31 thoughts on “Jerusalem Terror Attack, Chickens Coming Home to Roost – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. wow, if Israel was smart? I mean a country on the forefront of science, technology, medicine, arts etc, but none of them are smart enough to know what Richard from Seattle knows. Amazing. Of course, that logic can be used in reverse. If the Palestinians and their Iranian backers would have stopped homicide bomb attacks, stopped firing thousands of rockets against our civilians INSIDE ISRAEL PROPER then Israel would not have to take all the measures not to turn into the Yazidis or Kurds. Then again, I’m not as smart as Richard

    1. Yo don’t appear to be smart at all, Ron, just another apologist for Israeli terrorism against an occupied people. It takes too much time to educate you here, so I won’t try, but you should, at least, check your stats about who starts these attacks, how many rockets, mortars, drones, F-16s, naval battle ships, tanks, and chemical weapons are used on the civilian population of Gaza and how many Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank in 2014. Stats are easy to find. Otherwise, you do sound pretty stupid

    2. Not just “Richard from Seattle” – Oh no.

      Israeli politicians, like most of their colleagues elsewhere, are not well versed in world history. They are party hacks who spend their lives in political intrigues.

      Unfortunately, all Israeli politicians, left and right, have joined the March of Fools. Not a single establishment voice has been raised against it. The new Labor Party leader, Yitzhak Herzog, is part of it as much as Ya’ir Lapid and Tzipi Livni.
      As they say in Yiddish: The fools would have been amusing, if they had not been our fools.”

      Uri Avnery

      “And facing them on the seas has been the Israeli ship of fools, floating but not knowing where or why. Why detain people? That’s how it is. Why a siege? That’s how it is. It’s like the Noam Chomsky affair all over again, but big time this time. Of course the peace flotilla will not bring peace, and it won’t even manage to reach the Gaza shore. The action plan has included dragging the ships to Ashdod port, but it has again dragged us to the shores of stupidity and wrongdoing. Again we will be portrayed not only as the ones that have blocked assistance, but also as fools who do everything to even further undermine our own standing. If that was one of the goals of the peace flotilla’s organizers, they won big yesterday.”

      Gideon Levy

      “They are not simply war criminals. They are fools”
      Sir Gerald Kaufmann MP
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGuYjt6CP8

      “Is Netanyahu certifiable

      The expanded and most explicit form of my headline question is this. Is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of sound mind and knowingly talking propaganda nonsense about threats to Israel’s security in order to fool the world including most of its Jews, or, is he unbalanced, mentally disturbed, even clinically insane? I ask because his rubbishing in Davos of the most important speech any Iranian leader has made since the revolution which brought the mullahs to power 35 years ago sent me to bed recalling something my father said to me when I was a very young boy. “There are none so blind as those who don’t want to see.””

      Alan Hart

      AND SO ON

    1. @ Fred: There is no direct evidence he’s connected to Hamas or that the group had anything to do with the terror attack. None. And till you offer any real proof of it don’t even think of going there.

      His brother was a Hamas commander assassinated by Israel. That’s circumstantial & indirect evidence, but not satisfactory for my purposes.

      Pay attention to the comment rules. Canada is OFF TOPIC.

  2. But they did! The Palestinians, despite being ethnically cleansed for over 60 years, did stop the rocket attacks prior to Operation Cast Lead, and Hamas did abide by subsequent ceasefires – they were broken almost every time by Israel. They did stop the suicide bombings. But the daily killing, maiming, arresting of Palestians goes on. Sure Israel is smart but it is also, in the words of its president, “a sick society”. And since 95% of Israeli Jews supported the recent carnage that applies to pretty well all of them. Israel has one intent for the Palestinians – to remove them. Zionists have said as much almost since the inception of the movement. How many Israeli civilians INSIDE OR OUTSIDE ISRAEL PROPER were killed in the latest Israeli attack (see – I can use caps too) – and how many Palestinian children? I’m afraid the rest of the world is tiring of this kind of sadistic behavior from Israel and this kind of hogwash from its hasbarists. You are yesterday’s message. If Israel is true to form it will react to this killing with more violence enacted on innocent Palestinians and lose yet more of its supporters in the West.

