Israelis, Palestinians Put Less Faith in Bush

Despite continued efforts by U.S. President George W. Bush to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Bush's favorability rating among both groups fell from 2005 to 2007.

Israel, Syria, and Turkey in Talks

Israeli soldiers jailed for mooning Palestinians

Israeli soldiers jailed for mooning Palestinians

The Israeli army said on Sunday that it had suspended several soldiers after they were filmed exposing their bare buttocks to Palestinians in the south of the occupied West Bank.

"All personnel implicated in this unfortunate affair have been identified and immediately suspended from all professional activity," the army said, without specifying the number of servicemen concerned.

"This affair dates to a month ago and does not characterise the values taught to our soldiers," a statement said. "It will be settled today and the soldiers implicated will have to answer for their actions."

On Sunday the YNet news website posted a video, filmed and first distributed by a peace activist group last week, that shows two soldiers in full combat gear exposing their buttocks and a third flashing a victory sign with his fingers.

According to the activist, Israeli settlers regularly harrass the Palestinian shepherts when they take their flocks to water. "The settlers demanded that the shepherds evacuate the area, and IDF soldiers who arrived at the scene also attempted to clear the Palestinian shepherds from their grazing fields; then, in the middle of the argument and for no apparent reason, the soldiers pulled down their pants and exposed their rear ends to us."

The video was said to have been shot outside the southern city of Hebron, with the troops allegedly exposing themselves to Palestinian shepherds in order to try and make them leave an area near the flashpoint city.

"The soldiers frustrated with the failure of the Lebanon war could finally make a victory sign by showing their posteriors to unarmed Palestinians," Israeli Arab MP Ahmed Tibi told YNet in condemning the incident.

(With wire services)

This video is from AFP, broadcast February 4, 2008.

Suicide bomber strikes Israel

Suicide bomber strikes Israel

Suicide Attack in Southern Israel Kills 1 Israeli Woman, 2 Attackers

YANIV ZOHAR
AP News

A suicide bomber blew himself up Monday in the southern town that houses Israel's secretive nuclear reactor, killing an Israeli woman and wounding seven other people, Israeli officials said. Police said they killed a second attacker before he had a chance to detonate his explosives belt. It was the first suicide attack in Israel in a year, and officials were investigating whether the attackers came in through Egypt after Palestinian militants breached the Gaza-Egypt border last month. An offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement claimed responsibility, complicating recently renewed peace efforts. The attackers, they said, came from the West Bank, though the claim could not immediately be verified. Hours after the suicide bombing, Israeli aircraft struck a car in the northern Gaza Strip, killing a wanted man. Israeli government officials dismissed the notion that the heavily guarded Dimona nuclear reactor was the suicide attackers' target. The explosion took place in a shopping area about six miles from the reactor site. Ambulances and a large contingent of soldiers, rescue workers and police rushed to the scene of the bombing, the first in the working class town of 37,000. Police said one attacker managed to detonate his explosives belt, but the second was shot dead by police before he could set off his bomb. A police bomb squad went to the scene to defuse the explosives. Dr. Baruch Mandelzweig said he was at his nearby clinic when he heard the blast. He and his nurses rushed out to see what had happened, and saw body parts "strewn around everywhere." They spotted a critically wounded man and began to treat him before realizing he was the second attacker. "We saw an explosive belt," Mandelzweig said. "We ran away," and later we heard he had been shot, the doctor said. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said, "the terror organizations have shown again who they are and what they are." "Their goal was and continues to be to kill Israeli citizens in their homes and their schools and in their shopping centers," he added. "Israel will continue to fight against this murderous terror." At Sunday's Cabinet meeting, Israeli security chiefs warned that because of the anarchy on the Gaza-Egypt frontier, Palestinian militants might enter Israel through Gaza's Sinai desert to attack a civilian Israeli target, a government official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the Cabinet meeting was closed. Southern Israel has been on alert against militant attacks since the Gaza Strip's Islamic Hamas rulers breached the border with Egypt on Jan. 23. Egypt managed to reseal the border only on Sunday. The breach made Israel's Negev desert, where Dimona is located, more vulnerable to penetration by Palestinian militants who could enter through Egypt's porous border. Dimona is about 40 miles northeast of Egypt. The bombing came at a critical juncture. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators relaunched peace talks after a seven-year break just two months ago, and Israel has made it clear it won't implement any accord until militant groups in the West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza are disarmed. Abbas' office denounced the attack. It denied Al Aqsa was involved and linked the bombing to an Israeli raid in the West Bank that killed two Islamic Jihad militants before dawn Monday. The previous suicide bombing in Israel occurred Jan. 29, 2007, when a Palestinian attacker entered Israel from Egypt, killing three Israelis at a bakery in the southern Israeli city of Eilat. Dimona is home to Israel's nuclear research center, and it is widely believed that atomic weapons were developed at the plant. Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear arms.

