I Came to Israel and Saw a Great but Ungrateful Country

Giulio Meotti

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He has just prblished a book about the Vatican and Israel titled "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.

I was just in Israel for a week and travelled all over: Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, Hevron, Samaria, Jerusalem, Haifa, the Carmel...

I hadn't been there for three years and was pleased to see that the country is in a great state: you see large and young families, start up companies, foreign investors, overbooked hotels, traffic jams, religious devotion, new buildings everywhere. 

A country that began with 600.000 people and is now more than 7 million strong. 

I went to see the Har Nof synagogue where four rabbis were massacred by terrorists last week. It was full of people even in the middle of the night. It means the Jews are winning. 

Tel Aviv is like Manhattan, a kind of secluded peninsula which sucks the entire Israeli nation in as a black hole. It seems everybody wants to live there. And this is not good. It creates the conscience and the reality of a ghetto. 

In Ashkelon, which was bombed day and night by Hamas last summer, I saw new houses at every corner. Like nothing bad could happen to them in the next war. This seemingly absurd feeling is everywhere in Israel. 

A main problem is Yad Vashem: I don't understand why the state brings all the foreign visitors there. Is it to feed the sense of guilt? Is it to compensate for the Arabs false portrayal of the "Nakba"? 

Then I went to see Judea and Samaria with two great friends of mine, Hillel and Tamar. It was not on the official itinerary of my tour. I understood that it is the terra incognita for the Israeli mainstream. And that without these regions, Israel would not exist today.

What happened between 1948 and 1973, when there weren't any Jews between the Jezreel Valley and Beersheba, just proves that. It was only after the Yom Kippur War that Jews realized that settling the land meant protection. 

It is all there, the Jewish fate, cradle, meaning and future: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem road, Joseph's Tomb in Shechem (Nablus), Hevron's Cave of the Patriarchs . To not to mention the biblical mountains around Shechem. 

I wanted to see the borders of the "settlements", so I visited the families living in Tel Rumeida's Hevron and those living in Elon Moreh near Nablus but also everything in the middle, including Itamar, a wonderful religious agricultural (organic) utopia marked by a horrible night of killings and martyrdom. 

It is impossible, even for those who want to destroy Israel, to deny that the Jewish people would be obliterated without these barren highlands, the mountains overlooking Ashdod, Tel Aviv, Hadera, Petah Tikva. Even the blind, from these terraces, can see the danger over the Dan area. 

From a hilltop community near Kedumim, I saw the Azrieli Towers of Tel Aviv. Israel would be destroyed if a "Palestinian State" would take control of these region. To not to mention how the Hevron Jews protect the entire State of Israel from the Hamas and the Salafi terrorists based in the south.

Only heroes can live in those conditions. 

I didn't see any "occupation": the Palestinian Arabs use all the roads that serve the "settlements", they can even enter them. I saw very few soldiers to protect the Jews in Judea and Samaria. Their life is not in the army's hands. You have instead the feeling of an immense wilderness, with much empty space, where Jews and Arabs race to control and settle. The winner will decide the fate of the entire area. 

The Israelis from the coast, the south and the north don't set foot there. I know people who haven't been in Judea and Samaria for two decades and avoid even Kfar Saba because it is close to Qalqilya. They are paralyzed by the idea of driving in Samaria. 

But they also don't know that without this irrational miracle, which includes everything that has been settled and built after the 1967's line, their comfortable and politically correct life along the coast would vanish in a minute.

This is what I saw last week in Israel. A growing and strong besieged country. But one that is ungrateful towards its heroes.

“We built in Jerusalem, we build in Jerusalem, and we will continue to build in Jerusalem.” Netanyahu

Finally telling the world the truth, that Yerushalyim is not going to be "Judenrein"! 

Bibi Netanyahu

It's time to talk "Arab talk." Hamas keeps telling the world  that they want to annihilate all of Jewry, but we don't take the truth seriously. 
So it's time for us  to tell the world the truth, as Netanyahu finally did.
“We built in Jerusalem, we build in Jerusalem, and we will continue to build in Jerusalem.”

