Last week, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ron Prosor, published an op-ed in the Guardian calling for an honest discussion of the situation in Gaza. In contrast to those challenging Israel’s policies regarding Hamas, Prosor argues that Hamas is a danger not only to Israel but also to its own people. Hamas has retained its hold on power by eliminating rights to speech and expression and by misappropriating the very aid–supplied by Israel–meant to help the Palestinian people. The Western world, he writes, would do well to take Hamas and its threats to its neighbors at face value.

Showboating over Gaza
Israel last Saturday permitted two boats of protesters to land on the shores of Gaza. This disappointed the more aggressive agitators in the party, as they hankered for a confrontation with the Israeli navy that never came. Yvonne Ridley, on board making a documentary for an Iranian state-funded broadcaster, must have been particularly frustrated.
Having thoroughly assessed the security risks, Israel granted the ships safe passage. The protesters came ashore with enough hot air to fill the 5,000 balloons they’d brought for the children of Gaza. They also delivered 200 hearing aids. Yet their silence regarding Hamas’s abuse of its own people, let alone Israeli civilians, has been deafening.

On the occasion of her forthcoming book, the New York Times Magazine features an interview with Brigitte Gabriel, an author of Lebanese Christian ancestry who has written widely in support of Israel.  The discussion covers her views on the Middle East, how Americans view religion, and a bit about Gabriel’s work.  In all, an entertaining look at a personality whose views are often overlooked.

This week marks two years since Michael Levin was killed during the Second Lebanon War. Levin grew up in Pennsylvania and, upon making alyah, joined the IDF paratroopers. Though nearly at the end of his service, he petitioned to join his unit in the fighting in southern Lebanon. Many remembered his determination and his ability to make friends with many different types of people. Some recollections can be found on YouTube and the Washington Post.
Levin’s love for Israel was nourished by his experiences at Camp Ramah in the Poconos which will celebrate his legacy at the Trenton Thunder baseball game on 24 August. More information can be found here.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nation’s, Dan Gillerman, will soon finish his posting in New York. This past weekend, the New York Times Magazine published an interview in which the ambassador analyzed some of his accomplishments and shared some of his diplomativ wisdom. His interview with Newsweek discusses Israel’s position in some of the more delicate Middle East issues, especially regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

As part of the prisoner exchange that will return Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to Israel, the Israeli government will give up control of Samir Kuntar to Hizbullah. Kuntar was sentenced to five life terms in prison for his role in the murder of Danny and Einat Haran. The full story lay unknown for some time. The following article is translated from an article in Yediot Aharonot:

The Kuntar File, Exposed - Yediot Aharonot - by Nir Gontarz
After almost 30 years of being classified, File No. 578/79 has been granted permission for publication: the murderer’s testimony, the shots in Danny Haran’s back and the death blow to toddler Einat’s head.

For almost 30 years the Samir Kuntar file has sat in the district courthouse archives in Haifa. Its contents were never authorized for publication. Until yesterday. Right before his expected release in two days’ time, the court acceded to Yedioth Aharonot’s request and allowed Kuntar’s testimony, copies of the copious evidence and other testimonies in the file, the indictment and the judges’ verdict, to be perused…

Besides the Pardons Department, no one has ever read the file - which was considered top secret by court administrators. On the few occasions that it was removed from the archives, it was accompanied by an armed security officer. Being a classified security file, the contents of File No. 578/79 had never been released for publication. Due to the obvious public interest, Justice Ron Shapira has permitted publication of everything in the file except one person’s testimony. The judge also asked not to publish the pathological reports or any other detail that could harm the memory of the victims.

The government’s decision of 29 June authorizing a prisoner swap with Hizbullah was a decidely controversial matter. Discussions of whether to approve the deal raised a storm of opinions of all types, both in support and in opposition. Below, we’ve included an opinion piece by David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs in New York from this week’s Jewish Week that explains some of the arguments.

