Brotherhood offshoot, Hamas, in Gaza—again with Israeli cooperation.

But with a visit to Israel this week by Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry, the Israeli-Egyptian relationship appears to have taken an important step beyond the security sphere. It was the first visit to Israel by an Egyptian foreign minister in nine years. By all accounts, Shoukry’s talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were held in a good atmosphere and went well.

Aside from discussing and further enhancing the security cooperation—which Israel’s deputy chief of staff told Bloomberg is at a “level…we’ve never experienced before”—what’s in it for the two sides?

For Netanyahu, it has to do with fending off initiatives, or possible initiatives, to tackle the Palestinian issue without Israel’s consent and with a likely pro-Palestinian bias.

One of those initiatives comes from France, which in June held an international conference on the Palestinian issue that Israel strongly opposed, and which neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives attended.

Considering France’s longstanding pro-Palestinian bias, and President François Hollande’s Socialist government’s electoral dependence on France’s Muslim population, Israel sees France’s involvement as unwelcome and likely to lead to pro-Palestinian resolutions, potentially in the UN Security Council, and pressure on Israel. CONTINUE AT SITE

While the Obama administration continues to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to direct American foreign policy and, therefore, to implement “strategies” that render America defenseless in the face of Jihad and stealth Jihad, there are some alternative strategies that have the potential to turn this catastrophic situation around completely in America’s favor.

Below are 9 concrete steps that, if implemented by a future American administration, would make a big difference in preserving our civilization and in defending Americans from terrorism:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.

The Obama administration continues to refuse to label our enemy and, therefore, it continues to enable our defeat in the terror war. It is urgent that we name our enemy (i.e. Islamic Jihad) and definitively identify what ideology inspires our enemy (i.e. Islamic law).

2. Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”

“Countering Violent Extremism” is the pathetic and destructive focus of the Obama administration in allegedly fighting the terror war. On the one hand, this “focus” is vague to the point of being meaningless and completely incapacitates us. On the other hand, this focus allows the administration to perpetuate the destructive fantasy that there are other types of “extremists” — who just happen to be the Left’s political opponents — that pose a great threat to the country.

For example, as Stephen Coughlin has revealed, the “violent extremists” the administration is clearly worried about are the “right-wing Islamophobes” whom the administration obviously considers to be the real threat to American security.

The “Countering Violent Extremism” is trash and needs to be thrown in the garbage.

3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.

The government needs to stop cooperating with, and listening to, Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA immediately. The Muslim Brotherhood document, the Explanatory Memorandum, has made it clear that the Brotherhood’s objective is to destroy our civilization from within by our own hands with the influence of these groups. Moreover, as Robert Spencer advises, there needs to be legislation that will bar all such groups and affiliated individuals from advising the government or receiving any grants from it.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Good progress on dry-AMD treatment trials. (TY Karen) Human trials of OpRegen from Israeli biotech Cell Cure (see here) at Hadassah Medical Center are proceeding well. This unique stem cell therapy aims to stop progression of the dry form of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) that leads to blindness.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/clinical-trial-for-blindness.html

Oral insulin to replace injections. Israeli TV news about the innovative treatment from Israel’s Oramed that will make life better for many of the 400 million people with diabetes.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214498#.V3uKKjUbNf4

When you cannot eat. Many sufferers from cancer, stroke, cerebral palsy and Parkinson’s cannot take food orally. Israel’s Fidmi Medical is developing an innovative enteral feeding device that is secure, reliable, painless and discreet. It is extremely unlikely to get clogged up or be dislodged by (potentially fatal) accident.
http://trendlines.com/portfolio/fidmi/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQz-HBmHrWE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo8dL-W05Xs

