The Ice Cream Straw Man Cometh

The bad news in Israel keeps piling up. Religious tensions, Iran’s nuclear program and regional instability are all worrying enough – but now Häagen-Dazs ice cream in Israel is under threat, and may become a rarity on supermarket shelves.

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I don't really care about the article. Sure, I like Haagen Dazs, but not enough to cough up a car payment for a pint. Besides, I like homemade much better.

It's the mindlessness and vitriol of the commenting on this article that is simply astounding.

There's the dairyman who can't tell the difference between milks. Here's a hint, dairyman: only kosher milks coagulate into cheese. Oh yeah, and exactly how cost-effective is it to raise pigs on a dairy farm? Or do you think they would do it just to piss off the Jews?

There's the people who criticize the Rabbinate for not commenting on the Beit Shemesh, who can't do a simple Google search to find their condemnations from rabbinical organizations all over the world, including the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. This article is about ice cream. Go bang that drum somewhere else. And what about the reprisal attack in Ashkelon by a group of Ethiopian men? Did he deserve to get pummeled any more than the girl deserved to be spit on? Where's your outrage now, you sanctimonious assholes!

Then there's the kosher tax people. Really, that's about as anti-Semitic a comment as anything written in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I'm sure companies with lawyers, financiers and accountants much smarter than all of you would have figured out long ago whether paying a "kosher tax" for 1/10 of 1% of the population of the planet was really worth the cost. Or do you really believe that the Evil Joooz control the world?

Organized kashruth is about maintaining standards, and if you want to continue eating Haagen Dazs based on the OU's hashgacha, go right ahead; no one is infringing on your right to keep your own kashruth standards. Go ahead and eat your ice cream after shtupping your neighbor's wife in the back seat of your car on a Friday night. Have fun. The Chief Rabbinate is simply not willing to extend its supervision to stores that stock an item that relies on a kulah when it doesn't have to. Hey here's a thought Haagen Dazs people: open up a manufacturing facility here in Israel! OMG! Revolutionary! I mean, only Ben & Jerry's and Nestle's thought of it first, but you could, like, lower your costs of shipping and make even more money!

Funny, when it comes to meat I don't hear anyone complaining that the Rabbinate is more meikil about nikkur than R. Feinstein was. Hypocrites.

Settler Violence

What an offensive and demeaning term. It's offensive when I read it from liberals, and it's worse when I read it being used by citizens of Yehuda and Shomron. A "settler" is at once both Israeli and Jew, and neither, spat from the lips of the menage-a-tois of leftist politico, academic and journalistic pseudo-cognoscenti. It is a depersonalizing and polarizing epithet used to brand a fictitious group of people that do not share a homogeneous political ideology, religious creed, ethnicity or social status, to round them up and condemn them in one neat little package.

Let me clue you in: there is no difference between a citizen living in Ariel or Ashkelon, Talpiot or Tel Aviv. I know "settlers" who are members of Knesset, doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, teachers, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and mechanics. Settlers who are charedi, chardal, and chiloni, frum from birth, baalei teshuva and converts. They are co-workers, friends, and relatives. And yes, they are leftists, centrists, and rightists. So the attempt to use the term to conjure up a single image of some uncouth religious zealot is a failure. You can stop now; you're only embarrassing yourselves.

It is disingenuous for the government to turn around and implement policies against the very same people they subsidized and offered incentives to develop their homes, businesses and land for thirty of the last forty years. To do so and then expect them not to react while their Arab neighbors act with impunity is just plain fucking stupid. After all, the people have been in these areas for forty years; the government has been in power less than four. The people will continue to be in these areas long after the government has changed hands.

Civil disobedience is not non-violent resistance (though the latter is a type of the former), but there is a significant difference between it and rioting. In the case of the people in last week's confrontation, the aim/goal/purpose was to establish a new residence; they did not go simply to confront the army. It wasn't a pretense to attack soldiers or vandalize the base. By contrast, the ongoing Bi'lin Riots goal is only to violently confront the police and army. There is no constructive purpose in their actions, or even pretense of purpose.

The physical confrontations we are now witnessing are the outgrowth of the frustration against a completely arbitrary and increasingly hostile military junta in Yehuda and Shomron, which is completely anachronistic in 2011. Post American Civil-War Reconstruction lasted only 12 years; why is it now forty years later and Israeli citizens are living under military rule of law?

It's not my place to condemn or condone violence; I cannot be blamed for the actions of others any more than others can be blamed for mine. But the continuous threats, renegations of promises, evictions and administrative detentions has escalated the brinkmanship between the government of Israel and its people to the point where the citizens are able to justify a more hostile responses against the agents of the Government because they feel increasingly like they are being backed into a corner. "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is not some great philosophical idea; it is just a line from a science fiction novel.

