Columns

As the continuing flow of new missiles to Iran reveals, the Bush administration (refers to first President Bush) remains committed to misconceived policies in the Middle East. Even if Israel were to yield West Bank and Gaza to create a new state of Palestine (with east Jerusalem as its capital), the government in Teheran would persist in planned aggression against the Jewish state. Altogether unconcerned with the fate of the Palestinians, this government will be satisfied only by Israel's disappearance.

Chag Hasmicha is a celebration honoring newly ordained rabbis.

Since the latest Arab attacks on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the fashionably operative counter terrorism strategy in Israel has focused on "smashing the infrastructure of Hamas." With this in mind, the United States will now send at least $100 million of equipment to Israel for advanced bomb detection devices, X-ray systems and robotics devices, as well as for advanced thermal and radar sensors.

There is evidence of Jewish presence in Lipno as early as the 18th century.

For the moment, fears of a nuclear war in the Middle East remain focused narrowly and correctly on Iran. In the coming months, before that country is able to deploy a fully operational nuclear capability, Israel will have to preemptively destroy essential parts of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

There is no definitive information on when Jews first came to Vishkov, but at the turn of the 20th century, the cemetery was the final resting place of at least four generations.

It is exceedingly unlikely, but not entirely inconceivable, that Israel would ever decide to preempt enemy state aggression with a nuclear defensive strike. While circumstances could surely arise where such a defensive strike would be completely rational, it is enormously improbable that Israel would ever permit itself to reach such dire circumstances. To wit, and following Project Daniel, Israel will assuredly not allow Iran to proceed to the stage of an assembled nuclear weapons capacity.

Kurzelow is mentioned first in the 12th century, in a pastoral dispatch of the pope of that time, who fixed in it a new ecclesiastical district.

The year 2006 could become a fateful one for Israel and for the entire world. Still struggling to survive in the very worst of international "neighborhoods," the always imperiled Jewish State knows only too well that nuclear war and genocide need not be mutually exclusive.

The town of Gostynin was founded in the 13th century. It is located on the Skrwa Lewa River, approximately 60 miles northwest of Warsaw and 14 miles southwest of the city of Plock.

Soon, Israel will have little choice but to preemptively destroy Iran's developing capacity for nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Confronted by a declared enemy state that remains openly genocidal as it forges ahead with illegal nuclearization, Israel will face many tactical difficulties.

Ilza is a picturesque town in a valley along the Ilzanka River in south-central Poland.

In calculating the Iranian threat to national survival, Israeli strategists will have to consider both enemy capabilities and enemy intentions. Yet, because such threat components are never entirely discrete, but rather interdependent, interpenetrating and interactive, these strategists will have to look closely at all pertinent relationships.

The village of Ozarów is located in the Kielce region. The Ozarów cemetery dates back almost 400 years and is one of the few remaining Jewish cemeteries in Poland.

The opening of the first full-time Chabad center in Poland, under the direction of Rabbi Shalom Ber and Dina Stambler, was made official at the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchim earlier this year.

We who care desperately for Israel and for the Jewish People don't need a propaganda film to make our case. A completely truthful account - as Spielberg has given us - will always be in our interest.

Not Convinced By Plaut I always enjoy Steven Plaut's articles in The Jewish Press and until last week ("Israel's Plague of Conspiracism," front-page essay)...

Over the years, I have lectured and published widely on Israeli security matters - often with special reference to assassination and international law. Usually, in these matters, I have tried to point out the positive side of assassination, including informed support for Israel's ongoing policy of "targeted killings."

After I wrote about the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland last week, many people asked me to report more on this group and the important work they are doing.

Public discussions of Israel's nuclear policy almost never delve into core questions of targeting doctrine. Yet, the actual extent to which Israel's security will be affected by its nuclear weapons will depend considerably upon the IDF's codified targets and on the precise extent to which these targets have previously been identified.

In honor of Chanukah, a time of joy, I have been delving into the realm of Jewish music.

Science begins with the discovery of regularities. A regular feature of all Islamic "suicide" terrorists is a declared love of death. For us in the West, such declared affections must seem intuitively suspect. After all, they are contrary to everything we normally believe about self-preservation, reason and human behavior.

The Memorial Wall at Yad Vashem - the Wall of Holocaust and Heroism - has four sections, ranging from the Shoah to Rebirth. Magnificently designed by Naftali Bezem, it takes us movingly from an inferno in which the Holy is utterly profaned to the divine sanctuary of new Jewish generations. But these generations, symbolized by the countenance of a lion, must still shed endless tears.

Last week Israel remembered the Holocaust but received a rude reminder that its immigration policy admits many non-Jews into Israel.

Make no mistake, Israel is despised by the Palestinian populations because it is Jewish - not the other way around. In fact, Israel's unceasing pattern of capitulation to Arab terror elicits even greater Palestinian loathing, as such surrender behavior merely confirms the prevailing Islamic view of the Jew as coward.

From Arafat to Abbas, nothing fundamental has changed within the Palestinian Authority or in any of its sister terrorist organizations. In the prevailing Palestinian view, formal and informal, Israel remains the immutable focus of proposed eradication, although the language is usually more finessed and the tactics now more cleverly disguised.

It is not just our enemies who show us no mercy and who "love death" who bring us death. The triumph of the absurd (the world of Chelm or the world of Kafka?) can be found also in sober actions of the United Nations.

The story goes something like this. During World War I, a Jew loses his way along the Austro-Hungarian frontier. Wandering through the woods late at night, he is abruptly stopped in his tracks by the screaming challenge of a nervous border-guard: "Halt, or I'll shoot." The Jew blinks uncomfortably into the beam of the searchlight and retorts with obvious annoyance: "What's the matter with you? Are you meshugga (crazy)? Can't you see that this is a flesh-and-blood human being?"

War is never far from the minds of prudent Israelis, and prudent operational planning must always look closely at the regional "correlation of forces." Drawn from the military lexicon of the former Soviet Union, this concept is usefully applied as a particular measure of armed forces, from the subunit level to major formations.

Renana and Jay (Yaakov) Wolff made Aliyah in 1993 from Oak Park, Michigan, where they were serving as the Bnei Akiva internal emissaries (young couples who, prior to leaving to live in Israel, serve in towns that do not have a large Jewish college presence).