Understanding Israel’s Painful Decision
by David Saranga
Special To The Jewish Week

‘We’re really talking about Udi; he is my husband … someone to whom I said ‘I’ll bring you the moon and do anything for you.’ ”

For many Israelis, this statement by Karnit Goldwasser, the wife of Ehud Goldwasser, captures the popular sentiment. The government’s recent approval of a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group, means the bodies of Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who are presumed dead, will be returned to their homes, families and country. This moment comes at the conclusion of a closely-watched process that drained the emotional reserves of all Israeli citizens, not only the immediate families of the kidnapped soldiers. This painful chapter, with its two years of collective worry and anguish, will now begin to close despite the high price we will pay for Regev’s and Goldwasser’s release.

Photo:Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In a brazen midday attack yesterday (02 July), a Palestinian terrorist drove a large construction vehicle through a crowded section of Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road killing three Jerusalem residents and leaving crushed and overturned cars and buses in his wake. Once again, terrorists demonstrated their willingness and desire to harm innocent civilians–including the infants injured in yesterday’s incident.
This attack was particularly disturbing occurring as Israel has made strides in peace negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Though Hamas has agreed to abide by the Egyptian-brokered “state of calm” in Gaza, the organization’s approval for these actions is a noticeable reminder of the challenges Israel still faces from terrorists.
The State of Israel will continue to ensure its citizens’ right to security while maintaining its commitment to achieving peace with the appropriate bodies. She also calls upon the international community to condemn this attack and others like it in the strongest possible terms and to recognize the continued danger posed by extremist bodies and the necessity of advancing the cause of peace.
See the New York Times for continuing developments. Further analysis can be found through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Government of Israel decided on 29 June to approve a deal that will return Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to Israel in exchange for a number of Hizbullah terrorists. Below is the government’s statement on the subject. Following is an op-ed from the Washington Post by Smadar Haran illustrating the difficulties inherent in releasing Palestinian terrorists.

1. Our responsibility to our servicemen is a supreme value in Israel. It stems from the moral foundations of the State of Israel and the Jewish faith. This is Israel’s true strength.

2. The Cabinet endorsed the prisoner exchange to send a message to IDF soldiers and their families – that Israel will always do everything in its power to bring its sons and daughters home. This, despite misgivings over the need to release a cold-blooded murderer, Samir Kuntar, whose brutality is celebrated by Arab extremists.

3. Israel aspired to reach a deal quickly and on the most favorable terms possible. Rejecting the current deal could have meant a lengthy delay and a more painful price tag.

4. The agreement will return Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to Israel, together with the additional remains of soldiers who fell during the Second Lebanon War and a report on the fate of Ron Arad. Israel will return Kuntar, four other Lebanese terrorists and the bodies of dozens of infiltrators and terrorists (including eight Hizbullah members) to Lebanon. Israel will also give the UN Secretary-General information on four missing Iranian diplomats and, after the exchange, release Palestinian prisoners – whose identity and number will be at Israel’s exclusive discretion.

5. The Government of Israel remains steadfast in its commitment to obtain reliable information on the fate of Ron Arad and to continue working for the release of Gilad Shalit. No effort will be spared to find them and the other MIAs and to bring them home.

6. Israel’s response to the abduction of Goldwasser and Regev was unprecedented – Hizbullah suffered a severe blow to its infrastructure, arsenals and operatives. Its leaders are still in hiding. Israel will respond with full force to any future attempts to abduct its soldiers and citizens.

7. Hizbullah, Hamas, and their fellow Iran-backed terrorists are responsible for the suffering of Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese. They are the obstacle to peace between Israel and its neighbors.

8. Israel expects the international community to take decisive action against extremists and to support Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens while it negotiates peace with pragmatic counterparts.

The World Should Know What He Did to My Family
By Smadar Haran Kaiser

Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page B02

NAHARIYA, Israel–Abu Abbas, the former head of a Palestinian terrorist group who was captured in Iraq on April 15, is infamous for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. But there are probably few who remember why Abbas’s terrorists held the ship and its 400-plus passengers hostage for two days. It was to gain the release of a Lebanese terrorist named Samir Kuntar, who is locked up in an Israeli prison for life. Kuntar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kuntar’s mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas. And my wish now is that this terrorist leader should be prosecuted in the United States, so that the world may know of all his terrorist acts, not the least of which is what he did to my family on April 22, 1979.

