21-Apr-17: In Gaza, human bombs both unwitting and committed

"Female cancer patients in the Gaza Strip go on hunger strike in protest 

of an Israeli decision not to allow them to travel through the Erez crossing 

to seek medical care in Israel" (December 22, 2016). 
Were the sisters described in our post protesting? [Mohammed Asad
Middle East Monitor]

It's too early to know all the facts, but something happened on Israel's border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Wednesday) that highlights the hideous things the Islamist terrorists of Hamas do. And not only to their enemies.

Here's how Associated Press reported it:

Two Palestinian sisters from Gaza were caught trying to smuggle explosives hidden in medicine containers into Israel as they were headed for cancer treatment at a Jerusalem hospital, authorities said, accusing Hamas militants of trying to use the women to carry out an attack. Ragheb Atallah, the patient's husband, said his wife, Basema, 55, has gone for treatment of colorectal cancer in Jerusalem more than 10 times since July and has never had a problem before. He said his wife was unaware that she may have been smuggling anything illegal into Israel. "Someone asked them to take a bottle of medicine on their way for a patient there," he said. "The bottle was closed and they did not know what is inside. It seems there was something and this caused disruption," the husband said Thursday.
Ragheb Atallah said his wife was released and has been given permission again to go to the hospital, but her sister, 57-year-old Ibtessam Eid, remained in Israeli custody...
Despite the hostilities [with Hamas], Israel continues to allow thousands of Gazans to enter its territory for medical care or to travel to neighboring Jordan and other destinations. All travelers are subject to strict security checks, including in some cases lengthy interrogations by Shin Bet agents before they receive travel permits. Israel says the strict policies are necessary because Hamas tries to exploit civilians entering Israel by giving them weapons, cash or other equipment for militant activity... ["Israel: Gaza sisters smuggled explosives on way to hospital", Associated Press - Josef Federman, April 20, 2017]

Hussam Abdo, human bomb - before and after his oversize winter jacket 

was very carefully removed by IDF soldiers, March 2004 

[Image Source]

Let's note that the idea of innocent civilians being dispatched on life-threatening missions - whether they know it or not - is part of the Palestinian Arab terrorist ethos and nothing new. To name just two previous instances:

• The 1986 Anne-Marie Murphy affair (concerning whose murder-minded Palestinian Arab fiance a British judge said "about as foul and as horrible a crime as could possibly be imagined"
• Hussam Abdo, the cognitively-challenged 14 year old Nablus boy whose handlers promised him sex with dark-eyed celestial virgins in exchange for strapping explosives to his back on March 24, 2004.

Also relevant but much less innocent: the case of Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Bis, 21 (also called al-Biri, Albes, and al-Bass), a Gazan woman whose massively-burned body - the result of either an accident at home with a gas stove or deliberately burned by her family for the usual reasons - was restored and saved by Israeli doctors via intensive skin graft therapy in the two months from December 2004. She wrote a grateful-sounding thank you note to the hospital staff, and then "repaid" their kindness six months later by attempting to pass through the Erez Crossing on Israel's Gaza border while wearing an explosive belt. Her Fatah handlers instructed her to explode herself inside Beer Sheva's Soroka Medical Center hospital when she went there for a half-year follow-up appointment. Fortunately she didn't get that far. Alert Israeli security at the crossing sensed something very wrong and did not let her pass. She tried to trigger the bomb in front of the Israeli cameras but the Hamas technology was a dud and she lived, and was arrested, tried and convicted. She remained in an Israeli prison until released in the catastrophic Shalit deal of 2011. 

Wafa al-Bis back home in the Gaza Strip and planning to explode
a second time [Image Source]

Safely back in Gaza, she made headlines immediately after returning by telling little children from a Gaza school (very likely an UNRWA school) who visited her at home that "she hoped they would follow her example" and "Gd willing, we will see some of you as martyrs".

According to an Al Ahram report at the time, the little kiddies responded heartwarmingly: "We will give souls and blood to redeem the prisoners. We will give souls and blood for you, Palestine." Wafa al-Bis has repeatedly said she wants to try the human bomb thing again.

Seriously sick Gazans could go to Egyptian doctors or to the lavish medical centers of the astoundingly rich Gulf states. Instead, they keep crossing over into Israel when facing life-threatening illness or injury - 30,000 of them in 2016 alone [source]. The one aspect of this that's seriously confounding - given how much satanic hatred is relentlessly pumped into these people by their Hamas ideological overlords - is that Israel keeps agreeing to it. But anyone who understands the life-affirming sentiment that is deeply embedded in Jewish society and in Israel in particular will get it.

We are passionately opposed to the use of the expression "suicide bomber". We explained why in a previous post: see "30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs". This week's Basema Atallah affair underscores the point. A suicide bomber she certainly was not, as far as can be ascertained at this stage. But could she have ended up being a human bomb? Absolutely yes, and with all the consequences.

And in passing, we noticed that a photo in a Daily Mail UK October 20, 2011 article about Wafa al-Biss has this completely absurd caption:

"Waving a Palestinian flag at her house upon her release, Al-Biss has been in prison since 2004 after a failed suicide attempt"

[Image Source: Daily Mail]

Ms Al-Biss was imprisoned because she failed in an attempt to carry out an explosive act of mass killing. She was evidently indifferent about whether she would survive. That makes it murder, not suicide. And attempting suicide was not what got her sent to an Israeli prison.

