A fence in Israel...

... between Jews...

From the Guardian:

" The Jerusalem city authority has erected a fence in a nursery school playground to separate ultra-orthodox Jewish children from a secular Jewish kindergarten that shares the same building and garden. The wire fence is to be covered with sheeting to block visibility from one part of the playground to the other. The nursery schools are in the Kiryat Yovel neighbourhood of Jerusalem, an area that has seen a growing ultra-orthodox population in recent years, to the dismay of many local secular Jews.

The secular kindergarten, Pashosh, opened in September with the aim of attracting more secular families to the area. But ultra-orthodox parents have complained that the female staff of Pashosh are immodestly dressed and that they do not want their children mixing with children from a non-religious background....

Pashosh has about 10 children aged under two. The ultra-orthodox nursery school has about 20 boys and 20 girls, in separate rooms with separate entrances, aged three to four. Staff at the ultra-orthodox kindergarten declined to speak to the Guardian.

One ultra-orthodox parent, picking up her daughter, said she was saddened by the fence but reluctantly accepted its necessity. "I don't want my children to see immodest women," said the mother...

The Jerusalem city authority declined to answer questions about the fence but issued a statement saying that "with the aim of meeting the needs of all of the neighbourhood's pupils, both secular and ultra-orthodox, the [municipality] decided to divide the existing building ... The fence will be built as part of a wider perspective that provides for the quite different needs of the community as a whole." "

How do you keep your community whole when one group of children are not allowed to be with another?

To be clear it's the ultra-orthodox parents who wanted this fence ... But if one Jewish community cannot stand for their children to look upon the wider Jewish community, and this is pandered to ... where to Israel from there?

What does that bode for future generations?

And what kind of statement does that make?

And the children shall leave them

Israel has decided to expel 400 native-born children of non-Jewish foreign workers to help safeguard the country's Jewish identity. They have to leave by the end of the month. Announcing the decision, Prime Minister Netanyahu said there were "Zionist considerations" and said it was about "ensuring the Jewish character of the state of Israel.''

The Israeli cabinet voted 13 to 10 in favour.

Industry Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer of the Labour Party said:
''This isn't the state of the Jews that I know, that expels children''

Rotem Ilan, chairman of Israeli Children, said:
"They are the children of people who came to Israel legally to work... We brought these people here to plough our fields, build our houses and take care of our grandparents... The obligation to act with kindness and compassion to foreigners is the most frequently repeated commandment in the Torah"

I guess Netanyahu and his fellow Right-wingers missed that part.

What is it with the Right that, which ever country they're in - mine included - they feel it's their patriotic duty to steal its soul and trash its reputation?

Just a comment on Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips is the author of 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power', yet another book that seeks to say there is something fundamentally wrong with the world and - you guessed it - it's all the fault of Obama, gay people (about whose rights she has used the word "toxic"), Muslims, the theory of evolution, and people concerned about climate change.

Yawning already?

Oh and all centres around the eternal plot to destroy Israel, naturally...

Political commentator Matthew Norman writes:

" On her Spectator-hosted blog, Melanie Phillips disabuses readers of the suspicion that she can be vulnerable to the lure of hysteria. Responding to Joe Biden’s criticism of Israel for building more homes in east Jerusalem, she disputes his assertion that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own.

“To put it another way,” she writes, nimbly twisting the VP’s point in vintage Mad Mel style, “why does Joe Biden think that Israel “deserves” to surrender? And why, once again, is a final solution being imposed by America on democratic and besieged Israel ? ?” Is it me being fanciful here, or might MM be using that “final solution” subtly to compare Barack Obama with Hitler ? a tactic previously reserved for the more ostentatiously in-bred extremity of the Tea Party spectrum? "

guffaw snort..

Now let's be clear... you cannot reasonably use the phrase "final solution" when talking about Israel and mean anything other than a direct comparison to Nazi evil.

Phillips is deliberately inferring Obama is a Nazi just as she explicitly says he's a revolutionary Marxist and secretly a Muslim.

Phillips... One more bigmouth who has decided HER heritage and HER faith are the gold standard by which everything can be measured for virtue and justice, and anything outside of that experience is to be despised or devalued. All the world must fight HER fight. All the world is topsy turvy and only SHE can explain it.

piss off Melanie

The Gaza flotilla

“A man of honour should never forget what he is because he sees what others are.”

- Baltasar Gracian

"Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. Without it Israel would not be able to survive a single day. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative — to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventive measure, not in self-defense, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters..."

- Amoz Oz, New York Times Op-Ed.

"The government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River... The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel's existence, security and national needs."

- Likud Policy Statement

Among the people killed on the Gaza Flotilla:

"The results (alleged by autopsy in Turkey) revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, also a US citizen, was shot five times from less than 45 centimetres away, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot in the back of the head or in the back."

