Next week's headline will almost certainly demand that Israel relinquish Jaffa Street to the Arabs.

The fact that so many terror attacks have occurred on this road, including exploding buses and concluding with today's bulldozer attack is proof that Israeli security forces are incapable of protecting citizens walking or driving on this street. The only possible solution for such a situation is to continue the same policies practiced by the past Israeli governments: If you cannot protect it, abandon it.

Following transfer of Jaffa Street Israel should seriously consider a package deal by which King George Street is also given to the Arabs. After all, who wants to occupy a road named after a British King, and besides which, it's impossible to drive on these roads - the traffic jams are terrible.

It's likely that Neturi Karta will demand equal rights, in which case most of Mea Shearim and Geula will go too.

In the end it's likely that Israel will keep only the Gilo neighborhood in Jerusalem in order to access the tunnel roads leading to Gush Etzion and Hebron. After all, the Jerusalemites will have to have a secure way to escape from the city.

Police confirm overly severe law enforcement against Jews in Hebron

This afternoon, at a meeting of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, the commander of the Hebron regional police force told the MKs that for years the Hebron police have practiced overly severe law enforcement against the city's Jewish residents.

He informed them that Hebron police formed special 'Israeli disturbance squads' to deal with any and all complaints against Jews, even the most minimal, on the level of 'special investigative squads' (Tzacham in Hebrew).

This is the first time that an official representative of the police has confirmed Hebron community complaints that the police practice 'selective law enforcement' in the city.

********************************

The Supreme Court: Continued tours by "Breaking the Silence" in Hebron will be 'conditional on restrained behavior on their part.'

Supreme Court judge Eliyakim Rubenstein yesterday accepted the Hebron Jewish Community's request to participate as a respondent to the petition filed by the extreme left-wing group "Breaking the Silence."

Following a violent demonstration in Hebron on April 25, the Hebron police forbade further tours by "Breaking the Silence' in the city. The group petitioned the Supreme Court, demanding to be allowed to continue 'educational tours' of Hebron. The state prosecutor's office reached an agreement with the police and the group, allowing limited tours in Hebron. The Hebron Jewish Community petitioned the Supreme Court, demanding to participate as a respondent to the left-wing group's petition, while also requesting that the court issue a temporary injunction disallowing implementation of the agreement until the petition was heard in court.

Judge Rubenstein pointed out in his decision that while the petitioners, "Breaking the Silence" claim to be "discharged soldiers who served in Hebron and are presently 'peace activists,' the Hebron Jewish Community, requesting to participate as a respondent, claims that the petitioners are 'provocateurs, whose goal is to incite the Arab population against the Jews, and not educational, as they claim.'

Judge Rubenstein decided not to issued a temporary injunction preventing an agreement reached between the state prosecutor's office and 'breaking the silence' despite the Hebron Jewish community's claim that 'already on 15.6.08 this agreement was violated by the petitioners when they arrived in Hebron without prior knowledge by the police for a tour in the area.' However, he declared that the actualization of the agreement would be conditional on restrained behaviour by the petitioners.

He also said that the Hebron Jewish community is not immune from displaying restraint.

In conclusion Judge Rubenstein set a hearing of petition for the end of October.

A quick note before Shabbat here in Hebron:

Again this morning, extreme leftists, led by Yehuda Shaul, founder of "Breaking the Silence," invaded Hebron. They were joined by a busload of Israelis and foreigners, armed with digital cameras, snapping away.

They were greeted by the exit from Kiryat Arba, where they tried to visit the grave of Baruch Goldstein. A few dozen residents from Hebron and Kiryat Arba refused to let them through, and eventually they returned to their bus, which wasn't able to move due to people blocking the way. Finally it traveled a few meters to the actual gate leading to Hebron, where again it got stuck for the previous reason.

After a while a deal was struck: they could come into Hebron but had to stay on the bus. When they arrived in Hebron though they stopped by Ma'arat HaMachpela and all left the bus, attempting to walk from there into the Jewish neighborhoods, in order to incite Arabs against the Hebron community, while slandering the city's residents. However, this too they were unable to accomplish, as dozens prevented them from any forward progress.

At last, at twelve o'clock, the police sent them off.

These people have been classified by the police as 'more dangerous the the extreme Israeli right' because they are trying to cause the fragile peace in Hebron to explode by provocations against Hebron's Jews, waiting for us to react. They also incite against the community, adding fuel the fire. However the Israeli Supreme Court, as they are wont to do, preferring 'human rights' to human lives, resulting in pressure from the court, forcing the police to lift a ban on the group and provide them with security whenever they arrive in Hebron.

Photos from today's adventures can be seen on the Hebron web site at:
http://www.hebron.com/english/gallery.php?id=254 (photo gallery)
or at:
http://www.hebron.com/english/gallery.php?id=254&thumbs=1 (photo page)

To be continued.....