In addition to being a human bomb, and probably against her will and without actual knowing, it's clear Mrs Atallah was also used by the bomb makers as a human shield. The news industry generally has a hard time owning up to how Hamas does this routinely (see for instance, "Myth of Hamas’s human shield. Gazans deny being put in line of fire" [Belfast Telegraph, July 21, 2014]).

The cancer patient was almost certainly asked by Israeli security whether she had agreed to carry something through the security barrier on behalf of someone else on the Gaza side. If that happened, the husband's version means she gave an untruthful answer. (Whether or not she knew she was carrying bomb-making materials is irrelevant.) Should she be allowed back into Israel for more life-saving treatment? Given the existential dangers, is it more humane to say yes? Is it less humane to say no?

And to end, some food for thought from six months ago: 

Dozens of female cancer patients in Gaza began a hunger strike today to protest Israeli authorities’ banning them from obtaining travel permits to travel to receive treatment. During a protest attended by dozens of cancer patients in front of the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Gaza this morning, the Aid and Hope Programme for Cancer Patient Care in Gaza condemned senior health official Bassam Al-Badri for humiliating and offending cancer patients. Al-Badri had previously directed offensive and false accusations against the female cancer patients barred from travelling, claiming they purely sought media attention... In a statement she read on behalf of the Aid and Hope Programme, Al-Tatri condemned Al-Badri for also accusing the cancer patients of spying and working for the occupation, as well as exploiting the issue of cancer patients...  A large number of these cancer patients announced they were going on hunger strike as of this morning in an attempt to gain the attention of officials and the world and raise the issue of their suffering... ["Gaza women cancer patients start hunger strike to protest Israel treatment ban", Middle East Monitor, December 22, 2016]

Were the two Gaza sisters in this protest? No idea. The Israelis seem to have given them great attention and help. About Hamas, it's not so clear.

13-Apr-16: Arab elites, Israeli medicine and a dose of hypocrisy

Abbas, now in 12th year of a presidential term that
expired in 2009: Man of principle [Image Source: EPA]

People who expressed deep hostility to Jews and to Israel used to be termed antisemites. 

But life got more complicated and nuanced; ugly labels started becoming burdensome. So the haters updated their language. They adopted poses that masked the bigotry in fancier words that vaguely hinted at higher principles.

None of this is new to anyone following the evolution of BDS, the political-sounding bigotry that tries to disguise a passion for eliminating the world's one Jewish country by the use of words - boycotts, sanctions, divestment - that make it seem like a New Age business strategy. 

But a closer look at who does it and how they do it soon uncovers the hypocrisy and lying that animate it. It's simply the world's oldest hatred in social media garb, and no one should be surprised that Jews are involved in it too. The passions motivating BDS map to deep, visceral and tragically familiar hatreds and resentments.

But even as the BDS herd pours its scorn on Israeli cosmetic companies, Israeli packaged-salad purveyors, Israeli academics and their universities, Israeli chocolate makers, life-saving and life-enhancing Israeli medicines, there's one demographic that isn't playing along: the political and business fat-cats of the Palestinian Arab world. Buying into BDS as if they really meant it would simply be too uncomfortable.

Today's news: "Brother of PA president hospitalized in Israel" [Source]

The brother of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was on Monday hospitalized in Tel Aviv in serious condition, Ynet reports. His arrival at and admission to the hospital took place in secret. Abu Louai, who lives in Qatar and who turned 81 last month according to Ynet, was admitted to Assuta Medical Center, where Abbas' wife and brother-in-law have previously been treated. Recently diagnose with cancer, Abu Louai chose to receive treatment in Israel. Abbas' brother initially began his treatment at Assuta, an expensive private hospital, before returning to Qatar after a stay of several days at the hospital. Now, ahead of his next treatment, he has once again been admitted to the Tel Aviv-based medical center, arriving via Jordan. In summer 2014, Abbas' wife, Amina Abbas, was admitted to Assuta for an operation on her leg. She returned to Ramallah after several days at the hospital. Six months ago, just as the current escalation in violence was beginning, Abbas' brother-in-law — Amina's brother — was hospitalized at Assuta for life-saving heart surgery.

The great thing about principles and standards when you're a hypocritical despot? You can have so many of them - a different one for every occasion.

For some context, see some of our earlier related posts:

• 13-Aug-15: What their choice of health care providers says about terrorists and their lackeys
• 20-Oct-14: Sincere wishes for a complete and thorough recovery as soon as possible
• 18-Nov-13: When Hamas insiders need the best care around, to which Zionist Entity do they turn?

We wish the PA President-for-Life's brother a speedy and full recovery. And, as we have done before, we express our hopes that the Palestinian Arabs will manage to eventually achieve a complete and rapid separation from an iron-fisted, ideologically-crazed leadership which has never hesitated to impose cruel hardships on its own society while reserving to well-connected insiders the privilege of engaging with the Zionist Entity when it suits them personally.

18-Jan-16: May it be Your will...

Source: Kolech

Dafna Meir was stabbed to death Sunday at the door of the Otniel home she and her husband Natan made for their family of four biological children and two additional children they fostered. The killer is still on the run.

