Much ado about Gilad
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics, War
The country is sort of going a little crazy right now amid the flurry of reports about the imminent release of Gilad Schalit, the IDF soldier who’s been held captive by a faction within Hamas since 2006.
Rumors and speculation abound that the release in exchange for 450 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails – some hardened terrorists with ‘blood on their hands’, a euphenism for being the masterminds or perpetrators of terror acts – is only days away.
While media reports along the same lines crop up every few weeks, this is the first time since the whole ordeal began that it seems like there’s a semblance of truth to what’s being reported. President Shimon Peres said in Cairo on Sunday that progress had been made, and on Monday, a Hamas delegation from Gaza arrived in Cairo to discuss and decide on whether to accept the latest prisoner list provided by Israel. At the same time, Schalit’s parents, Noam and Aviva went to the Knesset to lobby the support of ministers to approve the deal on the Israeli side.
While all Israelis want to see Schalit come home to his family, some are saying that the price of releasing terrorists is too high. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Monday to hold discussions in the Knesset and with the public on the terms of a deal for the release of Shalit.
Netanyahu told fellow Likud MKs that the difficulties in making the decision lay in the government’s different goals in the negotiations.
“On one hand, the desire to take care of our soldiers and bring them back, sometimes at the cost of endangering lives – a very big principle for our people and in the Jewish tradition,” he said. “And on the other hand: refraining from encouraging future abductions.”
Members of the National Union party held a press conference urging Netanyahu to reject the deal, warning that it would increase terrorist attacks on Israel.
While that could possibly be an outcome of the prisoner release, it will be difficult, if not impossible for the government to turn back the deal. Apropo to Brian’s touching post below, in a country in which most families have a daughter or son, father and mother who have served or are serving in the army, the national sentiment is top heavy toward bringing Schalit home at any price.
Most of us who may bear the brunt of freshly released terrorists within arms length are willing to take that chance for the opportunity to see Gilad Schalit hugging his parents.
Not just any third birthday
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Religion, War
One of the most quickly forgotten aspects following any terror attack is the survivors. We all mourn the victims, obsess about the perpetrators, and move on, as those left behind attempt to pick up the pieces of their lives.
Three-year-old Moishe Holzberg has proven to be the exception. A year ago, Moishe’s parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg, 29, and his wife Rivka, 28, were killed along with 170 other victims when Pakistani Islamic terrorists carried out a series of attacks in Mumbai in India. The Holzbergs, who had lived in Mumbai for six years as official emissaries of the Chabad movement were killed with seven other people at Chabad House.
The two-year-old life of Moishe was saved when he was spirited away from the attack by his Indian nanny Sandra Samuel. He’s been raised at Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv by his grandparents for the last year. And on Wednesday, the community hosted a memorial ceremony for the couple, which was attended by 2,000 people. During the event, Moishe celebrated his first haircut, a coming-of-age event for three-year-old boys, known as an “upshirin” in Yiddish or “chalaka” in Hebrew.
“Moshe may be without biological parents, but the entire Chabad family has adopted him,” the head of the Chabad Youth Organization in Israel, Rabbi Yosef Aharonov, told The Jerusalem Post which attended the event.
Across a blue-grey curtain on the wall of the womens’ section of the tent, dozens of blue and white balloons spelled out “Moishe, three years old.” Moishe himself was carried in by Sandra shortly before the beginning of the event, and stood before a gaggle of reporters and cameras, calmly, even lazily, taking in the spectacle.
Rabbi Holzberg’s father, Rabbi Nachman Holzberg, said that the outpouring of support for his family has been tremendous over the past year, and that Moishe was doing very well. Holzberg also expressed his hope that the tragedy “will only bring the entire world closer to redemption.”
Samuel, surrounded by a sea of reporters and swarmed by well-wishers from the moment she entered with Moishe, said that she was feeling a mix of emotions at the event, both great happiness that Moishe was doing well and sadness at the fact that his parents could not be with him.
Samuel said that “the baby is fine, he’s a normal kid, he plays, he jumps.”
With a mixture of sadness and joy, which, after all, is a regular recipe in Israel, the shortened lives of the Holzbergs and the hopefully long life of their son Moishe was celebrated in the only way Israeli know how – with all their hearts.
The week that was
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, War
The pace of news events developing and exploding into headlines is always seemingly propelled by steroids here in Israel. There’s never a minute to rest, and the news addiction that most of the public suffers from isn’t helped any by half hour radio bulletins, that annoying beep beep beep of the hourly news reports and nightly hour-long TV newscasts that are holy in some households.
But even veteran observers are hard pressed to remember a week of news events – aside from wars and intifadas – that rolled in like a tsunami, pushing the previous one off the front page with an ease that is creepy and disconcerting.
First up at the beginning of the week was the disclosure that police had arrested an American immigrant – Yaakov Teitel – a resident of a West Bank outpost on suspicion of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and carrying out a string of previously unsolved hate attacks against other targets, including planting a pipe bomb outside the home of prominent left-wing Israeli professor Zeev Sternhall which injured him, and sending a bomb package to a family of messianic Jews from Ariel, seriously wounding their 15-year-old son.
This was huge news and the media covered it from every angle, from settlements spawning extremism to questioning whether the Law of Return which enables all Jews to immigrate to Israel should be reconsidered, or at least more stringent.
