News From Israel- June 12, 2022

ILTV Israel News

Conservatives who don’t conserve can’t inspire soldiers to soldier – comment

GIL TROY

The police hesitancy during the Uvalde school shooting highlights our young IDF soldiers’ larger-than-life, lifesaving heroism.

LT.-COL. DAVID SHAPIRA arrives at the Jaffa Military Court in 2016. Shapira testified that he doubted that Elor Azaria, a soldier under his command, was in danger when Azaria killed a terrorist in Hebron who was already shot and lying on the ground.  /  (photo credit: FLASH90)

While mourning Uvalde’s classroom carnage, Americans – let alone Israelis – cannot fathom the 78-minute police delay before neutralizing the gunman. Escalating the latest moral panic over America’s decline, CNN highlighted four devastating words from a Texas police officer, worrying “they” – the police – “could’ve been shot.”

In fairness, the lieutenant actually said: “If they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.”

Sharp contrast with the IDF

Laptop warriors who never faced danger should not judge glibly. Still, such paralysis – in Texas! – highlights our young IDF soldiers’ larger-than-life, lifesaving heroism. Especially lately, many of our children keep bursting through doors, facing the unknown, working 24/7, risking their lives for us – knowing “they could’ve been shot,” too. Every day, these noble warriors join a star-studded list of Zionist heroes who overrode their individual survival instinct so we as a nation could thrive.

Beyond being awestruck once again by my own children, their peers, and their elders who did it, too, that Uvalde dawdling reminded me of the Mercaz Harav massacre in March 2008. An off-duty IDF officer, Capt. David Shapira, heard the shots while at home and charged into the yeshiva, defying police orders to wait for SWAT. He and a veteran Mercaz Harav student, Yitzhak Dadon, killed the terrorist 16 minutes after the murder spree began. Eight teens died, 10 were wounded, but many were saved.

Shockingly, crowds cheered the massacre – unlike after Uvalde. Hamas “blessed this Jerusalem operation,” as did 84% of the Palestinians surveyed. Who else could celebrate school shootings – and remain popular worldwide?

In 1943, John F. Kennedy tugged a downed sailor with his teeth while swimming to safety after the PT-109 disaster. Asked how he came to be a hero, Kennedy replied: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

Like comets, heroes emerge instantly, but are nurtured forever. A particular ideology shaped Dadon and Shapira. Values inherited from their ancestors and instilled in their upbringing primed them to do what they needed to do.

Subsequent events proved that their actions were not flukes. A year after the massacre, Dadon celebrated his son’s birth at the same yeshiva. Tzemach Hirschfeld, the mohel Dadon chose to circumcise his newborn, lost his son Yonadav Haim in the attack. Living the Zionist Jewjitsu, seeking redemption, not revenge, Dadon said, “We sanctify life with the blood of the victims.”

Meanwhile, Shapira, who kept insisting, Kennedy-style, “I’m no hero,” showed how his courage and integrity meshed, eight years later in 2016. Now Lt.-Col. Shapira, he testified that he doubted his soldier Elor Azaria was in danger when Azaria killed a terrorist in Hebron who was already shot and lying on the ground.

Such truth-telling defied the loudest, shrillest voices in Shapira’s religious-Zionist community. Online bullies denounced this “traitor… piece of crap,” this “coward commander,” while wishing “Shapira should die in battle.” “Take the kippah off your head,” they sneered; “even God won’t forgive you.”

Shapira did not budge.

Liberal Zionism has its own recipe for turning kibbutzniks and city kids into heroes. Meanwhile, Shapira, Dadon and so many other heroes from the religious Right navigate their lives based on a different – if overlapping – formula from a constructively conservative world.

Conservatism gone awry

WHEN RIGHT-WING hooligans – and too many of their leaders – bully, stir bigotry, and sacrifice long-term values for short-term political gains, I fear for tomorrow. How can we raise new heroes to behave nobly, when their loudest leaders behave so poorly? How will tomorrow’s conservatives conserve the values and institutions we need, when today’s pyromaniac conservatives are so destructive?

A world with nihilistic nationalists, with conservatives who don’t conserve, risks stunting today’s hero-making process for tomorrow, failing to produce the resilient, altruistic citizens every healthy society needs from its Right.

Miri Regev embodied this unpatriotic behavior from the supposed patriots, when justifying the Likud’s (il)logic in opposing tuition subsidies for our young heroes “who could’ve been shot.” Showing that no principle will slow the Likud’s assault on this coalition, Regev boasted about being “a fighting opposition… to bring down this government. So there is no queasiness [when voting against] the disabled, and there is no queasiness with cases of rape, and no queasiness with battered women, and no queasiness with soldiers, because we all understand that this is the rationale.”

Such harshness makes me queasy. The bottom-line-obsessed, sharpened-elbows thinking with blinders that Regev articulated, combined with Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing assault on our justice system, hones all the wrong instincts. Who would want to live in such a cynical, selfish country – and who would bother sacrificing for it?