Mrs Meir was a nurse - which in Israeli hospitals always means nursing patients who are Jewish, Moslem, Christian and whoever else needs nursing - and a guide to many. She also managed to write a blog (in Hebrew, naturally enough), Women's Ways.

There, she published a prayer she had composed while studying for an exam in the Neurosurgery department at Beer Sheva's Soroka Hospital where she worked. That prayer has today been rendered into English (sincere thanks to Rochel Sylvetsky-Tabak)
and was originally published earlier today on the Israel National News site.

We hope it is copied and conveyed widely.

May it be Your Will, Creator of the world, He Who manages it with mercy and loving kindness, to grant me the ability to give medications to Your people in need of salvation, and also to the members of other nations who are in the devoted care of your faithful messengers, who continue their holy work day and night, on the Sabbath and holidays, without letup.
Grant that I understand, remember and realize, that the medications are a gift from You, and their efficacy is Your message to us.
Grant that I view and feel joy at their beneficial influence of the medications I, mercifully, can give those who are ill.
Grant me the ability to concentrate when giving out these medicines, to understand the way each acts on disease.
Grant that I notice in time any of my errors or those of my colleagues when handing out medications, and that I act quickly to correct the errors before the medication enters the body of the patient.
Grant that I act with modesty, learn and teach others about the successes and failures in giving medication.
Grant that I give medications to the sick from a position of good health and that I remember to be grateful that I myself do not have to take them.
Grant that I learn to have empathy, although in good health, with the patient's suffering and help him with all my ability every day and every hour, using the tools that You have given me.
Amen.

May her memory be as a blessing.

And see "Sometimes I feel we are in a game of Russian Roulette" which Dafna Meir Z"L wrote recently about her thoughts on security and danger. That too was translated by Rochel Sylvetsky-Tabak.

27-Nov-15: Friday morning vehicle-ramming attack east of Jerusalem

Almost unremarked in the major media, vehicle
attacks on Israeli civilians are being aggressively marketed
into Palestinian Arab society. As the saying goes, advertising
works.

The lethal downpour, directed at Palestinian Arabs from government, media and religious sources, of incitement to self-destructive violence [here's a Google-curated inventory of videos] continues to produce a return on the sickening investment.

At Kfar Adumim Junction this morning at about 7, a Palestinian Arab driving a sedan with PA license plates and approaching a roadside bus stop accelerated and plowed directly into the Israelis standing at the stop.

This was a copy-cat attack of the lethal vehicle-rammings that have become a fixture - along with stabbings - of the extreme violence now holding Palestinian Arab society in its grip. (Kfar Adumim is east of Jerusalem, on the road leading to the Dead Sea.)

The weapon in today's attack. That's
the bus stop shelter in the background.
[Image Source]

Times of Israel reports that two young Israeli men, both about 20 years old, were struck. Ambulance personnel arriving quickly at the scene [video] found them conscious but spreadeagled on the ground, one with injuries to the face and limbs, the other to the limbs. They were treated at the scene and then rushed to two different Jerusalem hospitals - one to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, the other to the closer Hadassah hospital compound on Mount Scopus.

The assailant sought to flee the scene after the attack, and was shot and killed by what Times of Israel calls an armed bystander.

We can expect to see the driver's face soon as the Palestinian Arab terror industry ramps up the customary efforts to anoint him as a defenseless martyr, publishing posters in his honour. (Will they also claim the damaged car was planted next to him to unjustly implicate an innocent man? Stranger things have been happening here lately, almost daily.)

13-Nov-15: In a hospital where a terrorist was being sheltered, Pal Arab fury

Most Israelis do. in fact, know the difference between a hospital and a
nightclub. We also know what connects them: the aftermath of the
mass-casualty Palestinian Arab bombing of the Dolphinarium,
a Tel-Aviv disco, June 1, 2001 [Image Source]

From a news report yesterday about events in Hebron, "Hamas’ main bastion in the West Bank":

About two dozen men wearing bulky jackets, woolen caps, hoodies and checkered kaffiyehs barged into a hospital in the West Bank city of Hebron before dawn on Thursday, pushing what appeared to be a very pregnant woman in a wheelchair. But they were not headed to the delivery ward. The people caught on the hospital surveillance cameras were, in fact, undercover Israeli security officers. About 10 minutes later, the Israelis were on their way out, leaving behind a Palestinian man whom they had fatally shot in the raid and wheeling out his cousin, a wounded patient whom they had come to arrest... Hospital officials were livid. “Hospitals are supposed to be the safest places on earth,” Jihad [sic] Shawar, the hospital director, told the official Voice of Palestine Radio. He said the relatives of the two cousins were “very angry.” Bassem Natshe, the hospital’s public relations director: “They terrorized the hospital, shooting in the department. We are talking about a hospital here, not a nightclub.” ["Israeli Hospital Raid in West Bank Angers Palestinians", New York Times, November 12, 2015]

A nightclub? When Bassem Natshe, the hospital’s public relations director, speaks with passion about people terrorizing his hospital and reminds his interviewer that they "are talking about a hospital here, not a nightclub", we're wondering if he means a nightclub like the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium.

As for us - 

We are talking about a pizzeria here, not a shooting gallery. We are talking about a school-bus here, not an APC. We are talking about a street-car here, not a video game. We are talking about unarmed stabbing victims in their eighties, not gangs of thugs indiscriminately firing lethal rockets. We are talking about mothers and children and infants here, not armed combatants.

