File under: Different jackal bites man

Three different people, all of them Israeli, have taken the trouble to point out that it was the Islamic Jihad that took responsibility for the recent rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. It is possible from reading the previous entry of this blog to mistakenly assume that it was Hamas that launched the rockets.  It was not, let that be clear.

It doesn't make the least bit of difference.

It is important not to fall for the trick that the fact that it was Islamic Jihad somehow absolves Hamas of culpability, it doesn't. Hamas rules Gaza, they are responsible for what happens there. There's a reason that Hamas hasn't held democratic elections in Gaza and it all goes to the same point. They rule by force and fear, and they simply did not exercise that force to cow Islamic Jihad into behaving like civilized human beings.

So the whole convoluted 'logic' of this situation is as follows:

1. Israel releases prisoners after reaching an agreement with Hamas;
2. The exchange strengthens Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad.
3. Islamic Jihad, feeling their masculinity threatened, come to the conclusion that they must do something to enhance their street cred; and what better way is there to show how courageous, valiant, gallant, and noble they are than to shoot rockets at civilians?
4. Hamas quite obviously doesn't feel obligated to prevent such attacks and pretty much allows Islamic Jihad to do as it pleases, as long as it's directed at Israelis.
5. Palestinians from Gaza shoot rockets at Israeli civilian populations resulting in dead, wounded, and quite a bit of damage.

Put another way, Islamic Jihad and Hamas are in a contest to see who has got the biggest... rocket launcher, and the way to keep score is by dead and wounded Israelis.

Mmmmh, that makes perfect sense, don't it?

File under: Jackal bites man

Over a thousand Palestinians convicted of terrorism were released just a few days ago in return for Gilad Shalit. Last night rockets were fired at Israeli population centers in the south of the country killing one and wounding several. (link)

There is a logical fallacy that goes by the Latin name of "cum hoc, ergo propter hoc." Or in simpler words, correlation does not imply causality.  This is all to say that I shouldn't jump to conclusions just because the attack on civilians in Israel closely followed the release of the Palestinian convicts. I really shouldn't, but it's hard not to.

One would think that releasing over one thousand prisoners would qualify in anyone's mind as a "confidence building gesture."  A gesture that maybe would inspire the Hamas leadership to seek some sort of understanding with Israel. Apparently not.

_____________________________________________________________________
In related news: the sun will set tonight in the west and rise tomorrow morning in the east.

What else does Gilad Shalit owe his country? Nothing, I thought. Shalit himself begs to differ.

I was going to pass on commenting on the release of Gilad Shalit from captivity. Quite frankly, it's been covered well, covered to death, and commented almost as much. Click here to read a really good piece by Bradley Burston on the strange pride we all felt around here on seeing Shalit returned, regardless of the enormous price we paid and the risks we're all taking even after paying it.  There are other pieces of course, there are even timelines with detailed explanations of what happened and where if you're really interested.  To all this river of comment I'd like to add my two cents worth.

Duty

What duty does a soldier owe his country after five years in captivity?  I asked myself this question fleetingly as we all waited for Gilad to make his way from the Gaza Strip to Egypt to Israel.  My answer of course was "none." If anything, we owe him.  Whatever duty he had to us he's paid in spades and then some. So I waited, together with millions of others, to see the pictures and the video of Gilad landing the Tel-Nof air force base where he was to meet his family.  The pictures were slow in coming. Obviously someone had given strict instructions to keep the flashes and the intrusiveness of the camera lens to a minimum around Gilad.  So the first pictures we saw were of a young man, pale and rail thin, dressed in his army uniform, carefully exiting a military transport.  Let me emphasize something that you might have missed just now:

Dressed in his army uniform.

Wow.

As it turns out, the people handling his return had the presence of mind to bring along uniforms (in the different sizes) for Gilad to wear. The important part was that they also brought civilian clothing and that the assumption was that Gilad would change into civvies before going home.  It was Gilad that asked for the uniform.  

The second image that so stuck in my mind was Gilad coming down from the helicopter to find the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and the Head of the General Staff of the State of Israel waiting for him.  And what does he do, this bespectacled slip of a man? After five years in captivity he stands ramrod straight and snaps a perfect salute to his commanding officers:

First Sergeant Gilad Shalit reporting for duty, sir.

It's not true that a picture is worth a thousand words, this one was worth only eight, but they're the right eight (and no, he didn't actually say the words, he didn't need to).

Keep this image in mind when you think next of devotion to duty, of courage, of presence of mind, of strength, of grace under pressure.  I'm not a soldier so I don't get to salute 1st Sergeant Shalit, but I can take my hat off to him.

File under: Man Bites Dog - Politician keeps his word.

Regular readers of this space must have by now sussed the fact that there is no love lost between Bibi and myself; not that he would know me from Adam's off ox if he met me on the street, but still.  As a rule, I find that Bibi is, in the words of The Economist, a "serial bungler."  That his government is based on cronyism and that his comb-over is frankly pathetic.  You know the old saw that goes "How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving."?  That's Binyamin Netanyahu for me.  Bibi is a brilliant, gifted communicator, this makes him the master of doublespeak.  "Two states for two peoples," he said not long ago.  Yeah, right.

And so, I find myself in the very awkward, very strange position of praising the man for keeping his word.  When hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the street to demonstrate for a better life I took a look at what Bibi was doing about it and concluded, repeatedly, that he didn't have a clue.

Apparently, so did he.

I say this because what Bibi did was outsource clue-getting to Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg.  Essentially, BN formed a committee (the preferred way for politicians to kill an issue) headed by Prof. Trajtenberg and gave them carte blanche to research the issues that came out of the protests and make any recommendations they saw fit.  He also kinda promised to adopt the recommendations.

And then a man bit a dog, or a politician kept his word. Quickly after the Trajtenberg Committee presented its report Bibi brought the matter before the whole government for its approval, and failed to get it. Undeterred, he engaged in the arm-twisting and politicking he is known for and brought it around for a second time and this time, managed to pass it.  Bibi? Really?

Wow.

On the face of it the main recommendations of the committee are not all that dramatic, but around here they amount to a sea change.  For example:

• Gradually open up all manner of protected markets to imports.
• Get more of the ultra-orthodox to work, mainly by diverting money from subsidized Torah study to more productive types of education.
• Slowing down, ever so slightly, the growth in the budget of the Defense Ministry.
• Increase participation of private firms in public transportation and diminishing the influence of traditional monopolies.
• Actual implementation of the Compulsory Education Law of 1984 that mandates free education for all from the age of three.

There's more but you get the idea.  Not bad I must say.  I don't agree with all of it and I don't think that this will be enough, but it's a good start certainly.

However, I find that I must steal a line from Aladdin, "now for the caveats, provisos, and quid-pro-quos."

1. Manuel Trajtenberg is a  clever man. He knew going in that any recommendations too much at variance with the current government's policies would be ignored, so none do.  We're getting "social justice" that can pass through the Bibi-filter.  Could be worse.
2. It ain't over til it's over. (link) The usual predators in the Knesset are already salivating over how much they'll get in return for allowing the government resolution to be turned into law.  How much they'll water down the better provisions, how they'll insert extraneous garbage to benefit their little band of supporters, etc.  Par for the course, but that is exactly the type of behavior that sparked the demonstrations in the first place.
3. Bibi might just be Bibi.  It might very well be that all this is a complex and sophisticated exercise to convince rubes like me that Bibi listens and wants what we want, and doing nothing.

Praising Bibi.  Whew, that was hard! I'll have to remember not to make a habit out of it.

This is getting to be a habit

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof. Daniel Schechtman of the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology.  Heartfelt congratulations go to Prof. Schechtman on this marvelous achievement. (link)  As I understand it, his discovery and understanding of quasicrystals changed the way we understand matter and made possible all sorts of useful applications including really good razors.  So, from myself and on behalf of the men and women around the world that shave with a razor let me just say, "Thanks, Prof!"

It seems to be that since the early 2000s (naughties?) some Israel-based academic wins a Nobel prize every couple of years.  Far from diminishing their accomplishments, this happy fact makes all of them shine all the brighter and if some of that shine should rub off on us ordinary folk, then all's for the best.  Winning once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence.  More than that and you begin to feel that there might be something there.  What a great piece of news.

                                                                                                                                                                   

On related news: the sun will set tonight in the west and rise in the east tomorrow morning and summer ended on September 23rd. 

File under: Man Bites Dog. Numskull CEO loses her job.

Remember the 450,000 I wrote about a couple of weeks ago?  I neglected to mention that what started the whole social protest thing was a consumer revolt against the high price of dairy products as symbolized by the small fortunes that families everywhere had to shell out for a small tub of cottage cheese.

In most of the world cottage cheese is nothing special.  Something that gets eaten once in a while, a staple of athletes and those that still harbor the delusion that dieting will make them thinner.  In Israel though cottage cheese is big business.  It is widely consumed and its price over the last few years simply sky rocketed.  And so, at some point early this summer people simply decided to boycott the cheese.  

The rest of that story is easily told: Consumer boycott - cheese companies ignore it - boycott grows bigger - cheese companies act even more arrogantly - boycott reaches crazy big proportions - cheese companies suddenly realize that maybe, just maybe, they should be paying attention - boycott becomes a total blackout on cottage cheese purchases - everyone involved in the production of cottage cheese blames someone else for the high prices.  And then everyone involved in the cottage cheese industry gets hammered to a pulp by the angry public, supermarkets are avoided, the cash cow of cottage cheese suddenly runs dry, PANIC, recriminations, special offers on cottage cheese.  Yada, yada, nada.

And in the middle of all of this is the Tnuva Dairy Company.  Originally a farmers' cooperative it grew and metastasized over the decades into a too-large, too-similar-to-a-monopoly company owned by foreign investors that recognized a good deal some time ago and bought it. To say that Tnuva and its head, Zehavit Cohen, acted arrogantly during the whole deal would be like saying the moon is made of cheese (of course the moon is not made of cheese, if it were Tnuva would have mined it by now).  Really, it would be difficult to convey how aloof, how disconnected, how creepy this numskull acted through this whole thing.  Think "let them eat (cheese) cake" and then multiply it by the number of udders in a rather large herd of cattle and you'll get some idea of how bad it was.  

So anyway, this morning the papers reported that Ms Cohen quit her job at Tnuva.  She's got other jobs at the investment firm that owns Tnuva, so don't feel too bad for her.  Still, she's out and that certainly counts as a victory.


(Note: Numskull blogger got Ms Cohen's name wrong in the original posting and corrected it.  Apologies to Ms Cohen for getting her name wrong in the first place.)