Revising history

Revising history on June 5, 1967 By Jonathan Gurwitz

http://jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/gurwitz060507.php3

Scientists believe history began 13.7 billion years ago. Proprietors of the newly opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., believe history began 6,000 years ago. Apologists for Arab terrorism and tyranny believe history began a short 40 years ago.

That was when Israel, evading the noose being tightened around its neck by Soviet-supported Arab enemies, launched a pre-emptive attack on the military forces arrayed against it. In May 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had expelled U.N. peacekeeping forces from the Sinai Peninsula, sent 100,000 troops across the Suez Canal, remilitarized the border with Israel and blockaded the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping.

With diplomatic efforts to halt Nasser's march to war in tatters, Israel struck first on June 5. Like so many chauvinistic dictators who came before and after him, Nasser fabulously misrepresented the success of his military in the early stages of the conflict. Believing victory against the Zionist enemy was finally at hand, the Baathist leaders of Syria and King Hussein of Jordan blundered into battle on two more fronts.

After six days, it was over. Israel had once again inflicted a stinging defeat on Arab armies. Israeli forces controlled the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and the West Bank of the Jordan River. And for people of a certain persuasion, history began.

No one had ever heard of the "occupied" Gaza Strip or the "occupied" West Bank before June 10, 1967. Not because there hadn't been occupations in both places. Of course, Egypt had occupied Gaza and Jordan had occupied the West Bank since 1948. And if there had been any inclination on the part of the Arab world to create even the rudiments of a Palestinian state, it might have occurred at any time in the preceding 19 years.

But as with so much else, you have to ignore history — and the facts — to buy into the belief system that constitutes the mythology of anti-Zionism. Attributing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the Israeli occupation, pretending that no other occupation came before it, is far easier than explaining the unanimous Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan and the failure of Arab leaders to pay more than lip service to Palestinian statehood.

You simply can't reconcile the explicit repudiation of a two-state solution and the jubilant calls in 1947 — and again in the days leading up to the Six Day War in 1967 — for the annihilation of the Jews with any notion of Arabs and Jews living together in peace.

You can't claim Islamic extremism is a reaction to Israeli occupation if you know that the Muslim Brotherhood — the ideological grandfather of all jihadist groups — started in Egypt two decades before the founding of the modern state of Israel or that Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab made a pact with Muhammad ibn Saud two centuries earlier that entrenched a radical interpretation of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula.

And you can't possibly blame Israeli policies for fueling violence in the Middle East if you know about the dozens of regional conflicts that have inflicted tens of millions of casualties on the Muslim world and have nothing to do with Palestinian self-determination — in Algeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan; between Morocco and Algeria, Egypt and Libya, Libya and Chad, Syria and Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait, Iran and Iraq.

But a fair reading of history isn't kind to anti-Israeli fabulists. So to make the mythology believable by the gullible and the willfully ignorant, history must begin in 1967 and the Israeli occupation must be the root of all Middle East evil. But the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the tragic degeneration of Palestinian society that followed has rendered this fantasy ultimately obsolete.

For those of us who seek an honest reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians and peace between Jews and Arabs — and, not least, among Arabs and Muslims — hope must triumph over experience. That hope is predicated first and foremost on an honest reading of history, a mutual recognition of humanity and a calendar that begins before June 5, 1967.