And by the way, how many innocent patients, staff or visitors in the hospital, other than the knife-attacker, Azzam Azat Shabadan Shalaldeh ("a minor figure in Hamas", but nonetheless the fugitive perpetrator of a stabbing attack on an Israeli civilian last month) whom the Israelis arrested and his clansman Abdullah Azzam Shalaldeh who was shot when attacking the Israelis, were harmed yesterday? Would casualties have been greater or fewer if the terrorist knife-man had been seized at some other time and in some other part of Hebron? The answer is obvious.

05-Nov-15: Lessons about life from a hospital emergency room

Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem: A slice of
Israel and its people

Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, one of the city's major hospitals, is - for a variety of reasons - a place we have come to know well. We're not the first to have observed that what goes on there is in some ways a microcosm of Jerusalem's varied, bustling, uplifting/upsetting life, and Israel's too.

One of the Israeli news programs has just put to air a ten minute segment, a distillation of a couple of days of observing life in the SZMC trauma department during these very difficult days of stabbings, rammings and shootings. Someone has now helpfully augmented it with English-language sub-titles. It's embedded below.

In criticizing much of the media coverage - and media values - that characterize the way events in this complicated and dramatic part of the world gets to audiences far from here, we have said, and believe, reporters and their editors and producers need to go visit a hospital, basically any hospital, in Jerusalem primarily (though we think the same holds for the hospitals of any other city in Israel) and watch what goes on there. It's an education.

We hope this clip gets plenty of pass-along viewers. It throws light on some of the larger questions of life and the Arab/Israel conflict in ways that ordinary news reporting almost never does.

There's more to say - we hope to complete this later today.

23-Oct-15: When the people inciting the knifings/rammings/shootings need really good doctors, where do they turn?

Mrs Mahmoud Abbas sought surgery in Tel Aviv a year ago;
her brother is doing the same right now

It's been a notably successful few days in the lives of the Mahmoud Abbas family.

The Palestinian Authority president (elected to a four year term as president of the PA on January 9, 2005, and successful in deflecting all attempts at another election since then) had the satisfaction of knowing his brother-in-law (the brother of his wife Amina) was given Israeli approval for, access to, and then saved by, life-saving heart surgery at a private hospital in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. In a report this morning, Times of Israel says the operation, carried out at Assuta Medical Center in the Ramat Hachayal section of Tel Aviv, was successful and the patient is recovering in intensive care.

Is this routine and ordinary? No. The patient's room at Assuta, according to the news reports, is protected by security guards. His privacy is protected as well: an Assuta spokeswoman is quoted saying under its policies “we don’t discuss patients hospitalized or not hospitalized at the medical center.”

There's room for doubt as to how much Abbas appreciates or even understands the scrupulous and principled respect of other people's rights by Israeli institutions. But no doubt at all that he knows about Assuta's policy since his wife Amina received the full VIP treatment there last summer ["Mahmoud Abbas’s wife undergoes surgery in Israel", Times of Israel, June 15, 2014], Note that this happened at precisely the time that all of Israel was in agony over the seizing and then murder of three Israeli teenage boys ["24-Jun-14: The price of treating one of the sides in the conflict as if they were children"] at the hands of Palestinian Arab terrorists.

In fact, there's a well-trodden path along which family members of the most senior fat-cats in the Palestinian terror hierarchy (including Fatah, the PLO and Hamas) request, and then receive, the best medical care in the region which, naturally, is the medical care of Israel. [See "13-Aug-15: What their choice of health care providers says about terrorists and their lackeys"; "20-Oct-14: Sincere wishes for a complete and thorough recovery as soon as possible" and "18-Nov-13: When Hamas insiders need the best care around, to which Zionist Entity do they turn?"]

How fair is this? How reasonable is it that Israel, against whom the entire Palestinian Arab enterprise is currently arrayed in a savage, merciless war of terror directed principally at ordinary non-uniformed Israeli going about their daily lives, should set all of that aside and permit the chief instigators to use their influence to obtain medical treats for their loved ones that they deny their own fellow villagers and subjects?

And if, which we don't accept, there's a case for saying "Yes, we ought to do it, it's right and merciful and humane that we do it", why are those Palestinian Arab fat-cats not compelled by our side to confess to their own people that this is happening? That their well-being, at the end of the day, is secured and improved by the Israelis?

From a quick Google search, we see there is a small number of dry analysis-free reports of this latest Palestinian Arab VIP story in the Arabic media [for instance, Saudi News; Egypt's 7 Days], all quoting Israeli sources. But there's no sign of any serious debate, as far as we can tell, about what this could mean to the conflict between the Arabs and Israel. We hope one of our Arabic-reading readers will consider translating this post to Arabic and then publish it somewhere in the Arabic world. Who knows what good might come of it?

[More 'successes' for Mahmoud Abbas are reported here: "23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror"]

13-Aug-15: What their choice of health care providers says about terrorists and their lackeys

Assuta Medical Center in Tel Aviv [Image Source]

We developed a real antipathy to certain expressions that some reporters and editors like to use when describing the conflict in our area. One of the most offensive is "two sides of the same coin". We hear it a lot. The idea: as bad as we say the other side are, our side is no better. And our arguments and justifications sound just like theirs.