But no sooner had we started to digest this horrific news, Israelis were presented with something even more uncomprehensible the next day. The police announced they had caught the suspect in the brutal murder of six members of a Russian immigrant family in Rishon Lezion last month. It was considered the worst murder case in Israel’s history, with many pundits speculating that it involved the Russian mafia and a hired killer.
However, police said that the suspect, Damian Karlik, 38, who was arrested with his wife, parents and two other female relatives, killed the Oshrenko family because he had been fired as a waiter a couple months earlier from the family’s restaurant.
Dmitry Oshrenko fired Karlik, who was headwaiter at the Oshrenkos’ high-end restaurant Premier, after accusing him of stealing a bottle of vodka. Karlik said he felt humiliated and began to nurture his hatred for his former boss. Expressing no remorse at the murders, which included two young children, Krilik allegedly bragged to the police that he was a “bad motherfu**er.”
Disoriented at the front pages of our newspapers being turned into True Crimes magazine, we felt things returning to ‘normal’ yesterday with the disclosure of a dramatic high seas capture by Israeli naval commandos off the coast of Cyprus of the “Francop”, an Antigua-flagged freighter packed with 3,000 Iranian rockets and shells headed for Hizbullah in Lebanon.
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If it had achieved reaching its destination, the shipment would have provided Hizbullah with almost the entire rocket arsenal they unleashed against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
Israeli sources say the shipment violates not only the UN Security Council resolutions from the 2006 war, but also those that forbid Iran from engaging in any arms exports. More importantly, it shows how Iran is attempting to incite the region, coming a day after Hamas in Gaza tested an Iranian-supplied rocket that has a range to reach Tel Aviv.
But hey, these are headlines that we’re familiar with -Iran, rockets, terror. However, by this morning, I found myself yearning for one of those days when the worst thing that could happen was The York Yankees winning the World Series, or narrow-minded citizens from my home state of Maine repealing same sex marriages. Both of those items are indeed reflections of a sorry state of affairs, but I’ll take them over the world gone crazy pace of news events we’ve had to put up with this week here in Israel.
Picture of the week: Finding friendship in the ruins of war
Israel is a country of contradictions. While the world outside sees the conflict in the clean crisp black and white of headlines, here in Israel we tend to see things in myriad shades of grey.
Take these two kids for example. Maria Aman (in the wheelchair) is a Palestinian girl from Gaza who was hit by an Israeli rocket during operation Cast Lead. Orel Ilizrov, is an Israeli child from Beersheva who was left with severe brain damage after he was hit by a grad missile fired from Gaza in the same conflict.
Against all the odds, they are best friends.
Maria was left paralyzed when her house suffered a direct hit. Four of her family were killed. Orel, an only child, is lucky to be alive. His mother threw herself on top of him in an attempt to protect him from the missile.
The children were hospitalized at the Alin Rehabilitative Center in Jerusalem and were given neighboring beds. Despite the traumas that both suffered, they ignored the conflict – as kids so rightly do – and formed a deep friendship based on everything they have in common, and not everything that keeps them apart.
Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90
Nice sentiments help Obama win the Nobel
I went away for a few days camping and came back to discover that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel peace prize. I was so surprised that I wondered briefly if while I’d been away I had got stuck in some kind of time warp, and a whole year had gone by.
And the prize goes to... President Obama meets Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in an effort to push forward peace. Photo by Avi Ohayon/GPO/Flash 90
It seemed a far more likely explanation than that the Nobel prize committee had actually decided to award a US president, in power for just a twinkle of the eye, with a peace prize for doing – nothing actually.
I’m a fan of Obama, and I admire what he stands for and the promise he holds. But that’s all we’ve got so far – just a promise, and a few statements about peace and goodwill to all men.
The peace committee said the prize was “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, while Time Magazine added that it was “primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament.” From where I sit, however, with Iran threatening to blow Israel off the planet and fast approaching the nuclear capacity to do just that, Obama’s sugary wish to disarm the world seems pretty frivolous.
I don’t often agree with Republicans, but Michael Steel, chairman of the Republican National Committee got it right when he said: “What has President Obama actually accomplished? It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who made real achievements working toward peace and human rights.”
Here in this region of the world, where conflict is in your face, and peace seems so elusive and unattainable, there are many people working on the frontlines of the peace movement who really do deserve a prize.
They face the conflict every single day, and still continue working for change, even at great cost to themselves.
What about Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish , the Palestinian doctor who lost his children in the bombing in Gaza, and still campaigns for peace? What about the founders of Parent’s Circle , an organization set up by Israelis and Palestinians who lost loved ones in the conflict but use their bereavement to fight ardently for peace, people like Robi Damelin, who wrote a public letter to Ynet warning of the terrible cost of the intifada as talk grows of the possibility of a new third intifada breaking out in Israel?
What about the dozens and dozens of peace organizations here where Jews and Arabs work side by side, bringing people together, and trying to create a different reality. Every one of us could cite an example. These people aren’t just making nice speeches about peace, they are actually out there making it.
If we are really lucky, in four years from now, Obama will actually deserve a Nobel peace prize, but as we all know, nice sentiments don’t always lead to action. In the meantime, couldn’t the Norwegians find someone who’s actually achieved something?
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