Batya Medad made aliya from New York to Israel in 1970 and has been living in Shiloh since 1981. Recently she began organizing women's visits to Tel Shiloh for Psalms and prayers. (For more information, please email her.) Batya is a newspaper and magazine columnist, a veteran jblogger and recently stopped EFL teaching. She's also a wife, mother, grandmother, photographer and HolyLand hitchhiker, always seeing things from her own very unique perspective. For more of Batya's writings and photos, check out:
As the Holiday of Passover gets closer and closer, we must deal with our limitations versus cleaning up with the Cohen's, keeping up with what's really demanded by Jewish Law and our dream of an immaculately clean and chometz-less home. No doubt, I'll have to make do with bare minimum. I don't know when I'll be posting here again. You can read more of my writing on Shiloh Musings and me-ander. Stay healthy.
Just a few days ago, another earthquake shook up Japan. 7.1 is generally considered pretty serious, though it's small potatoes compared to the 9 plus of a few weeks ago. There's no real protection for this natural disasters. The much lauded and extremely expensive protective sea walls were easily toppled by the tsunami waves. And the high-tech protective measure didn't contain radiation at the nuclear power plants.
Many times I've said that "you can't be a little bit pregnant," and I guess I just have to say it again. The establishment of such a state would have its uncontrollable dynamic, like a tsunami. It doesn't matter what conditions Israel's Prime Minister insists on:
In a foreign policy speech Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted the principle of a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. However in his speech Netanyahu listed certain conditions that the Palestinians may have difficulty with.
Netanyahu laid out three conditions in his speech. First, the Palestinian State would have to be demilitarized. That is to say, Palestine would not have an army with which to threaten its neighbors. Second, the Palestinians and presumably the other Arab countries would not only have to recognize Israel as a country but Israel as a Jewish state. Finally, Palestinian refugees would have to be resettled outside Israel.