It's self-evident that the "two sides, one coin" cliche obscures far more than it clears up. We object whenever we hear it.

When a person considers the hideous allegations - genocide, apartheid, racist - routinely hurled at Israel and its people, it's evident that this is being done in at least two different ways. One of them is what the Arabs - not only, but principally, the Palestinian Arabs - do. When the extravagantly wild allegations of war crimes and conspiracies come from them, it all looks and feels like psychological warfare. They themselves, at multiple levels of their society and culture, are deeply engaged in terror. Thus, there's a strategic imperative to be able to hurl something no-less-noxious back at their opponents. So we get, for example, the lunatic and deeply offensive claims about how Gaza is the world's largest concentration camp, its people subjected to genocide, and how Israeli chewing gum is loosening Arab girls' morals.

The other, often expressed in more sober terms, is carried out by Westerners, increasingly in the guise of BDS, the boycotting, divesting and sanctioning campaign waged by elements deeply hostile to Jews and to Israel in North America, Australia and Europe. A close look at what many of the BDS groups say, and in whose company they say it, leads quickly to the realization that there is not much new there; they are engaged in the world's oldest hatred. The passions motivating BDS usually map to deep, visceral and tragically familiar hatreds.

But look at what the Arabs, particularly some of the Arab "elites", are saying and something slightly more nuanced and calculated seems to be going on. Yes, there's hatred enough to go round. But in non-trivial ways, they demonstrate that their slogans and blood-libels are to a great extent for the 'benefit' of others. When they say their people are suffering "genocide" at the hands of "fascists", they want desperately to be believed, but they act as if they know perfectly well how contrary to the facts it is. They also show in the clearest way - by what they do, as distinct from what they shout and scream - that this is not about two sides of any coin.

The Rajoub article in Israel Hayom today

Nayef Rajoub is a pretty good example. He's a terrorist with a senior role in one of the most evil of the jihadist death-cults as well as being the brother of the notorious Jibril Rajoub about whom we have posted quite a number of times. Turns out that Nayef Rajoub

is currently recuperating in a private hospital in Tel Aviv, apparently after having undergone spine surgery. Rajoub, who is expected to stay in the Assuta Medical Center's Ramat Hahayal hospital for the next few days, has been assigned a security detail. The hospital said it could not confirm or deny the reports on Rajoub's hospitalization, citing privacy concerns.

Assuta may be less well-known than hospitals like Hadassah, Tel Hashomer, Shaarei Zedek and Ramban. But it's impressive enough as

Israel’s largest and leading private medical services center... Assuta Medical Center offers advanced medical treatments and world-class equipment and technologies to ensure optimal outcomes for patients... Each year, Assuta provides approximately 92,000 operations, 683,000 ambulatory checks and treatments, 440,000 imaging tests (such as MRI and CT), 4,000 heart catheterization procedures and 16,000 IVF treatments. Each treatment at Assuta, whether minor or major, is conducted with the highest quality of care and proficiency... Assuta works with patients from all over the world including Europe, the UK and the United States. The staff at Assuta is dedicated to making every step of your medical treatment as comfortable and stress-free as possible, including accompaniment throughout the process with a staff member fluent in your language.

As of the time we are writing this (Thursday afternoon), the only news source reporting the Rajoub encounter with Zionist medical care is an Israeli daily paper, Israel Hayom ["Senior Hamas official arrives in Israel for medical care", August 13, 2014]. But we expect it will soon get mentioned in other media channels. That's because it has significance beyond the people involved.

Nayef Rajoub, 57, is a senior member of Hamas who was

convicted of several terrorism-related charges... In 1992, he was among the hundreds of Hamas terrorists who were deported to Lebanon after the organization killed an Israeli police officer. While in Lebanon, Rajoub began climbing the rungs of the organization until he attained a leadership position... 

He's known for

his close ties with Ismail Haniyeh, who served as Hamas prime minister after the movement violently took over the Gaza Strip and formed a separate government in 2007.

Ismail Haniyeh is an interesting case - someone who is living proof of how, when they have serious medical needs among those closest to them, the innermost of the inner elite circle of the Palestinian Arab terrorists have no problem turning to Israeli treatment options. 

We have written in the past about how this works: see "20-Oct-14: Sincere wishes for a complete and thorough recovery as soon as possible" and "18-Nov-13: When Hamas insiders need the best care around, to which Zionist Entity do they turn?"

Haniyeh is an authentic arch-terrorist. A person deeply engaged in venomous denunciations of Israel and at the forefront of demonizing Israelis and everything our side stands for, the man has nevertheless - with barely any effort at hiding what he does - so far sent 

• his granddaughter for treatment at Schneider Children's Medical Center [November 2013];
• his mother-in-law for cancer treatment at a Jerusalem hospital [June 2014]; 
• his sister, Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh, who accompanied her critically ill husband (Haniyeh's brother in law) to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva for emergency heart treatment [August 2012]; 
• one of his daughters to a week in an un-named Israeli hospital in order to recover from complications arising "from a routine procedure" in Gaza according to Reuters [October 2014].

and there's no reason to think he won't keep doing it in the future if there's a need. He has made greater use of Israel's superior medical care than most Israeli citizens. It's as clear as any Hamas screaming fit could ever be about what the terrorist-in-chief actually thinks about Israel, Israeli and the essential non-sectarian goodwill towards patients - irrespective of extraneous considerations - that prevails in Israeli society. Hard to own up to, but he assumes like numerous other extremist Arab elitists that he can shut any critics up when needed.