For years now I have come to expect nothing fair or balanced from the Mainstream Media. But the hypocrisy when journalists decry "settler violence" as a unique, somehow worse form of violence than the continuously unreported "leftist violence" against the IDF is physically nauseating, and smacks of incitement.

Hillary's Slip is Showing

We all know that it's common for diplomats and reports of governmental activities are generally referred to by their respective country's capital cities. The NY Times reported yesterday that Secretary of State Clinton said:

“The only way of getting a lasting solution is through direct negotiations between the parties, and the route to that lies in Jerusalem and Ramallah, not in New York.”

Well, now, isn't this something? There is a law on the books to move the embassy to Jerusalem, a purty new consulate building in not the Arab part of Jerusalem while the embassy is still in Tel Aviv, a case going to SCOTUS about listing 'Jerusalem, Israel' on US passports... how does she keep it all straight in her head?

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Having It Both Ways

We're all too familiar with the double standard the press revels in when it comes to Israel. No less familiar and no less significant is the license they take in accusing Israel of anything that suits their fancy and their narrative, without any adherence to fact, logic or even reason. Yesterday's Financial Times reported on the growth of the protest phenomenon in Israel. They note:

His coalition government is deeply dependent on the support of lawmakers from pro-settler and ultra-Orthodox parties. Discord on the streets is bad enough for the prime minister. Conflict and strife inside Mr Netanyahu’s unwieldy coalition may be even worse.

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While just the other week, Peace Now (of all places) reported, also on the protests:

“The protests in the streets are actually making [the coalition] more stable and the ones who could give Netanyahu problems are not interested in bringing down this government,” [Prof. Shmuel] Sandler told The Media Line. “Also, March is a long way off. Netanyahu will likely come to an arrangement with the settlers, maybe give them other land, and he’ll take it (Migron) down.”

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So it's an unwieldy but more stable coalition. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. Our protests don't involve tanks or riots, but the press doesn't feel the need to report on that, in light of what's going on in "civilized" countries like England or Syria.

Only in Israel.

It's Everyone Else's Fault

Just stumbled across this jewel of a rant from the Guardian. I have no expectations that opinion pieces should be any less biased than actual news articles, but it would be nice to cite at least one source, instance or even anecdote to prove your point. And then there are the dizzying inaccuracies. For instance:

Half of the Palestinian population at the time were displaced from their homes.

Where did you get that number? Oh wait:

As if the forced dispossession from 78% of their homeland was not enough,

So which is it, half, or 78%?

Another:

Israel had planned for that occupation long before the war.

Yes, we planned to be cut off from the Straits of Hormuz, then invaded by Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

This is my favorite:

Year after year the Palestinian leadership offered concession after concession, trying to reach an equitable resolution to their dispossession and military occupation.

Please, please give me one.single.instance of a concession. Arafat at Camp David with Barak? Anything?

Past procrastination has only created irreparable damage on the ground invoking a dire need for an end game, not yet another starting point.

I agree, but I'm not exactly in agreement with him, knowwhatimean?

Thus spake the prophet:

This new shift will see Palestinians dropping their desire for independent statehood in a fraction of their historic homeland and instead will find them, within a genuinely representative political structure, articulating their desire for self-determination within their historic homeland, even if that homeland today is called Israel.

In other words, law and order.

He softens the blow at the end, after ranting about Israel's colonial criminality:

Now, the sooner Palestinians and Israelis realise that our destiny is to live together as equals, the sooner we can begin to rehabilitate our communities and build a single society whose citizens are all equal under law and equal as human beings.

It is your desssssstiny...

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Ashkelon Under Attack

Hamas has carried out its threat to continue to attack Israelis with rockets and mortar shells, and shortly after midnight fired a Kassam missile that exploded in a southern Ashkelon industrial area near a large electric power plant that serves Gaza as well as southern Israel.

Terrorists also fired at least two mortar shells on farm areas in the Eshkol region. No injuries or damage was reported.

Remind me again which part of the "occupied territories" Ashkelon is in again?

Also, remind me which other country would tolerate this bullshit of indiscriminate rocket fire into their civilian population centers?

Is the excuse that their rockets suck and (almost) never hurt anyone or damage anything starting to ring a little hollow, or are we still waiting for them to get lucky and hit a gan or bus of old ladies before we really get mad?

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Now the Zionists are building Elevators!!!

This just in from the Palestinian Ministry of Outrage:

The Al Aqsa Foundation also claimed in a statement that the area in front of the wall could be used as a base from which to attack the mosque compound. Moreover, it said the project was intended to prevent Muslim worshipers from reaching the mosque, while increasing the presence of Jews in the area.

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When rabbis write books of Torah, they get called in and threatened with being charged with incitement. When the Al Aqsa Foundation a terrorism-sponsoring organization openly calls for protests (aka riots) against a handicapped-access elevator from the Jewish Quarter to the Kotel Plaza, not a single word is spoken.

Moral equivalence indeed.