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Gunman Kills 8 in Attack on School in Jerusalem
by Steven Erlanger and Isabel Kershner
A gunman entered a prominent Jewish seminary in the heart of Jerusalem on Thursday night, killing at least eight students and wounding at least nine others, three of them seriously, the Israeli police said. It was the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in nearly two years and the first attack inside Jerusalem in four. It occurred at the start of the Hebrew month in which the Purim holiday occurs, and many of the witnesses at first thought the gunfire was firecrackers in celebration at the 84-year-old institute, an ideological base for the settler movement. Only one gunman appeared to be involved. (New York Times)
The End of "Guilty Israeli"
by Yossi Klein Halevi
In  the early 1990s, while serving as a reservist soldier in Gaza, I became a guilty Israeli. My unit patrolled the refugee camps where sewage flowed in rivulets and old men stared with hatred and children with despair. Those were the years of the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising, and its great victory was the creation of a substantial bloc of guilt-ridden Israelis ready to take almost any risk for peace. Israelis felt so desperate to end the occupation that they withdrew their army and uprooted their settlements from Gaza in 2006. Gazans elected a government led by Hamas, whose theology calls for the destruction of Israel and war against Jews around the world, and whose terror attacks are small pre-enactments of its genocidal ambitions. The result of all this is that today the guilty Israeli has become nearly extinct. Just as we came to realize during the first intifada that the occupation was untenable, so we have now come to realize that peace is impossible with Palestinian leaders for whom reconciliation is a one-way process. (Los Angeles Times)
The Sderot Calculus
by Bret Stephens
The Israeli town of Sderot lies le ss than a mile from the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the intifada seven years ago, it has borne the brunt of some 2,500 Kassam rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian terrorists. It is no stretch to say that life in Sderot has become unendurable. Conditions in Gaza, in so far as they are shaped by Israel, are a function of conditions in Sderot. No Palestinian Kassams (or other forms of terrorism), no Israeli "siege" of Gaza. (Wall Street Journal)
Gaza vs. Annapolis
by David Makovsky
 The Hamas-sanctioned rockets and the Israeli retaliation are actually at the core of Secretary of State Rice's inability to move the peace process even one inch forward since it was launched in Annapolis last November. Stop the rockets, and the process could move. Now the idea of land for peace has been replaced by land for violence and vulnerability. And if Israelis do not like the book in Gaza, why would they want to see the movie in the West Bank, from where Kassam rockets could reach much of Israel?Until now, Rice believed Abbas could achieve the political reunification of Gaza and the West Bank. But things are not likely to get that far. Abbas cannot reach a deal because of the ongoing violence, and Israelis will see Gaza as a cautionary tale against any deal over the West Bank. The writer is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (International Herald Tribune)
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Israel Say Peace Talks to Continue
by Laurie Copans
I sraeli-Palestinian peace talks will proceed within days despite a shooting attack that killed eight students at a Jewish seminary, Israeli officials said Saturday. The comments came hours after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called for Israel not to abandon peace efforts after a recent escalation of violence. (AP/Washington Post)
It's the Middle East, Stupid
by Michael B. Oren
T he Middle East will continue to be the source of the gravest threats to U.S. security, whether in the long-term form of a nuclear-armedn Iran or the short-term one of an unforeseen multistate war. So the candidates must be pressed about how they would handle a chain reaction in which events in Gaza suddenly engulf the entire region. To borrow an old slogan: It's the Middle East, stupid. The Middle East is still bitterly divided -- not between Arab nationalism and conservatism but between religious moderation and the surge of Islamist extremism spurred, in part, by the 1967 Six-Day War. Backed by Syria and Iran, a phalanx of terrorist groups threatens Israeli and Arab societies alike. Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and is engaged again in peace talks with the Palestinians, but it is still an object of abomination for the overwhelming majority of Middle Easterners. (Washington Post)
The Way of Terror and the Response
by Alan Baker
Day after day we are treated to footage on our TV  screens of what we are told is a "cycle of violence." The equation, so glibly presented through the media, between pure, deliberate terror on the one hand, and the attempts to prevent it on the other, is misguided, misleading, and creates an utterly false and unfair equivalence. If there were no daily, deliberate rocket-fire against Israeli towns and villages; if the industry of importing missiles, weapons and ammunition from Egypt were to be stopped; if the ongoing and prevalent industry of terror-planning, rocket-building, ammunition-manufacturing, and jihadist religious incitement and glorification were to give way to normal industries and economic growth; if the psyche of hatred and terror that prevails over Gaza were to give way to a psyche of peaceful coexistence, then Israel would have neither justification nor need to respond to terror and to defend its citizens. The writer is Israel's Ambassador to Canada. (Toronto Star)
To the Westerner Who "Understands" the Terrorist
by Bradley Burston
To the Westerner who "understands" the terrorist: Spare us the explanations. Spare us the learned, sociology-drenched justifications. When a gunman opens fire on religious students hunched over books in a library, firing and firing until blood soaks holy book bindings and open pages of Talmud and the whole of the floor, pay close attention to the reactions of the self-styled people of faith who run Hamas. Open your eyes. The world has grown weary of the Islamist's creed, that only the armed struggle can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the only proper resolution is the end of Israel. Even the Israeli left, which for decades championed the Palestinian with courage and determination, has, in large part, had it with the Palestinians. The reason is terrorism. (Ha'aretz)
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