For those of us who track the hatred and stabbing/shooting/bombing warfare directed daily at us and our children by people like Haniyeh are entitled to draw inferences from the moral abyss that separates what they say from what they do and actually believe.

Jibril, the better known of the extremely unlovely Rajoub brothers, is another case study. As we noted in "8-May-13: "I am your partner. I am going to kill you now."", Jibril Rajoub personifies much of what makes the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis so intractable. By words, deeds, history and public profile, he has personally done as much as anyone we can think of to deepen the venomous and corrosive hostility towards Israelis among the Palestinian Arabs, thereby raising the body count on both sides. He has no problem declaring that if he had access to nuclear weapons, he would have used them to inflict tremendous pain on Israel (check it here).

But this man of "principle" has not the slightest problem playing the dove when, and to the extent, it suits him:

He is a perennial participant for the Palestinian Arab side in the negotiations for peace that have been part of the political landscape here for two decades. An ad campaign on behalf of the Geneva Initiative included him as one of its central media figures back in August 2010. [Source]

We're not trying to find the good in him or those in whose company he moves. There is none of any interest to us. Nor is there anything at all that civilized people can or should learn from him and them. They are terrorists. They have removed themselves to somewhere outside the circle of civilized humanity.

Europe's romance with BDS in its black-and-white days
[Image Source]

A different kind of report yesterday illustrates how the non-Arab aspect that we mentioned above operates. With our deep, ongoing, non-sectarian involvement in creating better outcomes for children with severe disabilities, we burn with fury about incidents like the one reported here:

A Norwegian film festival recently rejected an Israeli documentary on children with disabilities, telling its director that it supports the boycott on the Jewish state and will not screen Israeli movies unless they deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Roy Zafrani, the director of “The Other Dreamers,” was turned down by organizers in a decision he termed “absurd,” the Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported Wednesday. “I’m sorry but we can’t show this film,” a letter from the organizers to Zafrani said. “We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel so unless the films are about the illegal occupation, or deals with the occupation or the blockade of Gaza, or otherwise about the discrimination of Palestinians, we can’t show them.” ["Norwegian fest boycotts Israeli film on kids with disabilities", Times of Israel, August 12, 2015]

The film, following four Israeli youngsters with special needs as they pursue their dreams, has already been screened at festivals in the United States, Spain, Italy, Australia and India. And in case the customary alibis are trotted out by the Norwegian totalitarians

Zafrani maintained that the film received no funding from the Israeli government... "This is an entirely independent film, with zero funding from Israeli public grants, so the boycott cannot even be justified by saying that it was made with government support... This boycott is simply because it’s a film that shows a different, nice side of Israel..." [Times of Israel]

As if that were not already obvious enough.

As the Rajoub clan settle down in one of the delightful family rooms on the Tel Aviv campus of Assuta tonight, they are probably laughing themselves silly at the witless, hypocritical fools in Europe and elsewhere who do Palestinian Arab bidding with greater gusto and enthusiasm than it gets from people living in our region, and with far less to gain from doing it.

09-Aug-15: Who's actually disabled in this affair?

The child with a hospital clown at

Tel Hashomer [Image Source]

Winston Churchill once famously said

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Since his long life ended before the emergence of today's social media, Churchill might have expressed it differently if he had seen how distortions and outright falsehoods have the ability to go to sleep for a while after being exposed, and then emerge via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and the others to get recycled, reinvigorated and relaunched. They can then do a great deal more damage while those of us concerned with old fashioned notions - like truth - are still struggling with our closets.

This morning, looking for a specific article that throws light on the terrorist attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem carried out by Hamas exactly 14 years ago, we stumbled across this:

#DemandJustice for Pal children left disabled by Israel's bombs in #Gaza #NoMoreImpunity #ForTheChildrenOfPalestine pic.twitter.com/OvKGPNhwyG

— Mirna Miranda (@MirandaMirna) August 8, 2015

It's a Tweet that went live just yesterday. And it exemplifies the point made by Churchill, updated to the age of the Tweetstream.

There's no doubt that vast numbers of Palestinian Arab children living under the ghastly Hamas regime suffer terribly. Sometimes, that suffering gets much worse when open warfare breaks out, which happens more or less as often as Gaza's Islamist overlords want it to happen. Last summer, for instance, when the constant fire of hundreds of Gazan rockets into Israel and at anything Israeli finally got too much for the Israeli side, there was a great deal of suffering. We understand perhaps better than many where to lay the blame for the suffering and how truly barbaric are the people who hold the destinies of Gazans in their corrupt and violent hands.

But war has additional dimensions. And whoever is the person behind the Twitter account above (sometimes there's no actual person) is also at war.

The image, tearing at the heart of most people, stops you in your tracks. The message it conveys doesn't really need to be articulated: if you can do this to a defenseless child, you're a savage. It's the kind of message we hear a great deal from Gaza and from the apologists who defend its institutionalized, imposed-by-relentless-force barbarism. It's hypocrisy incarnate.