Studying cancer in space. (TY SDM) Israeli startup SpacePharma is working with Bioscience engineering faculty and students at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in a $1.75 million research project that will use research in space to find new cancer cures. They will launch a “lab-on-a-chip” with cancer cells inside in a micro satellite that will orbit the earth, studying how cancer cells behave in zero gravity and micro gravity environments.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/SUNY-Poly-Israeli-firm-to-study-cancer-in-space-8333922.php
http://www.space4p.com/?page_id=163

UK fellowship award for Israeli CF Professor. (TY Karen) The UK’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health has awarded an Honorary Fellowship to Professor. Eitan Kerem, head of the Division of Pediatrics at the Hadassah Medical Center and cystic fibrosis specialist. He was praised especially for his work training Palestinian Arab pediatricians in his cystic fibrosis clinic, and treating Palestinian Arab children.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/royal-college-of-pediatrics-award.html

Generals renowned for strategy and bravery in war often make very poor national leaders. I speak here not of tin pot dictators and “generalisimos” whose chests are festooned with medals and ribbons, but of Israeli generals. As Martin Sherman, Israel’s superb commentator, wrote in The Jerusalem Post over a year ago in “Goofy Generals Galore”: “Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise and ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have–almost invariably—been disastrously wrong.”

Moshe Dayan was commander of the Jerusalem front in Israel’s War of Independence and Chief of Staff during the 1956 Suez War. In 1967, while Minister of Defense, he became the symbol of the IDF. Probably the most famous photograph of the 1967 war, is that of Dayan praying at the just-liberated Western Wall. His downfall came when he was blamed for the intelligence failures prior to the 1973 war. Inexplicably in 1977 Menachem Begin restored him to public life by making him Foreign Minister. Dayan played a critical role in implementing the infamous Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. As lead negotiator, he held secret meetings with officials in India, Iran, England and Morocco and prodded a reluctant Begin to accept all Sadat’s demands. The resulting peace agreement gave Israel nothing but promises, which were flouted by Egypt before the ink was dry. In return Israel surrendered the entire Sinai and agreed to give ‘autonomy” to the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria. As Henry Kissinger later commented, “autonomy” was the embryo of partition and independence.

Yigal Allon was a respected general who served as Prime Minister for three weeks in 1969 when Levi Eshkol died suddenly. Shortly after the 1967 war his Allon Plan proposed the first post war surrender: it proposed partitioning the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, creating a Druze state in the Golan Heights, and returning most of the Sinai to Arab control. It was immediately rejected by King Hussein and ridiculed by the other Arab states, but it laid bare Israel’s willingness to divide the area, laying the ground for successive American sponsored “peace processes.”

The next general to become Prime Minister was Yitzhak Rabin who served twice, from 1974 to 1955 and again from July 1992 to November 1995 when he was assassinated. While during his first tenure he oversaw the hugely successful Entebbe rescue, during his second term he signed off on the Oslo agreement which was followed by a large and bloody siege of terrorism and continues to have catastrophic consequences for Israel. He shared a Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat for his disastrous actions.

Lt. General Ehud Barak is the most highly decorated soldier in Israel’s history and was Chief of Staff from 1991 to 1995. In 1999 he won against Netanyahu and became Israel’s tenth Prime Minister. He promptly resumed negotiations with the PLO and stated: “Every attempt to keep hold of the West Bank and Gaza leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”

This was mild compared to his recent statements. As David Hornik one of Israel’s best commentators points out: “In a speech on June 16, 2016 Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” threats to Israel, declaring “Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….”

Barak went on to give his own outrageous mis-characterization of the current situation:

“Only a blind person or a sheep, an ignoramus or someone jaded, can’t see the erosion of democracy and the ‘budding fascism.…’ If it looks like budding fascism, walks like budding fascism and quacks like budding fascism, that’s the situation…. In capitals around the world—in London and Washington, in Berlin and Paris, in Moscow and Beijing—no leader believes a word coming out of Netanyahu’s mouth or his government’s.”

Mr. Green is a professor at Rutgers Law School and the author of “Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age” (Harvard University Press, 2012).

