Hamas War

Saturday, August 5, 2006

A worried nation barely maintains an internal cease-fire

As my daughters and son-in-law and I were sitting down at Shabbat dinner without my wife, who is in America, we began to hear of men who received emergency call-up orders on Shabbat. I didn't believe the situation was so critical, and after Shabbat I saw that it actually wasn't. I think I would have advised someone receiving such an order to wait until after Shabbat. Last night after dinner I went to the Daf Yomi shiur (class on the daily page of Talmud), and in between the lines people were of course discussing the situation. Someone mentioned that he had been up north recently and he saw that life was actually pretty normal. Olmert has put his foot in it recently by announcing that after the war he will continue his policy of unilateral withdrawals. Although he made the statement for the benefit of the foreign press, the national-religious and right-wing public is pretty angry. Some people are not interested in getting their pink rear ends put in danger of getting shot off, only to have themselves at best or their widows and orphans at worst driven out of their homes afterward. Opposition Knesset member and former general Effie Eitam has been acting as unofficial liaison and internal peacemaker these days. IMHO that won't make him very popular with his core constituency after the fighting dies down. We all wonder why he is bothering to do Olmert any favors. See the Jerusalem post analysis here. Are we who live here in Judea and Samaria ever going to stop being the doormat for the left that hates us? Is Israel, looked at collectively in the world as the Jews in the Diaspora always were, ever going to stop being the same? The "enlightened" Israelis are looked at exactly as the same Jew-boys and get exactly the same treatment. Just like the what "enlightened" Jews got in Europe. And now Olmert is encouraging the Germans, of all people, to join the proposed international peacekeeping force. What rock did this guy crawl out from under, anyway?

No comments: