InDepth

Worldwide, it is generally assumed that Israel's nuclear policy of deliberate ambiguity makes good sense. Everyone already knows that Israel has "the Bomb." So, why "stir the pot" by retreating from "opacity?"

Today is a very special day; it is the fourth day of Chol HaMoed Sukkot; it is the first day of the end of the building freeze in our community. Will the freeze end or will the cute trick of the Arabs work? They demanded a 10-month building freeze in Judea and Samaria, and then they waited nine months before they decided to sit down to start negotiations with Israel. When they finally did sit down, the first declaration of the Arabs was that the freeze must continue. The world leaders promptly agreed and declared that it is only right that if the Arabs finally agreed to negotiate, Israel should freeze building in Judea and Samaria. "How could we evil Israelis start building again when the Arabs so graciously agreed to talk to us?"

Joseph Sobran died last week. Regular readers may recall the Monitor devoting a handful of columns over the years to Sobran's malicious commentary on Jews and Israel. He was a supremely talented writer with a prose style smooth as silk, but sometime in the mid-1980's he descended deep into the fever swamps of anti-Semitism and never resurfaced.

Israel is a magical country, but to experience one of its greatest wonders you have to travel out to what the world calls the West Bank and the Bible calls Judea and Samaria.

Of blogs there is no shortage (roughly 130 million, in fact, according to the latest statistics). Good blogs that address contemporary issues relevant to the Orthodox Jewish world, however, are harder to come by. Emes Ve-Emunah - haemtza.blogspot.com - is one such blog.

On Oct. 8, 1973, two days after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban delivered the following address to the UN General Assembly. Of particular interest are the references to Anwar Sadat, whose image had not as yet been transformed into that of a peace-seeking visionary, and to the foresight of Israeli leaders in refusing to relinquish any territory in the absence of a workable and sustainable peace treaty.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that colleges and universities redress racial and ethnic discrimination or risk losing their federal funding. Thus, if African American or Hispanic students are harassed on campus, they can complain to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is mandated to enforce Title VI and ensure that their schools fix the problem.

Now that we've suffered, yet again, through the annual United Nations circus, has it occurred to anyone (other than New York City police officers) to question why we continue to tolerate the hypocrisy and waste of it all?

An exciting newcomer has arrived in the turbulent arena of Israeli politics. In her fiery speech during the recent countdown ceremony in the Revava settlement that marked the end of the ten-month moratorium on construction in Judea and Samaria, Tzipi Hotovely seized the moment. She eloquently encouraged the synthesis, so long deferred, between Judaism and Zionism. Even in her first term in the Knesset, at the age of 31 and its youngest member, her future impact already seems assured.

We are winning the war on child abuse. We shall fight this war until we win. We shall fight the abusers in the yeshivas, the synagogues, the mikvehs. We shall fight them in the hills, the valleys, on the land and on the beaches. We shall fight with every ounce of our strength, until we win.

U.S. President Barack Obama will not back away from his so-called "Road Map to Peace in the Middle East." Even now, a plainly self-defeating "Two-State Solution" remains the cornerstone of this twisted cartography. Understanding all this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemingly continues to harbor hopes that, somehow, any Palestinian state would be suitably demilitarized. Such hopes, of course, would necessarily rest upon a problematic antecedent assumption that demilitarization could actually work.

The Torah is defined as flint, a hard stone that is sturdy and unbreakable. It is therefore ironic that the year 5770 saw the Torah stretched as a rubber band - with the extremes causing the fraying of the bonds of Torah and Klal Yisrael and with no respite in sight.

In August, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) brought together some 110 scholars to present papers and share ideas relevant to the theme of "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity." The conference had as its seemingly straightforward, and productive, objective to further the initiative's primary role of identifying and seeking to explain current manifestations of the world's oldest hatred.

ABC News decided to put the overtly biased and under-informed Christiane Amanpour in the host chair for "This Week." The result is a weekly display of journalistic malpractice. This past Sunday was no different. Questioning David Axelrod, Amanpour assumed the blame for the blow-up of the peace talks will lie in Israel's hands:

Former president Jimmy Carter told NBC News last week that his work at home and abroad has been "superior" to other presidents. "I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents," Carter assessed. "Primarily because of [my] activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center and in international affairs, and, to some degree, domestic affairs."

