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Who Is to Blame for Grief on a Beach?
by Charles Krauthammer
It was another one of those pictures that goes instantly around the world. A young Palestinian, wailing in wretched sorrow, grieving over her dead father, stepmother and five siblings who had been killed by an explosion on a Gaza beach. The sensational coverage and sensational charges raise the obvious question: Why would Israel deliberately shell a peaceful family on a beach? The obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel - and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath? Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians' classic and cowardly human-shield tactic - attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. (Washington Post)
With a Stamp of Approval
by Anne Bayefsky
 There is a much darker side to the UN-NGO nexus than the rise of these obvious interlopers in NGO circles. It is the large number of NGOs that have been empowered by UN accreditation to spread anti-Semitism and hate, and encourage terrorism from a UN platform. The call for boycotts and sanctions against Israel is a central plank of this campaign. (Jerusalem Post)
Chorus of Hypocrites
by Amnon Dankner
 Once, my lot was with those who thought that if we would only be nicer, show more goodwill, be more humane, and offer more concessions - everything would be just fine. But the lesson that we learned, and which cost us so much blood, is that this approach which thinks that if we just give peace a chance, it will crown us with garlands; if only we do not respond with force and do not stand up for our lives, a warm sun of marvelous tranquility will shine upon us - is so stupid in the perspective of what we have gone through, that the brain bubbles with astonishment at hearing such things. (Maariv)
Israel Does Not Need Palestinian Recognition
by Yehuda Avner
 Menachem Begin would, indeed, have had what to say to Ehud Olmert, were he around today. Never would he have put on the table a demand for recognition of Israel's right to exist as a quid pro quo for negotiation. On the first day of his premiership in 1977, Begin was asked by the BBC whether he looked forward to a time when the Palestinians would recognize Israel. "I don't need Palestinian recognition for my right to exist," he replied. Later that day he told the Knesset, "Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist?" (Jerusalem Post)
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Time to Hang Up My Track (II) Shoes
by Yossi Alpher
 Informal Israeli-Palestinian meetings, commonly known as "Track II," are in danger of becoming pathetic and pointless. Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections a few months ago, and since then I've become allergic to Track II meetings. They tend to be despairingly unproductive. The organizers want to talk about returning to a peace process. They approach the issues as if Hamas had never replaced Fatah in power; as if PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had the standing and authority to negotiate on behalf of a unified political entity; as if Abbas' positions on the key issues, like the "right of return" of the 1948 refugees, had suddenly become more flexible and acceptable to Israelis. The writer was a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. (Forward)
Choice Between Terror Prevention and Civilian Deaths
by Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff
The attempt to wage a political public relations battle to justify Israel's moves is doomed to failure. It appears that, in any case, the average observer in the West sees the post-disengagement conflict here as a bloodbath in which assassinations are indistinguishable from acts of revenge. Israel makes a distinction between its approach: we attack terrorists and, as an incidental result, Palestinian civilians occasionally get hurt, and the Palestinian terrorists' approach of targeting civilians. But this differentiation falls on apathetic ears. (Ha'aretz)
Jews Are Under Siege: A Call For Action
by Charles Jacobs and Seth A. Klarman
 In the West, "Palestinianism," the notion that an innocent, indigenous people suffers a senseless, cruel oppression by the Jews of Israel (who ought to know better), threatens to become the standard view. It is the basis for an attack by Western radicals on Zionism, Jewish national self-determination, and by extension on Jews everywhere. The "oppression" of an Arab people by Westerners is, for the far left, morally and politically more consequential than the massacres, enslavements, beheadings, bombings, and ethnic cleansings committed by Arabs and Muslims from London to Sudan, from Spain to Indonesia. Jacobs (pictured) is president and Klarman is chairman of The David Project. (New York Jewish Week)
Irresistible Impulse To Bash Israel
by Amnon Rubinstein
 It's Thursday (or Friday or any other day) and another boycott against Israel is being declared - by a union in Ontario, university teachers in Britain, and church organizations everywhere. Not a word about Iran, whose president denies the Holocaust but seeks to complete it by "erasing" Israel from the map; not a whisper about the genocide in Darfur; no mention of Tibet or of beheadings in front of cameras in Iraq - only one spot on earth deserves to be boycotted or divested by "progressive" bodies. (New York Sun)
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