Driving While Jewish

Netanyahu’s 44 seconds of silence at UN are being widely mocked — ‘pathetic,’ ‘creepy’ –

So says the notorious hate site Mondoweis. I won’t link but you can google it.

It’s funny about 44 seconds.  Lots of things can happen in 44 seconds –inevitable hatreds can rise, life altering events can all conspire to happen in a brief 44 second pause.

It can be a pause for emphasis in a speech by the Israeli Prime Minister at chastising the UN body for its “utter silence, deafening silence” when Jewish Israelis are threatened.

Photo: Haztola

Or it can be the time it takes Palestinian gunmen to murder 2 Jewish parents in their car - in front of their children. It is only a miracle that their children ages 9, 7, 4, and 4 months survived the attack.

Baruch dayan emet.

Since Abbas gave notice he was repudiating the Oslo Accords; does this mean we can move in now?

As per Mahmoud Abbas’ characterization of Palestinians and their culture of peace and coexistence, I thought it would be instructive to detail what the last 7 months looks like living beside a people who have a culture of peace since so many ‘peaceful incidents’ never make the international papers.  

The Israeli Shabak (internal security) or as it is known by its acronym (the Shin Bet) just happens to carries a monthly summary of all attacks.

January2015

 Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  0 attack from the Gaza Strip, (2 in December); 105 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (133 in December); 18 attacks in Jerusalem (26 in December); Green Line: 1 attack. 
Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in January 102 out of 123 were in the form of firebombs (December: 127 out of 159). 
 Distribution of attacks according to regions and pattern profile: 
Following is a distribution of attacks in January 2015 according to regions:
The Gaza Strip – 0 attack. 
Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 123 attacks: 17 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade); 3 small arms shooting; 1 stabbing attacks (in Jerusalem); 102 firebombs (17 in Jerusalem).
 The Green Line – 1 attack: stabbing (in Tel Aviv).

February2015

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  0 attack from the Gaza Strip, (as in January); 84 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (105 in January); 12 attacks in Jerusalem (18 in January).

Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in February 76 out of 96 were in the form of firebombs (January: 102 out of 123). 

Following is a distribution of attacks in February 2015 according to regions:

The Gaza Strip – 0 attack.

Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 96 attacks: 15 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade); 4 small arms shooting; 1 stabbing attacks (in Jerusalem); 76 firebombs (11 in Jerusalem).

March2015

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  0 attack from the Gaza Strip, (as in February); 58 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (84 in February); 31 attacks in Jerusalem (12 in February).
Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in February 78 out of 89 were in the form of firebombs (February: 76 out of 96). 
Following is a distribution of attacks in March 2015 according to regions:
The Gaza Strip – 0 attack.
 Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 89 attacks: 8 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade); 2 small arms shooting; 1 stabbing attack (in Jerusalem); 78 firebombs (30 in Jerusalem).  

April 2015

An Israeli civilian was killed and another seriously injured in a vehicle attack at Jerusalem's French Hill on 15 April. Eight members of the security forces were injured in several stabbings and vehicle attacks. Four police officers were injured (two moderately and the other two slightly) in a vehicle attack near A-Tor in Jerusalem on 25 April. Three IDF soldiers and a border police officer were injured in stabbings: one IDF soldier was slightly wounded at the Trans-Samaria Checkpoint on 2 April; two soldiers were injured (one seriously and the other slightly) at Sinjil Checkpoint near Ramallah on 8 April; and a border police officer was moderately injured near the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on 25 April.

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  1 attack from the Gaza Strip, (0 in March); 82 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (58 in March); 38 attacks in Jerusalem (31 in March).

 Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in February 108 out of 120 were in the form of firebombs (March: 78 out of 89). 

 The Gaza Strip – 1 attack: rocket launching.

 Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 120 attacks: 7 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade); 2 run-over (in Jerusalem); 2 stabbing; 108 firebombs (36 in Jerusalem).

Throughout April 2015 one rocket was launched** from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, while in March no rockets or mortar shells were launched from Gaza Strip or Sinai towards Israel.

  

May2015

9 Israeli citizens (6 civilians and 3 members of the security forces) were injured in terrorist attacks in May. 6 of them suffered injuries in vehicle attacks, and 3 were stabbed in Judea and Jerusalem.