But far more than the effect it has on people like us - and we know how to look behind the scenes, get to the facts, scrape away the exaggerations and the lies - a Tweet like this and the photo it drags along with it fills the heads of many, many, many people living far from the scene, people who know relatively little beyond what is beamed at them by people with messages to market. And for soldiers like the Twitterer we just mentioned, the picture is the whole narrative.

As for the facts, who cares?

So here are the facts behind the image above, despatched from a Twitter account yesterday, and circulating the globe at this very moment, drilling into people's opinions, minds and prejudices.

First, it's not new. Here is how it was exploited last year:

Source: Falastin News, September 23, 2014

The real source is an Associated Press syndicated report by Diaa Hadid, datelined May 3, 2013. You can see both the text and the accompanying photo online even now via Huffington Post. It's a story that got wide circulation via many AP licensees including Times of Israel ["Disabled Gaza toddler lives at Israeli hospital", May 3, 2013],

The image that went out with it has this unmistakable caption:

In this Monday, April 29, 2013 photo, Palestinian child Mohammed Al-Farra is seen in the Tel Hashomer Hospital near Ramat Gan, central Israel. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

Then the dramatic photo, but not the Diaa Hadid article, got a flurry of attention two years after that when a different propagandist for the Palestinian Arab cause, a journalist, brazenly recycled it as depicting a child victim of the fighting in and around Gaza the previous summer. Here's his Twitter post, since removed:

The owner of the Twitter account in question (@mogaza) has an interesting bio. He's Mohammed Omer and he calls himself "Award winning journalist... Gaza-New York-Amsterdam". 

Over at an alert Israeli news site, they expanded on this in a May 10, 2015 article, revealing that Omer

started the Rafah Today blog and has written for numerous major news outlets including Al Jazeera, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the New Statesman, Aftonbladet and others [and] received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2008. The Prize is granted to journalists who "tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts." [Israel National News]

Prize-winning Mohammad Omer 

in hisTwitter portrait

The good people at Honest Reporting added some wording from the Gellhorn Prize

We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda.

In announcing the Gellhorn Prize, the judges said of Omer that he

was honoured as "literally the voice of the voiceless" and his dispatches were described as a "humane record of the injustice imposed on a community forgotten by much of the world".

We have gotten fairly used to hearing about voiceless and humane and justice from people who lack basic integrity, Let's say that, in this particular case, we're not convinced. Anyone with Google can search to see the provenance of almost any published image. It's fairly plain that Mr Omer didn't care to know. Or knew and didn't care to be honest. And there's this additional detail that we have not seen reported elsewhere: his Twitter account shows that he follows Diaa Hadid, the New York Times reporter who wrote the article about the little Gazan boy.

(If we're wrong about any of this, Mr Omer, we would be glad to hear from you: email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com)

If the little boy in the photos has any sort of future, it will be despite - and certainly not because of - his Gazan, Palestinian, Arab peoplehood and heritage. To be more blunt about it, it will be because here in Israel, a child's life is a precious thing, and not a chip to be coldly bargained with or tossed away.

Are we sounding offensive? That's not our intention but this is a searing tale. In our words, summarizing the AP report, which is our only source for the facts, here's the story behind the photo:

Mohammed al-Farra was born in Gaza with a rare genetic disease and has spent most of his life living in the children’s ward of the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, part of the Tel Hashomer hospital complex, Ramat Gan, Israel. It's one of the finest pediatric centers anywhere, and certainly in the Middle East (here's an impressive CNN video from 2012 that highlights their work among Arabs and Israelis in medical need). "Complications" set in and his limbs "had to be" amputated and were. The article implies the parents are cousins, a major factor in birth defects that come with the Arab world's devotion to consanguinity. They abandoned him - the father threatened to take a second wife if the mother didn’t leave him in hospital and come back home to Khan Yunis. She complied. Somehow (not so clear exactly how from the article, but we are personally familiar with such rescue operations), the afflicted little newborn was rushed to Israel for emergency treatment. His grandfather is with him in Tel Aviv, and cares for him in the hospital. The child's Israeli doctors are attached to him, and fund-raise to cover his bills. The child and his grandfather live in the sunny pediatric ward. He has been fitted with prosthetic limbs, funded by donors, but his future is unknown. And now a direct quote: "Dr. Raz Somech, the senior physician in the Tel Hashomer pediatric immunology department, attributes Mohammed’s genetic disorder to the several generations of cousin marriages in his family... a third of patients in his department are Palestinians and most have genetic diseases that were the result of close-relation marriages... 10.8 percent of {Gazan Arabs] suffer some kind of disability that affects their mental health, eyesight, hearing or mobility..." The article ends with the Gazan grandfather saying of Mohammed: "He needs a home."

The reporter could have added, but did not, that he might find it among the Jews. As for his own people, the Gazans, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Very little in life is black and white. There are good people on their side. There are bad people on ours. But the value systems that lie at the heart of the lives we live over here are world's apart - for whatever reason - from theirs. 

Glossing over this serves no one. 

31-Jul-15: First do no harm

Sieff Hospital in Tzefat, Israel: In which direction did the critically injured person on the
gurney face when he last prayed? No one asks, no one cares...

The statement in the title of this post is an element of the training given to doctors and expresses one of humanity's core ethical values. With savagery of a kind most of us have never seen and can scarcely believe is going on just across our country's border, humanity and values are on the minds of many of the people among whom we live.