Don't care? Well I do. Sorry.

"Two years after World War II, a rustbucket American steamship renamed Exodus 1947 sailed from France with 4515 Jews on board. Most were Holocaust survivors, bound for a new life in the Promised Land, then the British Mandate of Palestine.

The British refused to accept them as immigrants and stopped the ship off the Palestine coast. Three people were killed when the Royal Navy boarded it by force and sailed it to the port of Haifa. The Exodus 1947 Jews were eventually sent back to occupied Germany, of all places.

This was a priceless propaganda coup in the fight for an independent Jewish homeland. There was a tremendous international outcry. The novel Exodus, by Leon Uris, a bestseller based on the story of the ship... cemented the idea of Israel in the Western political and cultural imperative."

- Mike Carlton, The Age Opinion

"On me, on us, the young men of Israel, rests the duty of keeping our country safe. This is a heavy responsibility, which matures us early... I do not regret what I have done and what I'm about to do. I'm convinced that what I am doing is right. I believe in myself, in my country and in my future"

- Yonatan Netanyahu, Israeli commando killed in action, age 30, during the hostage-rescue mission Operation Entebbe in Uganda, 1976.
His younger brother is is the current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

For the record I (magpie) am pro-Israel, within the bounds of justice, decency and humanity. My view of the flotilla incident is not simple.

People who prefer simple views... should consider religion.

Addition:
For the first time ever, someone has suggested that I am anti-Semitic. Of course I reject that utterly.
I have criticized any number of things that any number of countries have done, yet it's not usually suggested that I'm racist for that.

"Excuse me, we need your identity to kill someone..."

How would you feel.... if you were innocently living your life and discovered that your identity had been stolen, used in the assassination of a senior leader of Hamas, and then your name and face sprayed all over the world as being connected?

Dubai police have released the names of the holders of 26 Western passports they say are suspects in the killing of Mahmud al-Mabhuh, electrocuted and suffocated, in a Dubai hotel room on January 20th.

Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan of the Dubai police stated he is “99, if not 100 per cent” sure that the Israeli eternal intelligence agency, the Mossad, was behind Mabhuh's death, and said there was evidence, including wiretaps, of their role. Israel has only said there is "no evidence" linking them to the killing.

I'm basically pro-Israel in as much as I recognize the country's right to exist, and defend itself within ethical limits.
That does not extend to potentially framing my countrymen for murder, or anyone else's for that matter.

The fake passports were British, Irish, French, German and those of two Australian men and one Australian woman.
Five very pissed off governments.

Australian foreign affairs minister Stephen Smith called in the Israeli ambassador this morning. He warned Israel that its relationship with Australia could be damaged if evidence is found it was involved in forging Australian passports.

Smith said "I've made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as the act of a friend".

Ronen Bergman, a security analyst writing for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper in Israel commented:

"Was Mabhuh worth this? It depends whom you ask. Most of the people involved agree that the enormous risk, whose full details will never be revealed, would have been justified only if he himself had been smuggling a nuclear warhead from Tehran to Gaza....Other than that, there is no terror activist who is worth it."

How about we ask the 26 passport holders if they think it was worth it?

Israel's cause supported by non-conservatives

Peter Costello, who might have been prime minister if he wasn't (he claims) short-changed by John Howard, commented in Israel that his support for that country was motivated in part "by the anti-Israel rhetoric of those on the left of politics".
The irony is he was standing next to the acting prime minister of Australia at the time of the Gaza incursion, Julia Gillard, who IS to the Left of him. Yet...

In front of an elite audience of Israeli politicians, academics and cultural figures at a dinner at the landmark King David Hotel, senior Israeli minister Isaac Herzog paid a warm tribute to Ms Gillard for her support for Israel during the Gaza conflict in January.
"You stood almost alone on the world stage in support of Israel's right to defend itself," enthused Mr Herzog, an act of courage he said would never be forgotten by the people of Israel.
Ms Gillard was Acting Prime Minister when Israel launched a three-week offensive against Hamas that resulted in the deaths of more than 1300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
At the time, Ms Gillard condemned Hamas for shelling southern Israel, but pointedly refused to criticise Israel's response, although she did urge it to be "very mindful" of civilian casualties.
Mr Herzog, a personal friend of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (also to the Left of Costello) and chairman of the Israel-Australia parliamentary association, also thanked federal parliamentarians for passing a motion last year in support of Israel's 60th anniversary.
(source: The Age Newspaper 24th June 2009, reported by Jason Koutsoukis in Jerusalem)

So where is the actual basis for Costello's comment? In myth and stereotype. In demonisation of anyone to the left of politics.
And yes some Israeli actions in the Gaza incident remain questionable, even if Gillard didn't say it.