From Ian:
Europe would not last a week if it had to face what Israel does
Europe would not last a week if it had to face what Israel does
I was watching the videos from Ramallah and elsewhere of the Palestinian riots against the blessed American decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. All those Israeli policemen and soldiers engaged in dispelling the riots and violence without inflicting losses but managing to contain the damage.Phyllis Chesler: Are New Yorkers becoming like Israelis?
These young Israelis doing such a tragic job are the same age as I am, at night they return to their wives and children, mothers and fathers. They are not shaheeds, they care about human life, their own and the ones of the people they must confront in the streets. They are the face of a state dealing with this drama for the last 70 years.
Then I thought of all the blackmail, the attacks, the wars, the threats, the tension and the death drawings that the world prepares for the small Jewish state with whose disappearance it is obsessed. And I thought, looking and looking at those images, that no European country, not one, would survive a week of this instead of Israel.
Most of commentators today worry about the “consequences” of the just and historical American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. But if the fear of violence had dictated its actions, Israel would not have been born in 1948 and the Jews after Auschwitz would have been found in a deli of Brooklyn rather than on the beaches of Tel Aviv.
In its 70 years of existence, Israel has lost 23,447 soldiers and 2,495 civilians, it survived 12 wars and thousands of missiles, while coexisting with the specter of a chemical and nuclear war.
On 9/11, I typed, “Now, we are all Israelis.”History repeats itself as Lord Allenby captures Jerusalem’s Old City, again
At the time, what I meant was that Muslim terrorists had come after us in New York CIty in a rather big way, just as they’d been attacking Israelis decade after decade, even as the world yawned indifferently or cheered the terrorists on.
Now, what I mean is that terrorist attacks have been normalized in the West, even in New York City, which has seen one attack after the other, beginning with the political assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen radicalized in Pakistan, who was later involved in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
Let’s not forget that in 1994, Lebanese-born, Rashid Baz, shot at a van filled with Orthodox Jewish students, killing Ari Halberstam and wounding three children.
Who can forget the 1997 Brooklyn-based Palestinian bomb plot to blow up the New York subway trains—or the lone, Palestinian shooting attack on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.
One can write that Palestinian Arabs export terrorists—not just terrorist ideology.
For a couple of hours on Monday afternoon in Jerusalem’s Old City, there was partying like it was 1917.
World War I Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) soldiers, Turkish pashas, local religious leaders, ladies in long skirts and bonnets — and the legendary T.E. Lawrence — celebrated as they awaited the arrival of Field Marshall Edmund Allenby, commander of the British Army’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, to officially liberate Jerusalem from Ottoman rule.
A century after the Great War, these actors played the long-dead Allenby and other historical figures to the delight of the many hundreds gathered from around Israel and the world who were genuinely excited to join in the festive reenactment.
Exactly 100 years ago on December 11, 1917, General Allenby delivered the British Army’s Proclamation of Martial Law in Jerusalem in seven languages from the steps of the Tower of David.
For some, like eighth-generation Jerusalemite Shalom Bagad, showing up on Monday was coming full circle.
“My mother Shulamit was here exactly on this very date in 1917 to watch Allenby enter Jerusalem and give his proclamation,” Bagad said.




