Vehicle attacks: one police officer was slightly injured in Hebron on 9 May; 3 civilians were injured (one moderately and 2 slightly) at Alon Shvut Junction on 14 May; and 2 police officers were slightly injured in Abu Tor, Jerusalem on 20 May.

Stabbings: one civilian was slightly injured in Mishor Adumim on 11 May, and 2 civilians were slightly injured at Jerusalem's Damascus Gate on 24 May.

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  1 attack from the Gaza Strip, (as in April); 91 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (82 in April); 60 attacks in Jerusalem (38 in April).

Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in February 129 out of 151 were in the form of firebombs (April: 108 out of 120). 

 Distribution of attacks according to regions and pattern profile:

The Gaza Strip – 1 attack: rocket launching. 

Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 151 attacks: 2 run-over (1 in Jerusalem); 2 stabbing (1 in Jerusalem); 2 small arms shooting; 16 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade);  129 firebombs (58 in Jerusalem).

 High-trajectory launchings from Gaza Strip and Sinai

 Throughout May 2015 one rocket was launched** from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as in April.**Clarification: The number of launchings is the number of rockets/mortar shells actually launched during one high-trajectory fire attack. For example: one attack may include a salvo of three launchings, that is, three rockets/ mortar shells, and so it will be counted as one attack and three launchings.

June 2015

Two Israeli citizens were killed in shootings in Judea and Samaria: one near Dir Abzia on 19 June, and the other near Kida on 29 June.Eight Israelis (5 civilians and 3 members of the security forces) were injured in terrorist attacks in June. 4 civilians were wounded in the abovementioned lethal shootings (one on 19 June and 3 on 29 June). Two IDF soldiers were stabbed: one was critically wounded at Jerusalem's Damascus Gate on 21 June, and another was moderately injured at Rachel's Crossing checkpoint near Bethlehem on 29 June. A civilian and a police officer were injured by firebombs: one near Shuafat refugee camp on 13 June, and the other near Hizma on 21 June.

Data regarding terror attacks in June 2015

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  3 attack from the Gaza Strip, (1 in May); 69 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (91 in May); 51 attacks in Jerusalem (60 in May). 

Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in June 98 out of 120 were in the form of firebombs (May: 129 out of 151).   

Distribution of attacks according to regions and pattern profile:

 The Gaza Strip – 3 attacks: rocket launching.

 Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 120 attacks: 2 stabbing (1 in Jerusalem); 4 small arms shooting; 16 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade);  98 firebombs (50 in Jerusalem).

  High-trajectory launchings from Gaza Strip and Sinai

 Throughout June 2015 three rockets were launched** from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, compared to one rocket in May.

July 2015

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  1 attack from the Gaza Strip, (3 in June); 63 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (69 in June); 42 attacks in Jerusalem (51 in June); 1 attack from Sinai. 

Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in July 90 out of 105 were in the form of firebombs (June: 98 out of 120). 

 Distribution of attacks according to regions and pattern profile:

 The Gaza Strip – 1 attack: rockets launching.

 Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 105 attacks: 1 stabbing; 2 small arms shooting; 12 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade);  90 firebombs (50 in Jerusalem).

 Sinai – 1 attack: rockets launching.

 High-trajectory launchings from Gaza Strip and Sinai 

 August 2015

5 Israeli citizens were slightly injured in stabbings. One civilian and one member of the security forces were stabbed on Route 443 on 9 and 15 August, respectively. Two members of the security forces were stabbed in Samaria on 15 and 17 August, and another officer was stabbed at Jerusalem's Lions' Gate on 26 August.

Three soldiers were injured (two seriously and one slightly) in a vehicle attack near Sinjil, Ramallah on 6 August. Another soldier was moderately injured by a pipe bomb thrown at an IDF post in Beit Jala on 19 August.

One civilian was slightly injured by gunfire at a passing vehicle near Kedumim on 30 August. Two other civilians were moderately and slightly injured by a Molotov cocktail thrown at a vehicle near Beit Hanina, north of Jerusalem, on 3 August.

 Data regarding terror attacks in August 2015

Following is a regional distribution of attacks:  3 attack from the Gaza Strip, (1 in July); 117 attacks in the Judea and Samaria (63 in July); 51 attacks in Jerusalem (42 in July).

 Jerusalem and the Judea and Samaria area: Most attacks executed in August 136 out of 168 were in the form of firebombs (July: 90 out of 105). 