Let's not be fooled. The opening weeks of the United Nations General Assembly feature numerous side meetings between Jewish organizations and dozens of visiting dignitaries. Many of the Europeans, and possibly some Arab delegates as well, will be expressing sympathy if not encouragement for Israel's potential need to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

America is engaged in an intense debate regarding the plan to build a mosque and Muslim community center near Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attack on New York. A wave of criticism has been growing against establishing a mosque at this site, the very idea of which elicits overwhelming pain as the horrible crime was committed by followers of extremist Islam via the manipulation of its symbols and the belief that they were acting as messengers of God.

The central truth of being human is the constant love of being alive. We Jews, of course, both in our prayers, and in our sacred rituals, have always underscored the central difference between life and death, between the "blessing and the curse." In consequence, all Jewish survival, individually and collectively, is now closely bound up with the survival of the Jewish state. For both its too few friends, and its too many enemies, Israel is now plainly the individual Jew in macrocosm.

According to Israel Army Radio, Prime Minister Netanyahu has offered to extend the moratorium on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria for an additional three months in exchange for Jonathan Pollard's freedom. That is, if Obama pardons Pollard, who has served 25 years of a life sentence for transferring classified documents to Israel, then Israel will agree to extend the ten-month moratorium on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, due to expire next week, for another three months.

According to Israel Army Radio, Prime Minister Netanyahu has offered to extend the moratorium on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria for an additional three months in exchange for Jonathan Pollard's freedom. That is, if Obama pardons Pollard, who has served 25 years of a life sentence for transferring classified documents to Israel, then Israel will agree to extend the ten-month moratorium on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, due to expire next week, for another three months.

The latest headliner in the campaign to silence critics of Israel's radical Left is Prof. Zvi Hacohen, the new rector at Ben Gurion University. A professor in chemistry and "desert research," Hacohen was cited at length in Haaretz (Sept. 15) denouncing people, especially students of the Zionist Im Tirtzu movement, who dare criticize leftist sedition.

This week's The Way We Were feature (page 75) takes a look at the issue of The Jewish Press published during the first week of the Yom Kippur War. The headline on that week's front page became something of a legend - and not in a positive way.

With Israel surrounded, as ever, by implacable enemies and forced to endure withering assaults of negative international opinion, we can take needed comfort and learn an important lesson from the Torah context of some key phrases in the Yom Kippur liturgy we recited just days ago.

David Ha'ivri lives with his wife and children in the world's most hotly contested territory and works daily to defend it. As director of Israel's Shomron Liaison Office, Ha'ivri operates within the Shomron Regional Council, promoting public relations for the Shomron and serving as the English-speaking point man for the international media stationed in Israel.

Supporters of the planned mosque and Islamic center near Manhattan's Ground Zero have focused on the issue of religious freedom. But as thousands of mosques have already been built throughout America, this is false - a straw man if ever there was one.

"You're going where?! That sounds interesting. What is it?" This response we received from friends when we mentioned our plan to attend the Orthodox Union's Marriage Enrichment Retreat this past July reflected the very same questions we were thinking. And it was with those thoughts that we went to the retreat - interested but unsure of what exactly we were getting into. A nice hotel, no kids, good food and maybe some interesting workshops.

One of the timeless truths and permanent principles of ancient Jewish wisdom is what I call the Severed Flower. This means that when I cut a beautiful fragrant flower off its plant in my garden and bring it indoors, I seem to have done a clever and good thing. No longer do I have to step outside and brave the weather in order to be able to enjoy the bright colors and intoxicating fragrance of my flower - it is right there in a vase on my desk.

The decision by President Obama to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia is wrong. It was leaked last week that the Obama administration was preparing to notify Congress of its intent to sell $60 billion in high tech arms, including F-15's and military helicopters, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Regarding the Oslo Accords and Israel's vulnerability to war, Israeli security has become increasingly dependent upon nuclear weapons and strategy. Faced with a codified and substantial loss of territories generated by Oslo, the Jewish state will soon have to decide on precisely how to compensate for its expectedly diminished strategic depth. While this shrinkage will not necessarily increase Israel's existential vulnerability to unconventional missile attack, it surely will increase that state's susceptibility to attacking ground forces and to subsequent enemy occupation. Any loss of strategic depth will almost certainly be interpreted by enemy states as a significant weakening of Israel's overall defense posture, an interpretation that could then lead to substantial enemy incentives to strike first.

Somebody in Israel should establish the Society for the Public's Right Not to Know.