Idealism in the face of cynicism 

FORTUNATELY, OUR idealistic kids still define Israel more than these cynical adults do.

And, amid the noise, some constructive conservative voices are resonating, from Naftali Bennett in Jerusalem to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Last week, Raffensperger won his Republican primary for reelection, despite resisting Donald Trump’s assault on the 2020 election results. Raffensperger proclaimed: “Standing for you, standing for the rule of law and election integrity, standing for the truth and not buckling under the pressure, is what people want.”

Ethics of the Fathers wisely defines heroism as controlling your impulses. How can we expect anyone to control the natural impulse to flee, to avoid getting “shot,” if our leaders cannot control their urges to demonize fellow citizens and diminish the great institutions and ideals that are worth dying for because they make life worth living?

The writer is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University, and the author of nine books on American history and three on Zionism. His book Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People, coauthored with Natan Sharansky, was published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.

Famed Italian Tenor Andrea Bocelli Visits Western Wall Following Concert in Tel Aviv

Shiryn Ghermezian

Italian operatic tenor Andrea Bocelli at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on June 9, 2022. Photo: Screenshot/TheKotel.org.

Legendary Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli made a stop at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Thursday, a day after performing in front of more than 20,000 people at a concert in Tel Aviv.

The award-winning singer visited Jerusalem’s Old City with his family and friends, according to the Western Wall’s official website. He also met with the rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, as well as the director of the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, Mordechai Eliav, “who showed him findings from the Second Temple period that had been uncovered in the Western Wall Tunnels.” Bocelli additionally visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other sites in Jerusalem.

The “Con Te Partirò” singer, who has been blind since the age of 12, uploaded onto his Facebook page two posts that include photos from his visit to Jerusalem as well as a video from his concert in Tel Aviv. In both posts, his staff wrote in the captions “We stand for PEACE. Any political comment will be deleted.”

Bocelli’s concert at Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield Stadium on Wednesday night alongside the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Gary Bertini Israeli Choir was his first performance in Israel in 11 years. Israeli pop singer Shiri Maimon sang with Bocelli “The Prayer” duet he originally recorded with Celine Dion, and he also performed on stage alongside his son Matteo and his youngest daughter Virginia, who sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

The audience included former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, film director Quentin Tarantino and former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, according to The Jerusalem Post. Bocelli reportedly told Netanyahu that while he currently resides in Tuscany, Italy, if he could move anywhere in the world, it would be Israel.

The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive – For a Jew its Home

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

UN continues to show bias against Israel – editorial

JPOST EDITORIAL

Mauritania, Pakistan, Somalia and Qatar all have laws to kill homosexuals and all have seats on the UN Human Rights Council.

Ambassador Gilad Erdan tears up a UNHRC report at the UNGA. / (photo credit: ISRAEL MISSION TO THE UN)

Unsurprisingly, the United Nations Human Rights Council showed on Tuesday that it continues to be the one-sided biased organization that we have long known it to be. It is blinded by a hatred for Israel, and instead of standing up for the values upon which this international institution was founded, it prefers to give credence to terrorists and forces that actively work to undermine democracy and freedom.

This time, it was the UN’s initial report by its highly contentious Commission of Inquiry led by Navanethem Pillay, the former UN high commissioner for human rights. In the report, Pillay and her two colleagues concluded that Israel is largely to blame for its conflict with the Palestinians.

“The commission notes the strength of prima facie credible evidence available that convincingly indicates that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation, has a clear policy of reassuring the complete control over the occupied Palestinian Territory and is acting to alter the demography through the maintenance of a repressive environment for Palestinians and a favorable environment for Israeli settlers,” the report said.

Israel slammed the report and said it was “nothing more than a waste of money and effort of the United Nations’ systems” and “part and parcel of the witch hunt being carried out by the Human Rights Council against Israel.”

UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer also criticized the document, highlighting how it turns a blind eye to Palestinian terrorism.

Deputy Minister, Alvin Botes delivers a National Statement at the Annual High Level Panel on Human Rights Mainstreaming under the theme “Thirty years of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: challenges and opportunities”, at the UNHRC, Geneva. (credit: FLICKR)

“The report turns a blind eye to Palestinian terrorism and embraces the Hamas narrative that Israel is the root cause of all conflict,” he said. “This is exactly what we expected from Navi Pillay, who actively lobbies governments to ‘sanction apartheid Israel’ and to condemn Israel for the very conflict that she is meant to investigate.”

As an example, Neuer counted the number of times Israel and Hamas appeared in the report. Israel was mentioned 157 times, Hamas just three and Islamic Jihad and Iran not even once.

What the United Nations fails to realize is that reports like these do not help solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They encourage it. The Palestinians – and specifically terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad – receive a feeling from reports like these that their crimes can go unpunishable and that there is no reason for them to stop attacking innocent civilians.