Distribution of attacks according to regions and pattern profile:

 The Gaza Strip – 3 attack: rockets launching.

 Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – 117 attacks:  5 stabbing; 1 vehicular run-over attack; 4 small arms shooting; 22 IED (including pipe bombs and improvised grenade);  136 firebombs (50 in Jerusalem).

High-trajectory launchings from Gaza Strip and Sinai

Throughout August 2015 3 rockets were launched** from the Gaza Strip towards Israel as opposed to July: 2 rockets one from the Gaza Strip and one from Sinai.

I would be remiss if I did not draw special attention to the July figures; 12 IED/Pipe Bomb attacks and 90 firebomb attacks. In the interest of ‘fairness’ there was 1 arson/ firebomb attack allegedly committed by unknown person(s) of Israelis.  Still, 90:1 is still quite a ratio of restraint.  Although, I am not sure how much peace the Israeli public can stand.

Lies, Stoners, and bombshells

The President for Life, Liar-in-Chief of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas addressed the United Nations today.  All week it was rumoured to be a ‘bombshell’ of a speech.  I was kind of holding out something like this -

"We, the Palestinian people living between the Mediterranian Sea and the Jordan River acknowledge the existence of a Jewish State and its historic right to live in peace on all of the land defined by the Palestinian Mandate. We abandon all claims to statehood, relinquish all rights of return, and join the ranks of our fellow Arabs who are already citizens of Israel and living under the full and equal protections of Israel's 1948 Declaration of Establishment.".

Instead, it went on like this and I quote just a small  part so you can get the flavour of it.

We do not respond to the Israeli occupation’s hatred and brutality with the same. Instead, we are working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence between our people and in our region, and we are anxious to realize it and to witness the day when all of the people in our region will enjoy peace, security, stability and prosperity. This cannot be achieved with the continuation of the occupation, settlement colonization, the wall, the burning of people, places of worship and homes, the killing youth, children and infants, the burning of crops, and the arrest and detention of people without charge or trial.

So I, the Filthy Footed Jew, would just like to point out in the last week.

Rocket attacks over Ashdod.

A Christian church is set on fire in Bethlehem, and the Palestinian Authority yawns as no Jews could be blamed. 

A Japanese tourist gets stoned by Palestinians in Hebron.

A taxi carrying tourists  to the Mount of Olives comes under rock attack by 11 year old Palestinian.  Police are apparently looking for his parents.

A 40 year old Polish tourist is raped  by six 12-14 year olds Palestinians.  The ‘youths’ kept pictures of her on their phones.  Who knows where their parents were...Now those were just the tourists.Death by stoning, and kicking Jewish babies in strollers is the latest past time for Palestinian ‘youths’...

  

And then then there are more traditional Palestinian pursuits.   The little boy is absolutely terrified and is screaming ‘Abba’...it’s probably just me, but I am taking a pass on the Palestinian version of the piece-ful co-existence thingy. 

Dear Beloved Tribe

Can we just stop now? 

If you need an Rabbinical authority to end it; why not accept the authority of the Rambam and Rabbi Yosef Caro?

Not only is it very pagan-lite, but it is conduct unbecoming a Jew.

We will never have sovereignty over our holiest of holies, as long as you continue to practice this ritual.  

Galut vs Jews

Ryan Bellarose, a writer at Israellycool, asks an interesting question in a post called ‘History Lesson’.

 I see these same problems now with young Jewish people in North America. Aside from a few, they have not been properly taught their own history, and they have been sold a false narrative. Instead of being proud at surviving almost ridiculous odds, and achieving something no other displaced indigenous people has ever accomplished, they feel shame at their people’s success. 

 How messed up is that? They come from a people who, today, number maybe 14 million worldwide, yet whose contributions to the world far outweigh their mere numbers, yet they feel ashamed? They come from a nation that survived two thousand years of exile, only to emerge triumphant to retake their ancestral lands from the hands of their colonizers. Yet they are made to feel like they have done something wrong and must apologize? No.

We need to ask: how did we allow the twisting of the quintessential bully story? 

To answer Ryan, one needs an understanding of Jewish history and the make-up of North American Jews.  North America is host to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. If we were to examine the Jewish community in North American, the largest single group of Jews is self-identified as ‘secular or culturally’ Jewish. The second largest group, after those self-identifying ‘secular’ Jews, comes from the ranks of ‘Reform Judaism’. I suspect the vast majority of those ‘secular’ Jews also draw their roots from the Reform movement, but I digress.

