The first night of Chanukah, in the neighborhood of Nachlaot in the center of Jerusalem, December 8, 2012.

The idea of the Chanukah candles is to announce the miracle, make it as public as possible, kind of the visual equivalent of screaming it from the rooftops: We were stuck with only one little jug of oil and it lasted 1-2-3-4-5-6-7- and 8 days!

In Jerusalem they take these things very seriously, as you can see, literally publicizing the miracle in the streets.

Across

1. Apple leftover

5. Concert equipment

9. Grad. school tests

14. The ___, counting time

15. Torah mariner

16. Gets promoted

17. Stallion’s mate

18. “Beetle Bailey” dog

19. “Live ___ ___ Legs”, Pearl Jam album

20. Cry by He-Man, or when removing the third word a statement made by the lucky ones last month

23. Preserve, in a way

24. Letters before DVD

25. Dimness

27. Dylan of the Mets

28. Arid

30. Squared cracker?

32. Kind of action figure, or possible title for one providing juice?

36. Sch. with a bear mascot in Little Rock

37. Decorative pitcher

38. Tail action

39. Kind of agreement

40. “Wheel of Fortune” buy

41. Like G-d

45. Seek a seat

46. Make like Eli

47. Poet’s “before”

48. Davidic song

50. Napoleon in literature, e.g.

51. Wetland

54. 1992 Morgan Freeman movie

58. Color of one of the Avengers

60. Wren or hen

61. Country of conflict on the political stage

62. Kind of church

63. Hodgepodge

64. Foul mood

65. Unpopular name at the moment

66. Seals’ meals

67. Belonging to Chaya, e.g.

Down

1. Rickles or Regan

2. Poker game

3. Played again

4. Day before

5. One more

6. Cocoon exiters

7. Head

8. Factory

9. An unfriendly dog, e.g.

10. Actor Sal

11. Kind of artificial ground

12. Driver’s helper?

13. Common ID

21. Penultimate fairy tale word

22. Shrek, e.g.

26. Region across from Hong Kong

27. Jewish stranger?

28. Ginger cookies

29. Waffle brand

31. Washington locale, with “the”

32. Orchard item

33. Admit

34. A Miramax founder

35. Cobblers’ tools

39. Bonanza find

41. Very much

42. Light antique?

43. Odd folk

44. As a result

49. Coming up

50. Jeopardy

51. Carried by

52. Broadcasting

53. Fellows

55. Cousin of a bassoon

56. Sly trick

57. Abode for Jonah, once

58. Astronaut Grissom

59. Biochemistry abbr.

(Answers, next week)

As Israeli air strikes and naval shells bombarded Gaza last week, the world asked the question that perennially frustrates, confuses and enrages so many people across the planet: Why aren’t the Americans hating on Israel more?

As in Operation Cast Lead, the last big conflict between Israel and Hamas, and as during the operation against Hizbullah in Lebanon, much of the world screams in outrage while America yawns.

If anything, many of Israel’s military operations are more popular and less controversial in the United States than they are in Israel itself. This time around, President Obama and his administration issued one statement after another in support of Israel’s right to self-defense, and both houses of Congress passed resolutions in support of Jerusalem’s response.

Commentators around the world grasp at straws in seeking to explain what’s going on. Islamophobia and racism, say some. Americans just don’t care about Arab deaths and they are so blinded by their fear of Islam that they can’t see the simple realities of the conflict on the ground.

Others allege that a sinister Jewish lobby controls the media and the political system through the vast power of Jewish money; the poor ignorant Americans are the helpless pawns of clever Jews.

Still others suggest that it is fanatical Christian fundamentalists with their carry-on flight bags packed for the Rapture who are behind American blindness to Israel’s crimes.

America is a big country with a lot of things going on, but the real force driving American support for Israeli actions in Gaza isn’t Islamophobia, Jewish conspiracies or foam-flecked religious nuts. It’s something much simpler: many though not all Americans look at war through a distinctive cultural lens.

Readers of my book Special Providence know I’ve described four schools of American thinking about world affairs; from the perspective of the most widespread of them, the Jacksonians, what Israel is doing in Gaza makes perfect sense. Not only are many Jacksonians completely untroubled by Israel’s response to the rocket attacks in Gaza, many genuinely don’t understand why the rest of the world is so steamed about Israel – and so angry with the United States.

Americans as a people have never much believed in fighting by “the rules.” The Minutemen who fought the British regulars at Lexington and Concord in 1776 thought that there was nothing stupider in the world than to stand in even ranks and brightly colored uniforms waiting to shoot and be shot like gentlemen. They hid behind stone walls and trees, wearing clothes that blended in with their surroundings, and took potshots at the British wherever they could.

George Washington saved the Revolution by a surprise attack on British forces the night before Christmas; far from being ashamed of an attack no European general of the day would have countenanced, Americans turned a painting of the attack (“Washington Crossing the Delaware”) into a patriotic icon. In America, war is not a sport.

Theoreticians of “just war” say that in order for war to be justifiable, two tests must be met. You have to have a legitimate cause for war (self-defense, for example, rather than grabbing land from a weaker neighbor) and you must fight the war in the right way. You must fight fair (that is, fight a just war), and you must fight nice.

One of the criteria for jus in bello (fighting nice as opposed to jus ad bellum, which is about whether it’s just) is proportionality. If the other guy comes at you with a stick, you can’t pull a knife. If he’s got a knife, you can’t pull a gun. If he burned your barn, you can’t nuke his capital. Your use of force must be proportionate to the cause and to the danger.