Shabbat Shalom.

From: The Jewish Week


When Does Hebron’s Story Begin? by Jonathan Mark, Associate Editor
Critics start in 1967; Settlers start in1929 — or antiquity.

When does history begin?

When explaining black America, in the wake of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (March 30) looks to America’s “legacy of slavery, Tuskegee and Jim Crow,” context spanning 250 years.

But when it comes to Hebron, Kristof and B’Tselem — the Israeli human rights organization that Kristof relies on — history begins June 11, 1967, the seventh day of the Six-Day War, start of the occupation. That’s convenient, of course, because the story of Hebron — the world’s oldest Jewish city, according to the State of Israel — becomes too sympathetic if you start the day or the decades before that.

Kristof notes that Israel’s security “is nowhere more stifling than here in Hebron.” To protect

800 settlers, “the Israeli military has established a massive system of guard posts, checkpoints and road closures since 2001. More than 1,800 Palestinian shops have closed, in some cases the doors welded shut, and several thousand people have been driven from their homes.”

Not one word from Kristof or B’Tselem about Jewish buildings shuttered or Jews driven from their Hebron homes in 1929.

Kristof acknowledges, “The settlers see the issue very differently, emphasizing the continuing Palestinian attacks on them and noting that the security steps were put in place only in reaction to Palestinian terrorism during the second intifada a half-dozen years ago.”

And yet, Kristof writes, “In the Palestinian territories,” as if those territories are not disputed, “you see the worst side of Israel: Jewish settlers stealing land from Palestinians,” and also “the very best side of Israel. Israeli human rights groups,” such as B’Tselem that “relentlessly stand up for Palestinians ... the most persuasive indictments of Israeli actions come from Israelis themselves.”

Kristof hoped that when American candidates “compete this year to be ‘pro-Israeli,’ let’s hope that they clarify that the one they support is not the oppressor that lets settlers steal land and club women but the one that is a paragon of justice, decency, fairness — and peace.”

If Kristof can go back to slavery in the 1800s, well, Rivka Slonim, Chabad emissary at the University of Binghamton, tells The Jewish Week that Slonims were living in Hebron in 1845. At what point does a settlement graduate to the dignity of being a neighborhood? How about a settlement that was established before 23 states were admitted to the Union?

On Oct. 13, 1912, the Times reported that Jews “owned 40 villages” in what is now Israel, including 23 villages in what is now the West Bank. In Hebron, there were yeshivas, Hadassah Hospital and a Jewish branch of a London bank making loans to “agriculturalists and traders.”

On July 12, 1914, the Times reported that Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, made an official visit to Hebron “where a triumphal arch spanned the road and Jewish schoolchildren sang songs of welcome.” Special dispensation from the Ottoman Empire allowed Morgenthau to enter the Cave of the Patriarchs, the first Jew to do so in centuries.

On Dec. 8, 1917, when British troops captured Hebron, the Times headlined that Hebron was where King David had lived, with the article adding that this was David’s capital for seven years, facts about Hebron that are rarely if ever mentioned anymore, in a journalistic atmosphere that is more about delegitimizing Israel than explaining it.

If slavery was America’s “original sin,” the 1929 ethnic cleansing was Hebron’s. For three days, Aug. 26-28, the Times ran daily stories and sidebars about an Arab attack that started on Shabbat morning at Hebron’s Slabodka Rabbinical College, killing 30. The toll of the dead and wounded from further rampages neared 120.

Kristof complains about the IDF presence in 2008. In 1929, JTA reported, and the Times quoted, “casualties mounted high because of the lack of a Jewish ‘self-defense’ group.”
The Times added, “Moslem Arabs seem to take particular delight in destroying Jewish religious institutions.” In the house of “A.D. Slonim, manager of the local branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, where more than 50 took refuge, 18 were killed.... The barbarity of the attackers knew no bounds.” Women were raped; the dead were “mutilated.”

The Times reported that Hebron had to be “evacuated by the Jewish inhabitants.”
A few days later, a Jewish burial society returned to Hebron, protected by British troops, to literally pick up the pieces. They worked from dawn into “the glaring rays” of afternoon. According to the Times reporter, “the examination [of the dead] was plainly visible and was burned into the memories of the newspaper men.”

In 1980, after the Camp David Accords that would have restored Palestinian autonomy to the West Bank, a position rejected by Yasir Arafat, a 23-year-old yeshiva student was murdered by Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization for the crime of walking in Hebron.