Reform Judaism was born in Germany in the 19^th century. I am not going to go over all the ins and outs of the Reform movement, since this history bores me senseless (and I would rather curl up with my bio of Rav Kook) but suffice to say that Reform Judaism rejected a number of core Jewish beliefs. Among those beliefs rejected by the early Reform movement was a belief in the coming messiah to redeem the Jewish people and re-establish our state in our ancestral homeland or the re-building of our Temple in Jerusalem. Reform Judaism rejected idea that any Jew was dwelling in exile. To Reform Jews, there simply was no Galut.  Jews were full citizens of those societies in which they were dwelling, and the only meaningful Jewish mission was to address universal issues of social justice faced by both Jews and non-Jews of those societies. 

It was imperative to the early Reform Jewish thinkers that Judaism became merely a religion, just like any other religion.Nazi Germany killed off most of the ‘Reform’ Jews of Europe, and after the Shoah, Reform Judaism ceased to be a significant religious stream of interest outside North America. The devastation laid to waste in the Shoah did cause a serious ‘rethink’ by Reform Jewish philosophers towards ‘Zionism’ (the movement for self-deter mination for the Jewish people) for a time, but the kind of ‘Zionism’ the North American Reform Jewish community was prepared to support could not have a religious nationalist component; hence, their contempt towards the Dati Leumi movement. Concepts based on ‘indigenous rights’ for the Jewish people in their historic homeland conflicted with the founding characteristics of Reform Judaism. 

This is why so many so-called progressive Jewish organizations like J Street, B'Tselem or Rabbis for Human Rights often appear to be so ‘anti-Jewish’ in nature and drawn the bulk of their Jewish membership from the Reform community. That is not to say, all Reform or Reform influenced Jews are ignorant of their history and/or refuse to recognize themselves as members of Kol Yisrael, but as North American Reform Judaism moves closer and closer to being a general religion based on humanitarian, rather than, Jewish values, well, they risk being our lost tribe rather than a members of our tribe. 

To complicate matters further, political progressive liberals, put enormous pressure on secular and reform Jews to actively disassociate and divorce themselves from the community of Kol Yisrael. Elliot Abrams touches on this in a recent article on this very theme highlighting the Obama Administration’s manufactured outrage over everything ‘Israeli’.

The third Obama administration reason for building up this crisis is also deadly serious: it is to use the current tension to harm Israel’s support in the United States permanently. All opinion polls in the last several years show a partisan edge in support: overall support for Israel is steady and high, but its composition is changing. More and more Republicans support Israel, and the gap between Democratic and Republican support levels is growing. President Obama acts as if he sees this as a terrific development, one that should be enlarged as much as possible before he leaves office. That way he would leave behind not just an Iran deal, but weakened support for Israel on Iran and everything else.  Support for Israel would become less of a bipartisan matter and more a divisive issue between the two parties. It is not hard to envision Obama in retirement joining Jimmy Carter as a frequent critic of Israel, pushing the Democratic party to move away from its decades of very strong support for the Jewish state.

Perhaps this manufactured crisis will diminish after Netanyahu’s speech, where he is likely to say things that many Democrats still agree with. Perhaps it will diminish if Iran rejects any deal, even on the terms the Obama administration is offering. Perhaps Netanyahu will lose his election and a new Labor Party-led government will appear in Jerusalem. But more likely, the remaining 23 months of the Obama administration will be months of continuing tension between Israel and the United States. That is because the administration desires that tension and views it as productive. The problem is not Netanyahu’s speech, which right or wrong to deliver should be a minor and passing factor in bilateral relations. The real issues are deeper and far more serious. This president has fostered a crisis in relations because it advances his own political and policy goals. That is what his subordinates and many Democrats in Congress are trying very hard, and with real success, to obfuscate.

Jewish history is long and diverse. We have seen this type of Jew before. They are not self-hating Jews, but Hellenistic Jews, robed in modern garb. To modern Hellenistic Jews, the greatest threat to their existence comes not from murderous intentions of  Anti-Semites and Assimilationists, but to the fidelity shown by the Jewish people to the covenant of our Torah in our land.