For more than 20 years, I have taught college graduates, most in their mid-20s, the basics of criminal law and procedure. In all that time, at half a dozen law schools, I’ve had the daily opportunity to observe some of the miracles that modern technology has wrought in the legal academy: Computerized research. PowerPoint. No more handwritten blue books!

But now and then, carrying out my institutional duty to observe classes taught by younger colleagues, I move from the front of the classroom to the rear. What a revelation to see what the students are up to. While virtually all of them have open laptops and most are taking notes, many seem more intent on emailing and texting, posting on social media, reading news sites, shopping online, or looking at YouTube videos. I recently saw one student systematically checking out law-firm websites for summer-associate salaries. Another spent an entire class streaming an NHL hockey game.

If this is what the students are doing while I’m sitting behind them, observing the class, I can only imagine what they’re doing when I’m up front, lecturing.

Has the time come to ban laptops from my classes? The arguments for doing so seem pretty straightforward. As common sense suggests, and a March 2013 study by Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas J. Cepeda confirmed, students who are multitasking during class have less understanding and recall of what’s being discussed.

The study also found that “participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared with those who were not.” So the student with the game on his laptop is also making it harder for the student sitting behind him to focus.

My school has spent a fortune for classrooms with comfortable seating, quality lighting and good acoustics. Don’t we also owe students a physical environment in which they’re not bombarded with the laptop-generated equivalent of Times Square?

Even when multitasking is blocked, students who take notes on a computer tend to perform worse than students who take notes by hand, according to a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. They found that laptop users were basically creating a transcript of the lecture, while those taking notes by hand were synthesizing the information. This confirms my own experience when meeting with students who appear to have a nearly verbatim record of what I said in class but fail to grasp what I was trying to convey. It’s like making a cake recipe from scratch, measuring out all the ingredients perfectly, but forgetting to put the concoction in the oven. CONTINUE AT SITE

I have great respect for Fred Maroun, however, the UN Partition Plan of 1947 was the most egregious betrayal of the Jews. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 (with ten abstentions) to implement the new partition as Resolution 181. Absent in all the media hailing of the “compromise” was any mention that the Jews of Palestine had already relinquished 75 percent of the area promised in the Balfour Declaration. Media and diplomats alike would declare that the Jews were gaining 53% of “Palestine” when in fact they were left with roughly 12 percent. rsk
We Arabs managed our relationship with Israel atrociously, but the worst of all is the ongoing situation of the Palestinians. Our worst mistake was in not accepting the United Nations partition plan of 1947.

Perhaps one should not launch wars if one is not prepared for the results of possibly losing them.

The Jews are not keeping the Arabs in camps, we are.

Jordan integrated some refugees, but not all. We could have proven that we Arabs are a great and noble people, but instead we showed the world, as we continue to do, that our hatred towards each other and towards Jews is far greater than any concept of purported Arab solidarity.

This is part one of a two-part series. The second part will examine what we Arabs can do differently today.

In the current state of the relationship between the Arab world and Israel, we see a patchwork of hostility, tense peace, limited cooperation, calm, and violence. We Arabs managed our relationship with Israel atrociously, but the worst of all is the ongoing situation of the Palestinians.
The Original Mistake

Our first mistake lasted centuries, and occurred well before Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. It consisted of not recognizing Jews as equals.

As documented by a leading American scholar of Jewish history in the Muslim world, Mark R. Cohen, during that era, “Jews shared with other non-Muslims the status of dhimmis [non-Muslims who have to pay protection money and follow separate debasing laws to be tolerated in Muslim-controlled areas] … New houses of worship were not to be built and old ones could not be repaired. They were to act humbly in the presence of Muslims. In their liturgical practice they had to honor the preeminence of Islam. They were further required to differentiate themselves from Muslims by their clothing and by eschewing symbols of honor. Other restrictions excluded them from positions of authority in Muslim government”.