Israel said the attack was a “grave violation” of a truce in Gaza between Israel and the militant group Hamas.

Israel had been allowing more imports into Gaza since the truce was agreed, but officials said the crossings would now remain closed until further notice.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, said the closings violated the truce agreement.

Well, of course it violated the truce! But so did shooting rockets into Israel! Or did it?

The rocket attack on Sderot on Tuesday was carried out by Islamic Jihad, which said it was to avenge an Israeli raid in the West Bank, in which two died.

So it looks as if one Palestinian militant group committed an act of violence against Israel, in retaliation for which Israel punished the entirety of the Palestinian population in Gaza. So why doesn’t Hamas try to stop Islamic Jihad from committing these acts of violence?

Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya said the group remained committed to the six-day-old ceasefire with Israel and it had called on all Palestinian groups to respect it.

However, he said that Hamas would not act as Israel’s “police force” in confronting militants who breached the truce.

I’m confused. Complain about violation of the truce after Israel imposes collective punishment on Gaza, but don’t commit to holding up the other end of the truce by taking any concrete action to stop other groups from violating the truce? Hamas is using Islamic Jihad as a proxy to commit terrorism while appearing to keep their own hands clean. If Hamas won’t act as the “police force” in Gaza, but will blame Israel for violating the truce when it takes unilateral action, who will keep those other militant groups from committing terrorism and getting away with it? And how can Israel avoid the heavy-handed and inhumane response of shutting down the Gaza Strip entirely when something like this happens?

Ad matai? Will it never end?

So. When will Bush and McCain denounce Israel, just like Bush denounced Barack Obama—on the floor of the Knesset, no less—as an “appeaser” for declaring his intention to talk to America’s enemies? Israel is actually doing it. Where’s the condemnation?

Oh, right. Talking to and “appeasing” terrorists is okay when the American government or its allies does it, but when their political opponents even suggest it, they’re morally equivalent to Hitler.

Via TPM/Veracifier and Think Progress.

Israel at 60, Jews at ±3000

• Problems of every sort: demographic, political, religious, you name it. Can Israel continue to exist? Mayyybeee…
• Israel’s huge demographic problems are being compounded as the government sits on its hands with regards to the deepening Sudanese refugee crisis.
• News flash: Anti-Semitism still exists in Eastern Europe. (And the NY Times still reports on it in the “Art & Design” section.)

Saudi Arabia and mobile pornography

• Porn constitutes about 70% of all files exchanged between teenagers’ mobile phones in the sexually repressive Arab kingdom.
• To deal with the sexually repressive culture—and Bluetooth harassment by young men—Saudi girls have developed all kinds of strategies, such as cross-dressing. There is an interesting debate over whether or not reading a man’s Facebook page is tantamount to hearing his voice, since all you’re perceiving is his writing.

Other random stuff

• Jane Doe (i.e. anonymous) rape kits will soon be available on a national scale in the United States. It’s about fucking time.
• After all these years, there is still nothing business analysts love more than to predict doom and gloom for Apple.
• Summer music camps—of whatever musical persuasion—aren’t just for young people anymore.
• A NY Times columnist comes to the startling realization that young people hold huge political power.
• M.C. Escher drawings recreated in Lego.
• A book entitled Uncensored Amazon Kindle Buyer’s Guide: Know for Sure if the Amazon Kindle is Right for You is now available in Kindle format.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

The ruling by Judge Bar-Asher is a reasoned judgment, and it conforms with the logic on which the law is based. The judge refused to accede to the argument of the defendants that the law should be struck down because it violates their fundamental rights and is not in keeping with the values of the State of Israel. She did not accept their argument that the law represents religious coercion. The only thing she did was examine the definition of the “public” place in which the display of leaven is prohibited. She concluded that the interior of a business is not considered a public place according to the legal code, and therefore displaying chametz there does not violate the law, whose intent is not to offend the sensibilities of observers of Torah and mitzvot.

These people will in any case not enter a store or restaurant where nonkosher products are sold and served, and as such they will not be exposed to chametz and their sensibilities will not be offended. On the other hand, as long as there is no law prohibiting selling and serving leavened products to those who want them, why prohibit their display inside a place of business that is permitted to sell them?

The Israeli Haredi establishment won’t be satisfied until every square inch of Israel is a theocracy, and the men in black hats have all the power. Like Iran, but Jewish. People should have the right to buy, sell, and eat what they want during Passover. Just because some three-thousand-year-old law says you shouldn’t eat hametz, that means everybody in the country must be prohibited from it? Passover is about freedom. This includes the freedom not to give a damn about old laws and customs.

Many people know that on Passover, many Jews refrain from the eating of hametz, which is defined as food made from any or all of the “five grains”: wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt, in which fermentation has taken place by means of water for over eighteen minutes. If you bake whatever it is you’re making before eighteen minutes of hydration, it won’t rise but will turn into matzah instead. This (so goes the story) is in memory of when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, and had to leave in a great big hurry after all those ten plagues, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and various special effects.

