Jimmy Carter - The Prince of Peace?

I met former US president Jimmy Carter on June 14th and left the meeting profoundly unsettled.

It was a cordial meeting: Shaul Goldstein, the mayor of Gush Etzion had been approached by Carter's staff because in 30 years of peacemaking, Carter had not visited any settlements. I imagine Carter wanted to improve his tarnished image. There was seemingly a dialogue, and yet the meeting revealed the chasm between us. I suspect that the chasm has to do with divergent basic assumptions that are grounded in religious belief and are very rarely discussed. It is not so much the idea of peace that separated us at that meeting as the idea of grace, a Christian belief that as far as I know has no parallel in Jewish thought. Carter didn't talk about grace yet somehow I suspect that we can't understand him, a proud Christian Baptist, until we understand that idea.

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The Hundred Years War

For the first time in years, probably since Israel invited Yasser Arafat and his minions back into the West Bank in a march of folly that resulted in the death of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians including my 13-year-old son Koby Mandell, the sanctity of the "two states for two peoples" concept is being challenged. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu [Bibi] so far has refused to utter the phrase and his Likud backers are begging him to resist the temptation. Conjecture about his Bar Ilan University policy speech touted as a response to Obama's Cairo address centers almost completely on whether he will utter the two state formula.  

Not that anybody really thinks the idea is a good one.  

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The second-class fallen

Even the headline in the Jerusalem Post gets it wrong ... Remembrance Day to honor thousands of servicemen and servicewomen. Those who were killed in war.

But there is no mention of the thousands that have been murdered in terror attacks. Even though this day is officially for families like ours as well, the Post doesn't mention it.

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A hatchet job

I belong to an "elite" group of mothers of children who were bludgeoned to death by Palestinian terrorists.

Murdered cruelly, intentionally, and in cold blood. Murdered because they were innocent. Murdered because they were Jews. Targeted by cowardly terrorists because they were defenseless kids. My 13-year old-son Koby was beaten to death with stones.

Now the Nativ family from Bat Ayin has joined our group. Their 13-year-old son Shlomo was murdered last Thursday by a Palestinian terrorist wielding an ax. The family has a passport into the never-ending pain of losing a child.

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Understanding (not) the European mentality

Are you surprised by the Spanish judge who is opening a file against Israeli security personnel for killing a Hamas terrorist in 2002?

It's appalling. But let's face it. Europeans have a history of anti-Semitism, though there are exceptions. And these days, Europeans are fueled by their own postmodern ideology, unable to differentiate between moral and immoral behavior.

I experienced the shocking equivocation of good and evil in Spain many years ago. I had a German friend who looked up to the Palestinian cause. I didn't identify very much with Israel then, but as a Jew his animosity toward Israel hurt me. I couldn't understand it. And then something happened that gave me a window into this mentality.

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Fathers, sons and Gaza

Jerusalem Post reporter and columnist Herb Keinon recently wrote a moving article about his son's first tour of duty in a combat unit during wartime. He described the constant state of tension he lived under while his son was in danger. He worried each time the phone rang that it would announce that his son had been injured and dreaded even more an unexpected knock on the front door threatening something even worse.

I know that his description was accurate not because my soldier son was in danger, but because at least three times during the first day or two of the IDF's invasion of the Gaza strip a father with a son in Gaza described to me emotions similar to those described by Keinon. Once on a street in Jerusalem, once in a parking lot and once on the way to the synagogue a friend or acquaintance came over to me and out of the blue said something like the following:  "Ah. My son just went into Gaza. I'm really worried. Can't sleep at night. Can't get any work done that requires any concentration."

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The NY Times' moral repugnance

On December 13, Clark Hoyt, the NY Times public editor, wrote about the New York Times' reluctance to use the word terrorists to describe the perpetrators of the massacre in Mumbai.

He quotes a memo James Bennet wrote when he served as the NY Times Israeli bureau chief in the years 2001-2004 about the use of the word terrorist.

The memo said that he [James Bennet] settled on a rough rule: He would use the words, terrorists when they fit, to describe attacks within Israel's 1948 borders but not in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, which Israel and the Palestinians have been contending over since Israel took them in 1967. When a gunman infiltrated a settlement and killed a 5-year-old girl in her bed, Bennet did not call it terrorism. "All I could do was default to my first approach and describe the attack and the victims as vividly as I could."

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