InDepth

The Middle East is ablaze with political revolution. Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria – the list of countries keeps growing. All is quiet, however, on the Israeli front. The question is: Why?

Last week the Anti Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee circulated a proposed “unity pledge” for American Jews which, according to a press release, was designed “to encourage other national organizations, elected officials, religious leaders, community groups and individuals to rally around bipartisan support for Israel while preventing the Jewish state from becoming a wedge issue in the upcoming campaign season.”

With surprising swiftness, almost immediately after UNESCO granted full membership to the Palestinian Authority on Monday, the United States announced it was cutting off all funding to the UN’s major cultural agency.

At a moment when Israel is under new daily assaults from the international community, especially from the Palestinian Authority and its oddly eager mentors at the United Nations, it is worth noting that there is a discernible and continuous pattern here of legal double-standards.

Cyprus is about half the size of today’s Palestine and is mainly mountainous. A smaller chain of mountains stretches along the north coast; the main mountain range in the southwest of the island reaches to more than 2,000 meters above sea level and is covered with various species of pine trees. Between these two mountain ranges lies a high plateau with only minor changes in elevation, and makes up about a third of the island’s total surface.

Laughter really is the best medicine. Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, has found humor and satire to be valuable tools in making the case for a strong Israel. Her latest venture to that end is Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website Glick created and edits.

With Sgt. Gilad Shalit safely returned in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian terrorists and murderers, celebration – propelled by wishful avoidance – spread throughout Israel.

I’ve been reading The New York Times pretty much every single day since I was ten years old. That’s more than a half-century by now.

In the 1980s, I was an unrefined adolescent from blue-collar Butler, Pennsylvania. I knew nothing and cared nothing about politics. I had no idea if I was a conservative or a liberal, Democrat or Republican, or much of anything else.

Information spreads like wildfire. “Gilad Shalit is home,” my friend e-mailed me happily as soon as he heard the news. He isn’t Jewish or a even a Zionist, but the kidnapping of someone our age moved him enough to track the case.

There is an element in the Occupy Wall Street movement that should concern the Jewish community. It is not that this so-called people’s protest against alleged corporate greed and banking industry excess has become defined by several anti-Semitic signs in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and some movement-related videos that have surfaced. It hasn’t.

We have come to expect The New York Times to seize almost any opportunity to peddle its view that Israel is the real impediment to peace in the Middle East. This time the Times outdid itself with a bizarre spin on the Gilad Shalit release. This from an editorial last week.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations show no sign of abating and the voice of collective dissent now echoes well beyond lower Manhattan. During the past few weeks, the movement has spread nationally, as protesters across the country came together in a leaderless association that rails against corporate greed and social inequality.

Honorable representatives of the nations, I chose to come here today to tell you the truth. Since the miraculous war in which the God of Israel led us to redeem Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and Israeli territory until the Jordan River, a strange costume ball has been taking place in this building.

I have three grandsons serving in the Israel Defense Forces. If any one of them were, God forbid, captured, I would demand that every Arab murderer be set free so that my grandson would come home alive and well. I would demonstrate, argue, demand, organize marches, cry, fight, and scream that my grandson be freed.

Israel, in the fashion of every nation, positively shrinks from annihilation. How could it be otherwise?

As the Palestinians press forward in international forums with their plans for statehood, a growing chorus of countries has expressed support for the move.

As the Palestinians press forward in international forums with their plans for statehood, a growing chorus of countries has expressed support for the move.

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the Bus 300 affair recently popped up again in the Israeli media just days after the al-Qaeda terrorist with the U.S. passport, Anwar al-Awlaki, was liquidated by a drone in Yemen, and shortly before the Netanyahu government agreed to release more than a thousand terrorists for the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

In recent times we have witnessed increasing support for Israel on the part of evangelical Christians. They view the establishment of the State of Israel as the miraculous fulfillment of the vision of the biblical prophets.

The recent call by NYU's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for TIAA-CREF to divest holdings in targeted companies doing business in Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism on campuses disguised as efforts at achieving social justice.

The German Holocaust foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, Future - EVZ - is in a state of denial concerning misuse of public funds meant to largely compensate the victims of the Shoah but used instead to finance anti-Semitic student exchange programs in Israel and Germany.

In March 1978, at the conclusion of the Litani Operation in South Lebanon, five Israeli soldiers and a civilian jumped into a car and decided to go on an outing. The group took to the road in defiance of army regulations and somehow got waived through a forward checkpoint. Moments later they found themselves surrounded by heavily armed Palestinians. Four of the five soldiers were killed instantly, while the civilian miraculously made it back to Israeli lines the next day.

Generally, the Israeli is despised in the Islamic world because he or she is a Jew, a condition of presumed infirmity that can never be "remedied." Consider the following facts:

Editor's Note: This installment of Keeping Jerusalem was written by Hillel Fendel, who interviewed Chaim Silberstein, the usual co-author of the column.

"What a depressing book!" is a common response to reading Sefer Kohelet. It seems at first glance that Shlomo HaMelech, the wisest of all men, is telling us there is no purpose to all of man's efforts, whether intellectual, material or social.

The use of double standards against Israel has permeated large parts of the world's mainstream. One finds it at the United Nations, among governments, in major media, academic institutions, NGOs, liberal churches and trade unions.

I read Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times column of October 6 with its headline "Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?" and concluded on finishing it that it is Kristof who is truly an enemy of Israel.

In May 1967 Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook spoke to his former Mercaz HaRav students at their annual Independence Day reunion in Jerusalem. Usually a festive day of celebration, this year was different. Rabbi Kook sorrowfully recalled his feeling of despair nineteen years earlier, when the State of Israel was born: "I was torn to pieces. I could not celebrate." Suddenly he cried out: "They have divided my land. Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Shechem? And our Jericho - will we forget them?"

One night, a man was shot as he tried to break into the settlement from a nearby Arab city. His family did not say, "We are so sorry that our son tried to break into your community and commit violence." Quite the opposite. There was a prolonged, noisy demonstration in his city against the Israel Defense Forces.