  3. Excellent article as usual, Richard, BUT I do take issue with your calling this a terrorist attack. It is certainly a murderous attack, but your words reaffirm the vile story book of the Apartheid State of Israel. Why not call the squatter attack on the two girls with the car ‘a terrorist attack.” Both are murderous attacks, one done deliberately by an illegal squatter and one done in retaliation by an occupied Palestinian. Both are horrible.

    1. @Greta

      “..one done deliberately by an illegal squatter ”

      Proof Greta.
      I defy you to prove the settler ran over girls deliberately.
      As for the Arab terrorist who plowed into the crowd in Jerusalem, the video speaks for itself.

      1. @ Fred: Palestinian eyewitnesses know & saw what happened. Israeli police will never find the murderers nor charge them. This is the impunity settlers enjoy in Israel. Get the police off their asses & we’ll know what happened.

    2. Richard, I find myself agreeing with many of your points.
      Rather than arguing the semantics of terrorism which is a charged term, I prefer to use the term “politically motivated violence”. A tribalist on either side will call the other side’s action terrorism no matter what.
      The points you make here only strengthen my previously stated view, that only an imposed solution from the outside has any chance of ending the cycle of violence. The Israelis must be forced to accepts 1967 (plus or minus) boundaries and the Palestinians must accept that right of return applies only to a Palestinian state.
      Both sides are simply incapable of making the required compromises on their own. Both sides wallow in their narratives of injustice, ideology and persecution, which will have to be dealt with as part of a general reconciliation process, parallel to political arrangements, but currently blocks all willingness to take risks or concessions.
      But your one sided proposal stating that Israel should just give in does nothing, because that will not happen for all the reasons I have mentioned. (Game theory, security dilemma etc) The Palestinians will not concede ROR either, unless the Arabs and Europeans force them to accept that a Palestinian State is their destination. If the UNSC would adopt the proposed demand on Israel, and in parallel state that the Palestinian refugee problem is to be solved in a Palestinian state, I think that the US and Europeans should support that.
      In the absence of an imposed solution such as above, there is nothing preventing an eventual devolution into a Syrian style civil war, unfortunately.

      1. @ Jeff: Right of Return is inviolable. Israel has agreed in the past to the return of 100,000 refugees. It will have to accept at least that many if not more to honor the principle. No one, not Europeans or anyone will persuade or force them to give it up.

        1. Do Jews and Israelis also have a right of return, in your view, to territories they were forced to leave? Or just Palestinians?

      2. @Jeff
        Just where do you imagine this “parallel Palestinian State” will materialize? Unless Israel is forced to obey international law and move back behind the 1947-48 partition boundaries there’s nothing left for a Palestinian state. That horse has left the stable. It’s one state already; all that’s needed is for Israel to stop the racism & violence and make it one secular democratic state with equality for all its citizens.

  4. Israelis generally say that Jews must be able to live anywhere in Eretz Israel (meaning the land of Mandatory Palestine, I suppose unless meaning a land still larger). “Free tio live anywhere” comes mighty close to saying “this land is our land” and comes close, also, to saying “we may evict anyone who lives there already, no matter how long and how legally they’ve lived there”.

    Now if a peace treaty were to be proposed for acceptance by the Israeli public, a treaty which would abandon all Israeli claim to the West Bank, then a lot of israelis would vote against it, saying stuff like “we’ve lived here all our lives and have a rights to continue to live here.” NB: The same thing could be said by Israelis living in the pre-1967 territory where they have lived for VERY FEW YEARS LONGER (1967-1948=19, 2014-1967=47, 2014-1948=66). BTW, not all parts of pre-1967 Israel are equally densely populated with Jews. Giving up a sparsely populated part of pre-67 Israel in order to retain a densely settleed part of WB such as a settlement blok would make sense. it would also show that there was no “magic” in Israel’s pre-67 borders which were always (as Israel always insisted) subject to negotiation.

  5. They shot the driver before an investigation could take place. It was not the police who shot him, it was the settlers. In video,(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzbjDwJ49lg) it shows the 21 year old putting his hands up saying it was an accident. He was seen from his doctor the day before and referred to see a Psychiatrist on Nov 9, due to the fact he reported being tortured and abused dramatically three times since his arrest in 2012. He was not trying to flee the scene but get out and see if people were OK according to non Zionist witnesses. Israeli media claims Hamas is praising what he did, again false, they actually said both driver and child are both victims.