And he is not even talking about the settlements, he is talking about building in the "green line" ...
This is  the area that the US State Department is criticizing. How crazy is that? 
Vote Republican, guys. Vote the Democrat bums out!

 It is the condemnation of Israeli building in Jerusalem, not Israeli developments beyond the Green Line in Jewish neighborhoods in the capital, that distances peace, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a combative response to US and EU condemnations of plans to move forward with another 1060 units in the capital.

Netanyahu, at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new port in Ashdod, said that Israel would continue to build new ports, pave roads, lay rail road tracks and “continue to build in our eternal capital.”

“I heard the claim that our building in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem makes peace more distant, but it is the criticism itself that makes peace more distant,” Netanyahu said of criticism that poured in following his announcement of plans to develop 660 more units in Ramot Shlomo in the northern part of the city, and 400 in the southern neighborhood of Har Homa.

This criticism, he said, is “detached from reality” and feeds false Palestinian hopes.

US State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday that plans for new projects in Jerusalem were “incompatible with the pursuit of peace. And Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for outgoing EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, said the move “once again” calls into question Israel’s commitment “to a negotiated solution with the Palestinians.” She warned that “the future development of relations between the EU and Israel will depend on [its] engagement towards a lasting peace based on a two-state solution.”

Netanyahu said that the international community remains quiet when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “incites to the murder of Jews in Jerusalem,” but strongly condemns Israel when it builds in Jerusalem.

“I don’t accept that double standard,” he said. “We built in Jerusalem, we build in Jerusalem, and we will continue to build in Jerusalem.”

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, meanwhile, decried the move in an Israel Radio interview, saying these types of steps will make it more difficult for Israel to thwart Palestinian efforts in the UN Security Council .

Livni said that while she feels that Israel has the right to build in Jerusalem, these announcements not only hurt Israel diplomatically, but also worsen the volatile security situation in the capital.

Content is provided courtesy of the Jerusalem Post

2,000 Year Old Menorah carved in stone found, contradicts the Chabad understanding of what the Menorah looked like.

A worker of the Israel's Antiquities Authority shows a menora carved on stone, that was found in what archaeologists say is a 2,000-year-old drainage tunnel leading to Jerusalem's Old City, at the IAA's offices in Jerusalem, Monday, Aug. 8, 2011. On Monday, archaeologists from the IAA presented a menora, a seven-branched Jewish candelabra that was one of the central features of the Temple, carved on stone, found during excavations of an ancient drainage tunnel beneath Jerusalem, late last month. The excavation of the tunnel has yielded new artifacts from a war here 2,000 years ago, archaeologists said Monday, shedding light on a key episode of the past buried under today's politically combustible city. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Now look at the Chabad menorah.... Note: that they never ever found any depiction of a menorah with the Chabad and the Rambam's understanding of how the menorah looked like ... all depictions found have the traditional understanding that the Menorah had curved arms

Chabad menorah with arms straight instead of the traditional view of curved arms.

(AP)Israel - Archaeologists say artifacts discovered in an ancient drainage tunnel under Jerusalem are left over from war 2,000 years ago. On Monday archaeologists presented a Roman legionnaire’s sword and sheath found in the tunnel late last month. They believe it dates to around 70 A.D., when Rome put down a Jewish revolt, razing the second biblical Jewish Temple and much of the city.

Accounts of the battle say Jewish rebels fled to tunnels in a futile attempt to escape the Romans.

Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Eli Shukron says diggers also found clay lamps, pots, and a bronze key. He thinks rebels left many of those items.

The newly excavated tunnel is part of a growing network of subterranean passages under the city.


Dusiznies Note:
 it is alot more difficult to carve a "U" in stone than a "V" ...So if the Bais hamikdash Menorah was in the shape of a "V" as Chabad proposes then why in the world would the stone carver want to carve the "U"????
The stone found days ago depicts the difficulty the stone carver had carving the Menorah as he saw it ...the "U" , he apparently had a hard time with it... so if the Menorah was in the shape of the "V" ...why carve the "U"?