Jews are also prohibited from “deriving any benefit” from hametz during Passover, so a legal expedient has been invented: you can sell your hametz to a non-Jew. Essentially, you sell all of your hametz for some trivial amount, like $1, and the sales contract includes a clause that makes the hametz automatically revert to you if the non-Jew doesn’t come up with the rest of the money for the full value of the hametz. Since the hametz presumably remains in your kitchen somewhere, the “wink wink” nature of this contract is clear: it is a legal fiction designed to allow Jews to get around the Torah laws. (This is nothing new, by the way. Two examples: (1) The eruv, a kind of “boundary” created around a large area like a city to “enclose” it and thus make it one “domain” for purposes of carrying things within it on the Sabbath. (2) The Prozbul, a legal fiction wherein a debt can be “transferred” to a rabbinical court so it cannot be defaulted on during a Sabbatical year.)

Anyway, I’m glad for the judicial ruling that recognizes that if people—Jews—want to sell and buy hametz during Passover, they have every right to do so. This is victory for rationality, consideration, and tolerance, and against caving to the Haredim and surrendering personal choice to the theocracy that some Jews are intent on creating in Israel. People have rights, including the right not to observe old (and frankly, quite silly) traditions.

Let Israeli Jews who don’t want to eat hametz on Passover do what we do in the Diaspora: get really jealous at everybody they know who does eat hametz, and then have a massive pizza-and-pasta party after eight days of self-affliction. And if they happen to walk by a store selling cookies, cakes, breads, what have you—they should give thanks that they live in a country that allows people to buy, sell, and eat what they want when they want.

• From Failed Messiah: Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel: Real Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t abuse children; child abuse is a problem only among ba’alei teshuvah (naturalized ultra-Orthodox Jews). Reason? Haredi children don’t call their teachers by their first names.
• From the Slog: University of Washington College Republicans are holding an odious and racist event on Tuesday: ‘Find an Illegal Immigrant Tag’. Stated purpose: ‘to send a a “clear statement that we need to get serious and crack down on illegal immigration and secure our borders.”’ Unstated purpose: to be huge white-privilege racist dicks.
• From The Province: A good summary of the problems surrounding this year’s Vaisakhi parade and festivities in Surrey, B.C. A what point does it stop being a family-friendly religious celebration and start being political, especially when you throw photographs of Sikh men who committed violent terrorist attacks against Indians in support of a Sikh homeland into the mix?
• Finally, from the Onion:
  
  

  

  Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook

  The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.

An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.

Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.

Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …

The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …

Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …

Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.

Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”

The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”

And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:

Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.

There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.

(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)

This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

Don’t get me wrong. Jews—and yes, I am one of them—worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book—a bad book, incidentally—comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book—about what they call “the Israel lobby”—many Jews react as if the sky is falling.

Essentially, what’s going on is a severe overreaction to any perceived threats against Israel. Israel is equated with the Jewish people both there and in the Diaspora. Never mind that the ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel, which have de facto control over the country’s civil life, hate—to the point of considering Not Jewish—liberal Jews, or even Orthodox Jews who don’t wear the right hat. (In case you missed it, Gershom Gorenberg had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine demonstrating the extent of this ultra-Orthodox control and craziness when it comes to ‘proving’ your Jewishness for the purpose of marriage in or immigration to Israel.) Back to Miller:

This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.

This point, unfortunately, is correct in its essence. However, as we’ve learned time and time again, nuance simply doesn’t sell. And if your message is at all nuanced—not 100% rah-rah Israel, all Arabs are terrorists, etc.—then you are, by definition, an enemy not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. How pathetic is the discourse, how sad is the conversation? There is neither discourse nor conversation, because the attitude is ‘us versus them’—nuance equals betrayal.

This is, naturally, completely against the spirit of the open and free exchange of ideas—something that needs to be protected legally if a democracy is to be a true democracy. Just think back to the controversy last year in which Bill O’Reilly appeared to hold the Daily Kos responsible for comments posted on its site, equating the Kos with Nazism because of things that were pulled from the comments section. It’s simply common sense that you can’t make this inference: if it were valid, you could prove that Bill O’Reilly supported death threats against Senator Hillary Clinton, for example. But it’s more than a matter of common sense: it must be enshrined in law that speech belongs to the speaker, and therefore only the speaker can be held responsible for it. Otherwise, calling it ‘free speech’ is a useless term at best and doublespeak at worst.

If this bill passes and becomes Israeli law, it should be reckoned as confirmation—for those who still need it—that the modern Israeli ‘democracy’ is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the assertion that Israel is a democracy is for the most part a myth peddled to Jews in the Diaspora for political and fundraising purposes. A democracy that inhibits its inhabitants’ free speech does not deserve to be called a democracy. We seem to hold other so-called enlightened Western countries—or at least aspiring enlightened Western countries to these standards. Israel must not be an exception.

[Hat-tip: Jerome, via Shmarya.]