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The next day, Abu Abbas announced from Beirut that the terrorist attack in Nahariya had been carried out “to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty” at Camp David the previous year. Abbas seems to have a gift for charming journalists, but imagine the character of a man who protests an act of peace by committing an act of slaughter.

Two of Abbas’s terrorists had been killed by police on the beach. The other two were captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Despite my protests, one was released in a prisoner exchange for Israeli POWs several months before the Achille Lauro hijacking. Abu Abbas was determined to find a way to free Kuntar as well. So he engineered the hijacking of the Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt and demanded the release of 50 Arab terrorists from Israeli jails. The only one of those prisoners actually named was Samir Kuntar. The plight of hundreds held hostage on a cruise ship for two days at sea lent itself to massive international media coverage. The attack on Nahariya, by contrast, had taken less than an hour in the middle of the night. So what happened then was hardly noticed outside of Israel.

One hears the terrorists and their excusers say that they are driven to kill out of desperation. But there is always a choice. Even when you have suffered, you can choose whether to kill and ruin another’s life, or whether to go on and rebuild. Even after my family was murdered, I never dreamed of taking revenge on any Arab. But I am determined that Samir Kuntar should never be released from prison. In 1984, I had to fight my own government not to release him as part of an exchange for several Israeli soldiers who were POWs in Lebanon. I understood, of course, that the families of those POWs would gladly have agreed to the release of an Arab terrorist to get their sons back. But I told Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, that the blood of my family was as red as that of the POWs. Israel had always taken a position of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. If they were going to make an exception, let it be for a terrorist who was not as cruel as Kuntar. “Your job is not to be emotional,” I told Rabin, “but to act rationally.” And he did.

So Kuntar remains in prison. I have been shocked to learn that he has married an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of terrorist prisoners. As the wife of a prisoner, she gets a monthly stipend from the government. I’m not too happy about that.

In recent years, Abu Abbas started telling journalists that he had renounced terrorism and that killing Leon Klinghoffer had been a mistake. But he has never said that killing my family was a mistake. He was a terrorist once, and a terrorist, I believe, he remains. Why else did he spend these last years, as the Israeli press has reported, free as a bird in Baghdad, passing rewards of $25,000 from Saddam Hussein to families of Palestinian suicide bombers? More than words, that kind of cash prize, which is a fortune to poor families, was a way of urging more suicide bombers. The fortunate thing about Abbas’s attaching himself to Hussein is that it set him up for capture.

Some say that Italy should have first crack at Abbas. It had already convicted him of the Achille Lauro hijacking in absentia in 1986. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now wants Abbas handed over so that he can begin serving his life sentence. But it’s also true that in 1985, the Italians had Abbas in their hands after U.S. fighter jets forced his plane to land in Sicily. And yet they let him go. So while I trust Berlusconi, who knows if a future Italian government might not again wash its hands of Abbas?

In 1995, Rabin, then our prime minister, asked me to join him on his trip to the White House, where he was to sign a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat, which I supported. I believe that he wanted me to represent all Israeli victims of terrorism. Rabin dreaded shaking hands with Arafat, knowing that those hands were bloody. At first, I agreed to make the trip, but at the last minute, I declined. As prime minister, Rabin had to shake hands with Arafat for political reasons. As a private person, I did not. So I stayed here.

Now I am ready and willing to come to the United States to testify against Abu Abbas if he is tried for terrorism. The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer have said they are ready to do the same. Unlike Klinghoffer, Danny, Einat and Yael were not American citizens. But Klinghoffer was killed on an Italian ship in Abbas’s attempt to free the killer of my family in Israel. We are all connected by the international web of terrorism woven by Abbas. Let the truth come out in a new and public trial. And let it be in the United States, the leader in the struggle against terrorism.
Smadar Haran Kaiser is a social worker. She is remarried and has two daughters.

In this unprecedented internet address, Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, addresses the Iranian people directly. The video, in English with Arabic and Farsi subtitles, expresses goodwill and friendship towards the Iranian people while emphasizign the serious problems with the government in Tehran.
For more information, see Jerusalem Online.