Comprehending the question posed in the following para (from this recent article on the VICE.com website) and the incredible real-world scenarios that surround it, a person can become either bamboozled (assuming they know only what most of the mainstream media tells them about our side and the other side in this ongoing war) or deeply moved:

How do you check the military credentials of an unconscious, unaccompanied, malnourished teenage boy in plastic sandals and blood-soaked trousers as he bleeds out on a dusty hill? More tellingly, among the doctors stitching such boys together again, it's not clear whether that even matters. ["Inside the Hospital Where Israeli Doctors Treat Syrian Patients", VICE, July 25, 2015]

It's a great article. Please click the link and read it all right through to the end. (Our own earlier visits to what is happening up north in Tzefat are here and here.)

Visiting a hospital - any hospital - in any part of Israel, and especially the paediatric departments, is likely to lead to a degree of cognitive dissonance among people who haven't yet fully understood what makes Israeli society tick. When reporters and journalists interview us, as hundreds have over the years, we usually invite them to make such a visit together with us (unfortunately we have deep first-person familiarity with the terrain).

Only one of them, in all these years, has ever taken us up on the offer.

20-Feb-15: Jerusalem and Paris: Abuse and disabuse

Screen-grab from the Paris video

Here's TIME's coverage of a thoroughly-viral video that tries to throw some light on what it means to be a Jew living in one Europe's most civilized and appealing capital cities:

Zvika Klein, a journalist who works for the Israeli news outlet NRG, filmed himself walking the streets of Paris for ten hours one day while wearing a yarmulke. The video opens with Klein putting on the traditional Jewish skullcap in front of the Eiffel Tower, before walking around the city. Along the way, Klein experiences what he describes as “fear and loathing,” as the camera catches people spitting on the ground near him, shouting “Viva Palestine” or simply saying, “Jew” or “Juif.” The video has been edited down into a minute and a half and Klein had to go to areas where he, or any outsider, was likely to arouse attention. Klein, who wore a tzitzit or tasseled prayer garment to emphasise his identity, told the BBC that filming took place earlier this month and that while few incidents took place in the central areas of Paris, the outskirts of the city were a different story. “As we went to the suburbs, or certain neighbourhoods in the city, the remarks became more violent,” he said. (Klein also told the BBC that some bystanders also spoke out against the abusive comments he received.) [Watch the Abuse This Jewish Man Gets as He Walks Through Paris | Megan Gibson | TIME | February 17, 2015]

The video itself is posted on YouTube [click] where it has been seen 4.2 million times as of this morning. At a guess, we think some proportion of those viewers are likely to come away mistakenly convinced that if Jewish/Moslem (or Israel/Arab) relations are this bad in the bosom of European culture, they're bound to be as bad or worse in the hateful, uncivilized Middle East.

We live in Jerusalem. It's a city where Jews, Christians, Moslems and a broad spectrum of the faithful and the not-so-focused-on-faith live, visit and bump up against each other daily. You see it on the trams, buses and streets as well as in stores, hospitals and eateries. Spend time in Jerusalem's down-town area and you're struck by the very visible, disproportionate presence of Arabs, particularly since the Jerusalem light rail (tram) network began operating in 2010 after nearly a decade of construction. (Nonetheless it is routinely stoned as it passes through Arab neighbourhoods.)

This doesn't stop the snide comments from outside about how our's is an apartheid society. Easy to say, but a little harder to believe once you walk around. 

Jerusalem light rail

Security here is a reality that Jerusalemites and Israelis take in their stride by necessity. (Our daughter's murder in 2001 happened in a pizzeria where no security guard was posted, and no security barrier was yet in place.) Whatever people think of its significance or what it symbolizes, the lives it has saved, and the open interaction among people that it enables, ought to be beyond question. Tensions certainly exist if you go looking for them - though nothing close to what is depicted in the video from Paris. And from our own experience in dozens of visits to Paris and other European cities, tensions - particularly at a time of terrorism - exist. So, alongside the problems, does co-existence. It's such a natural part of life here that it's rarely talked about.

Here are some snapshots of Jerusalem life and a look at the unremarkable presence of Arabs (please especially the widespread presence of unaccompanied, unafraid women) as part of the life and fabric of the city.

Sisters waiting for family member to emerge after treatment
Shaarei Zedek Medical Center

Downtown Jerusalem last summer

Hadassah Medical Center, Ein Karem where she evidently
works on the nursing staff

Shopping arcade at Hadassah Medical Center, Ein Karem

Visiting a new mother: Shaarei Zedek Medical Center

Makeshift breakfast in the family waiting area outside
a surgical suite at Shaarei Zedek

On board the Jerusalem Light Rail: multiple destinations,
varied origins [Source: Tablet Magazine] 

(The images are deliberately low-res and faces have been disguised. We have no desire to intrude on people's privacy.)

Israelis and those who visit here might be wondering why the reality of people living different styles of life in this city even needs discussing. The NRG video from Paris is the answer. Israel's war with the terrorists is not so different from everyone else's. Israel's ability, learned the hardest-possible way, to safeguard the conditions for ongoing, ordinary, unremarkable lives is also not so different. In fact, compared with how some other countries' capital cities are dealing with their challenges, you might think things are not too shabby here.