    1. Abbie, I also am concerned that this is a traffic accident interpreted as a terrorist attack. There have been other cases of unarmed Arab drivers shot dead after traffic collisions, and it is not a good story.

      1. How can it be a traffic accident, he changed his wheels to the area which was filled with people, how can you explain that? It was also a mistake that he was previously arrested on security matters?
        Maybe the last two tractor terror attacks in Jerusalem which in one of them an Arab terrorist flipped a bus was a traffic accident too?
        Maybe Arab people just like to travel with explosives on their body and we shot them because we don’t understand their intentions?

        1. @ Tal M.: Maybe Operation Protective Edge was just one big accident too. All those helicopter gunships & F-16s were really in training exercises & not supposed to rain down real armed missiles. It was all simply a misunderstanding. Right?

  6. 1. To all of the “religious” tribalists out there (and I include secular humanism as a sort of religion as well, Mary): Your moralizing insistence on “righting” all past wrongs (each according to his view of justice) virtually guarantees the eternal continuation of the conflict, since it frames everything as a black and white zero sum game and demands complete capitulation of the other side. This of course will not happen. The Palestinians will not go away and the State of Israel will not voluntarily dissolve itself. Leftists can be extremists too, just as much as right wing nationalist wackos. Only compromise and reconciliation will allow us all to move forward.
    2. Richard: Regarding 100,000 refugees– the real question is if the PALESTINIANS agreed to it. If not, it is just a proposal, not an “agreement”. If they Pals agree to just 100,000, I’m all for it. I don’t know what the Palestinians actually agreed to with the secret Olmert-Livni talks. This is not just semantics. Why is it that whenever Israel proposes some sort of compromise, that the Israeli proposal then becomes an “agreement”, a concession to be pocketed as the starting position for the next round, when in fact the Palestinians have agreed to nothing?
    3. The elephant in the room, of course, is- is Israel like South Africa and will Israel dissolve itself as the apartheid government did. Aside the obvious difference that apartheid was based solely on race, whereas the Israel-Pal conflict is an ethnic-national conflict, it goes without saying that Israel which is the only Jewish state will not agree to dismantle itself, any more than we would expect any of the Muslim/Arab countries to do so.

    1. @ Jeff:

      Your moralizing insistence on “righting” all past wrongs (each according to his view of justice) virtually guarantees the eternal continuation of the conflict

      Doncha just love the moral temporizing of lib Zionists: you can’t get the whole loaf so just settle for half. It’s the best deal you’re gonna get. So just face facts & accept the inevitable. And if you left wing extremists don’t accept half a loaf it will be your fault when the bloodshed continues! That last statement is the killer for me.

      Israel is ransacking Palestine & massacring it’s inhabitants by the thousands, but somehow it’s not Israel’s fault, it’s my fault, your fault, you leftie moralizers! Excuse me for raining on this parade, but I know who’s really at fault. If you want to dwell in a world of fantasy and blame us for Israel’s evil deeds, you go right ahead. Don’t let me spoil things for you.

      It’s total delusion to claim Palestine winning its share of rights, as I’ve outlined here in the past, means Israel “dissolving itself.” This is patently dishonest & even histrionic on your part. These are Zio arguments as old as the hills and about as effective as patent medicine.

      Leftists can be extremists too, just as much as right wing nationalist wackos.

      THey sure can: look at all those leftists who vandalized cemeteries, houses of worship, military bases. Look at all the terror attacks, murders & shootings leftists perpetrated against their enemies. Dirty violent hateful leftists: we spit on them! Right?

      Only compromise and reconciliation will allow us all to move forward.

      There were probably even a few European liberals and maybe even a Jew or two who said the same of Hitler in 1932: we’re gonna have to deal with this guy. Let’s make the best of a bad situation. Let’s try to understand Hitler & his goals. Maybe we do business with him and mitigate the damage. Sorry, but there’s no dialogue with hate. No dialogue with settlerism. No dialogue with massacre and murder.

      Palestinians have paid a price you can only begin to imagine. You don’t get to tell them when to give up.

      I never said Palestinians should agree to 100,000. I said Israel had already agreed to that number twice before there was any serious negotiation. I think 400,000 is a reasonable number if there’s going to be a number. But again, it’s not up to me to decide. I’d like demographers & pollsters to do surveys of refugees and determine what they would really do if given a chance. That will give negotiators a much clearer idea of what choices they would make.