Ten days later, David Shipler reported (Feb. 10, 1980), “Israel’s cabinet supported in principle today the position that Jews have the right to resettle in the heart of the occupied city of Hebron where the last Jewish community was destroyed by Arab rioting in 1929.”
Shipler wrote that 56 buildings in Hebron were still registered to their Jewish owners from 1929. Many of the Jewish homes in Hebron remained uninhabited, reports Shipler, “not only because they realized that sooner or later the Jews had a chance of returning, but also because they thought the houses were haunted by the ghosts of Jews killed in 1929.”

Not a word from Kristof about how the Hebron “settlement” came to be. Kristof speaks of “shuttered” Palestinian buildings but not buildings shuttered and haunted by Jewish “ghosts.” To Kristof, the children of these ghosts are “the worst of Israel.”

NGO Monitor, a Jewish group in Israel, charged that B’Tselem is known for appropriating “human rights rhetoric for partisan goals.” B’Tselem begins its version of history after the 1948 war. That’s convenient because Arab armies in 1948 prevented Jews from returning to Hebron, and also expelled Jews from Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter. According to B’Tselem’s Web site, the Jewish return to the Old City’s Jewish Quarter (site of the Western Wall) in 1967 constituted “land expropriation” from Palestinians, violating international law.

As NGO Monitor points out, “context is inconvenient for promoting B’Tselem’s political objectives, which would mean again removing the Jewish population from Hebron.” NGO Monitor also highlights B’Tselem’s frequent charge that Israel is “racist” and “apartheid” simply “trivializes legitimate Israeli anti-terror requirements,” implying that Israel’s concerns are motivated by ethnicity rather than terror dating back decades.

B’Tselem, founded in 1989 by Israeli academics, journalists, human rights activists and several Knesset members, is a recipient of the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize, established by President Jimmy Carter.

On its Web site, B’Tselem openly acknowledges that it is partisan. It monitors Palestinian violations but “as an Israeli organization ... the majority of [B’Tselem’s] efforts are directed at violations committed by our government on behalf of all of us. Juin, 2008

Komokarzy the First today blasted his way into the Israeli Knesicircus, taking center ring. It wasn't clear to the viewers if the visitor was appearing as a clown or a suicide bomber, and they had trouble deciding whether to laugh or cry.

Actually Komokarzy confided to the Prime Monster of the Knesicircus that he planned on requesting asylum during the show, due to the fact that some 5 million Islamic fanatics had overrun his country, and were now over 8% of the population. However the Prime Monster replied that the all the Israeli asylums were packed full of ex-politicians being tested for insanity pleas and there was no room for foreigners.

That was when Komokarzy the first decided to join the ranks of his fast-breeding newcomers to his country, and convert on the spot. Sticking out his tongue at the two Israeli Chief Rabbis and then opening his arms and bowing in the direction of his new found friends in the stinking bullpen, Kamokarzy smiled a wicked smile and proclaimed:

I will always be your friend. (One of the viewers in the Knesicircus whisperdly exclaimed: "Look, there in the mirror - you can see his other side - he has his fingers crossed!!!" He, he, he --- he doesn't mean it!! He's lying!! How can this be - the great Komokarzy the First is lying to us, in our own home, on our own turf, in the Knesicircus!!!"

Then, smiling only at the stinking bullpen, but frowning sternly at the others, he continued: For the sake of piece you must expel at least 300,000 Jews from their homes, and relocate them. NOW!
One of the Knescircus pawnamentarians piped up from the gallery, let's have a party transfer, ah, ah, no, that's transfer party, ah - as long as your country is becoming Muslim, you take our Arabs and you give us your Jews - and you'll be remembered ever after as the great piece maker - you'll even get the Nepal Prize - here, we can award you one now."

Komokarzy whipped out a smelly French kiss that had belonged to his wife and tossed it at the speaker who promptly shriveled up and melted from the odor.

After that, everyone kept their mouths shut.

The Komokarzy continued: you will build an Ark, load them up, and put them out to sea. There is no room for them here, but the ocean is very very large.

You will then imitate the way it was in the beginning of your peoplehood. I am going to reward you for your hard labor so many years ago. Then you were forced to build – today you will take vacation; no one will build. All building will stop, as of now

Then the water parted. Today it will not be the sea, rather the city will be divided. Almost as written in the Bible, with only slight variations. My word is as good as His.

Now you will vote on my piece plan: Mr. Prime Monster, how do you say?

“Yeah Yeah,” he replied. Yeah, yeah all the pawnamentarians yelled.

Komokarzy the First then looked towards his new found friends, sitting in the stinking bullpen, and waved with a victory salute.

To his great shock, he saw them ignite a small rocket, with the words Komokarzy the Second engraved on the side. The fired it in his direction and seconds later he was gone, a puff in the wind.

As his spirit drifted aimlessly above them, as if lost in space, he cried down to them: why, why?

Ignoring him, the bullpen players huddled to plan their next play, saying: a Komokarzy thought he’d get out of here alive? Guess we showed him a thing or two. Who’s next?