      The “secret” Olmert talks weren’t secret. It’s in the Palestine Papers published by AJ. Abbas had agreed to the return of 5,000 refugees. 5,000!! You wonder why Palestinians call Abbas a quisling?? No Palestinian would accept 5,000 except perhaps Abbas and Dahlan.

      Israel will not agree “to dismantle itself.” No one who is serious or reasonable is asking it to. But Israel will accept radical changes to its political & social system that will turn it into a real democracy. This will overthrow the theocratic monopoly & threaten the financial oligarchies unless they get on board. IT will turn Israel into a democracy, and a thriving multi-ethnic one at that.

      Or not. If not, the end will come for Israel and something much worse will take its place.

      I’m sick and tired of the “dismantle Israel” argument. Don’t make it or use it here again. We can argue about what Israel will become, but it’s a lie to use the terms you use & I object to it.

  7. Richard: “There were probably even a few European liberals and maybe even a Jew or two who said the same of Hitler in 1932…”
    So is that intended to compare Israel to the Nazis? I thought your comment rules banned that.
    If so I think that is the end of the discussion.
    Thank you and the best of luck with your project.

  8. Frans Timmermans, until recently Dutch Foreign Minister, has become the first Vice-President of the European Union. At the occasion of his departure, the octogenarian former Dutch Prime Minister, Dries van Agt ( who became a pro-Palestinian activist in his old age – unfortunately after his Prime Ministership) has written him an open letter. After congratulating him on his new appointment and complimenting him for some of the things he has done in office he took him to task for his policy on Israel, that, he said, would leave a stain on his record.

    There were high expectations among pro-Palestinian activists at Timmermans’ appointment to his previous post, that he would make a change to the traditional pro-Israel bias of the Dutch government. People were confident that his policy line would be notably different from that of his predecessor, Uri Rosenthal. Instead, as Van Agt pointed out, he came up with more of the same.

    The high expectations were based on Timmermans’ record as an ordinary parliamentarian when he was often quite critical of Israel and had castigated the government on more than one occasion for having done nothing about Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements. He then called the members of the Dutch cabinet “useful idiots for Netanyahu”. Well, once in office he did nothing about it either and in fact disavowed a foreign policy spokeswoman of his own party (Labor) when she insisted on making Dutch cooperation with Israel dependent on Israel stopping its grabbing of more Palestinian territory. Shortly after that shameful deed Timmermans flew to Israel to confirm with Netanyahu, in a more or less festive fashion, Dutch – Israeli cooperation.

    In addition, said Van Agt, quite a few reports have reached me that you stepped on the brake more than once in Brussels when other countries wanted to take firmer measures against Israel.

    Now, admittedly, Timmermans had also announced cooperation with the Palestinian authority but that was, said Van Ag, just to create the illusion of even handedness. In reality that amounted to very little.

    Yet it was Timmermans who used big words in Parliament when inaugurating his pro-Israel cooperation policy. He said about the then attempts of Kerry to get peace talks going: “If this process is in vain and fails, and if it can be pointed out who is responsible for it, the party concerned will regret it …Whoever drops this fragile porcelain will have to sit on the shards for years. It will also have consequences for relations between the Netherlands and Israel ..”

    Since then, of course, the porcelain has been dropped and the Americans have made clear who was responsible for that. Nevertheless Timmermans just continued with the same policy versus Israel and also didn’t honour his promise to evaluate his own policy in terms of its effect on Israeli policy within a year.

    Van Agt says he was, in fact, shocked about the eagerness with which Timmermans and the conservative PM, Rutte, emphasised during the attack on Gaza, Israel’s line that it had the “right to defend itself” and also echoed the Israeli propaganda that Hamas was firing rockets from “schools and hospitals”.

    He was equally shocked about the discrepancy between European policy towards Russia, and the speed with which sanctions against it were inaugurated after its occupation of the Crimea. and the foot dragging on sanctions against Israel that has occupied the West Bank for almost half a century. “The time is not ripe for sanctions” has echoed Timmermans. When will it be, asks Van Agt? When there are a million settlers? When Israel kills at the next attack five thousand Gazans?

    And there is more. Timmermans has insisted on making Palestinian attempts to join international treaties, namely the Statute of Rome, dependent on “successful” negotiations with Israel, giving that country in fact a veto on any such Palestinian move. The stick behind the door here is financial sanctions.

    It should be admitted, says Van Agt (who is a Christian Democrat himself), that your hands were tied to a certain extent because of the necessity for the Labor-party to cooperate with its bigger coalition party, the conservative liberals. Nevertheless you could have dome much more, in line with your earlier statements, than you actually did.

    Van Agt ends with the wish that Timmermans’ successor as Foreign Minister, Bert Koenders (Labor), who has also been critical of Israel as a parliamentarian, will have the vision and courage to conduct a fairer policy.

    It is tempting to “explain” Timmermans’ change of front in ad hominem terms. The least that can be said is that there was a test of character here that he has miserably failed.

    1. “The God of Israel is a jealous God”

      Van Agt is, also through his “Rights Forum”, very well informed about what is going on in terms of pro – and anti-Israel activities in the Netherlands. He opined in his “open letter to Timmermans” that the latter had been unfairly pro-Israel. But Israel wants, in the name of “old friendship”, absolute subjection to its policy re the settlements and from that point of view Timmermans was under suspicion. The Times of Israel wrote on the 15th Jan. of this year (the in-between headlines are mine):

      A pension giant withdraws its money:

      “An informed source says that over the past few months, the Dutch pension giant contacted Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot, First International Bank of Israel and Israel Discount Bank and informed each of them that in PGGM’s view their settlement-related connections pose a problem from the standpoint of international law.
      PGGM told the banks its stand was based on the advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2004, which held that settlements in occupied Palestinian territory violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention are illegal.
      Article 49 provides: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
      PGGM’s move, it now appears, comes in the wake of relentless pressure by several NGO’s that receive funding from the Dutch Government.”

      And so did a Dutch water company:

      In December 2013, Dutch water company Vitens cancelled a cooperation agreement with Mekorot, Israel’s water utility. This marked the second time in a month that a Dutch company had joined the BDS campaign against Israel. The Vitens decision came barely a month after the agreement with Mekorot had been signed and after a Dutch governmental delegation led by Lilianne Ploumen, Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation canceled a visit to Mekorot.

      …/

      And who is behind it, that dastardly Van Agt?

      Meanwhile, it has emerged that a key driving force behind the Vitens decision and the lobby for BDS in the Dutch parliament is a well-connected, pro-Palestinian NGO, The Rights Forum (TRF) led by former prime minister Andreas van Agt.
      Several other former senior ministers are on its board, including former Dutch Foreign Minister and EU commissioner Hans van den Broek who is said to have been the driving force behind the EU’s recently announced critical guidelines on Israeli settlements.

      And what is Timmermans doing about it?

      “It remains unclear what the role of Dutch FM Timmermans is in the escalating BDS campaign in The Netherlands against Israel. Formally, Timmermans denies all involvement in the campaign. He says he objects to sanctions and boycotts against Israel. But the Israeli government and Several Dutch MP’s, along with parts of the government of Israel, think this is not the entire truth.
      Last week, the Dutch ambassador was again summoned by the Israeli Foreign Ministry over the pro-boycott activities in The Netherlands. Israel’s Deputy Director General for European Affairs, Raphael Schutz, told the ambassador that the PGGM pension fund decision to divest from Israel is unacceptable and relies on false premises.
      Israel, he emphasized, “expects the Government of the Netherlands, in the spirit of the friendship between the two countries, to take an unequivocal stance against such steps, which only serve to damage the relations between Israel and the Netherlands”.
      Something similar happened in December 2013 when Israel first summoned Ambassador Veldkamp and protested against “ambiguous statements by the Dutch Foreign Ministry that created a pro-boycot atmosphere in The Netherlands” “.

      Timmermans is disloyal to Israel

      “Whatever the final analysis, it is absolutely clear that Timmermans holds a very different view on Israel’s presence in the West Bank compared with his predecessor, Uri Rosenthal. Rosenthal vehemently opposed boycotts against Israel and has said that they do not contribute to peace.
      Timmermans’ policy is to actively discourage Dutch companies from doing business with Israeli enterprises that are active beyond the so-called Green Line. He does not view the West Bank as a part of Israel and has defended the double standard in the EU’s treatment of Israel.”

  9. In my previous post all text under the in-between headlines is part of the Times of Israel article. I don’t know what happened to some of the quotation marks in the copying process

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