Israel’s fiercer critics attack it for fighting unjust wars against the Palestinians. For some, Zionism itself is an illegitimate idea, and a state that has no right to exist has no right to defend itself. Anything it does to defend itself is a crime. This is how Hamas and many others think and it is why people in this camp are able to work themselves up into such a froth of indignation and rage when Israel responds to their fire.

Mishpacha and Ami Magazines are competitors. They both seek to serve the same populations. They are virtually identical in Hashkafa – which is decidedly Charedi. How Charedi are they? Well neither of them will show a picture of a woman no matter how Tzanua (modestly dressed) she is. Even if she were wearing a Burka. That’s pretty Charedi.

At the same time they both seek as broad-based an Orthodox readership as they can find. Thus they will feature very positive articles on both the Satmar Rebbe and Rav Hershel Shachter of Yeshiva University.

While I believe they are both absolutely wrong in excluding pictures of Tzanua women – I applaud them for their broad based approach to Orthodoxy. There are many informative articles and weekly columns by talented writers in both magazines. But all is not rosy. I often find things in these magazines which are truly maddening. This week both magazines had articles like that.

In what was an otherwise very positive story in Ami about how the Jewish community’s extraordinary efforts in alleviating the pain of those who have suffered – and are still suffering – the after effects of Superstorm Sandy, there was one little blurb that bothered me. It read as follows: “The Rosh Yeshiva gave us a Psak to help anyone who asked.”

On the surface that sounds wonderful. The Rosh Yeshiva is Rav Reuven Feinstein. He of course said the right thing. Now the Yeshiva students who were working so hard helping their fellow Jews could also help to alleviate the plight of non Jews suffering the same fate.

Really? They had to ask a Shaila? Did they think that if a non Jew desperate for some help – they should tell him, “No”? “Sorry, we can’t help you”? “We can only help Jews”?

That too is a Shaila? What kind of Chinuch do these young Jewish students get that causes them to hesitate in feeding a fellow human being in need? The implication is obvious. Had they not been able to ask a Shaila and a non Jew desperate for food – saw these boys handing ou t food and asked for some himself, they may very well have refused them until they asked a Shaila. Can there be a greater Chilul HaShem than that?

Now I don’t know if they didn’t “shoot first and ask questions later”. Maybe they did feed the needy non Jew and merely wondered if they were doing the right thing. But even that is ridiculous. A fellow human being needs food to survive – you give it to him. Did they think God would punish them for doing so?

There is something terribly wrong with Charedi Jewish education if it does not make obvious the absolute requirement to help your fellow man in these circumstances.

On a completely different subject – this week’s column in Mishpacha by Eitan Kobre really got me upset. In yet another in what seems to be a never ending assault on the President by right wing pundits, Mr. Kobre goes to town on how stupid the black community in Washington DC is for voting for the President.

I am going to stop short of calling Mr. Kobre a racist. I don’t think he is. After all in using economist Thomas Sowell – a black man – to bolster his opinion it is kind of hard to say that he is prejudiced against black people.

But still there does seem to be a subtle prejudice that is hard to prove. He is not castigating all black people. Just those who voted for the President. Which – if I recall correctly – was well over 90%. He attributes this to voting racial pride rather than voting for what’s good for you. As an example of that he points to the fact that Republicans advocate vouchers which – where they have been used – has benefited the black community immensely. I believe that many black people endorse vouchers. And yet they voted for a President that will never implement them and instead will continue funneling money into the black hole of the public school system.

But is it really so surprising that people will vote their racial or ethnic pride – choosing that over someone whose substantive positions have proven to be more beneficial to them? How many Jews vote for the Jewish candidate because he is Jewish? Are Jews stupid too? Besides – are vouchers the only thing to base one’s vote upon?

To be clear, I have no problem with Mr. Kobre’s arch conservative politics. Although I am more of a centrist than a political conservative, I tend to lean a bit more toward the conservative approach. So politically we are not that far apart.

But to bash the President as if he were some sort of socialist “Robin Hood” interested in taking from the rich via taxes and giving it away to the poor via an enormous increase in entitlement programs – is taking the criticism to a new low. Mr. Kobre may not have used those terms in his column. But that is clearly how he thinks of the President. (Not that he’s alone. As I said Thomas Sowell agrees with him. As do many conservative pundits. In fact Rush Limbaugh makes Mr. Kobre look liberal by comparison.)

I do not recall this kind of criticism made against any other Democratic President. Nor even against a democratic candidate for President. Is he the most left leaning President or Presidential candidate in recent history? You would think he was the second coming of Karl Marx if one looks at the sheer venom of some critics. While I wouldn’t go that far with Mr. Kobre’s criticism, there does seem to be an inordinate amount of dislike for the man that goes beyond politics.

Like I said, I do not accuse Mr. Kobre of being a racist. And yet he goes to extraordinary lengths to foment hatred of the man by the Jewish people. Why else did he once again make reference to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright?! What was his point here other than to somehow connect the President to Wright’s rabid anti Israel stance?

And all this in the face of the President’s unqualified support of Israel’s bombing raids in Gaza. I wonder how Reverend Wright characterized it?

Adding insult to injury – that Mr. Kobre wrote this article and that Mishpacha published it before there was a cease fire and while Hamas was still firing rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem make it even more egregious. Especially since it was the Obama administration’s financial investment in the Iron Dome Defense system which prevented the kind of carnage that would surely have ensued had it not been there! If anything Mr. Kobre should be thanking the president profusely instead of calling black people stupid for voting for him.

Come on Eytan. You can do better than that!

Visit Emes Ve-Emunah.

Politicians are by nature narcissistic creatures, but it is possible that former Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni will come down in history as the narcissist’s narcissist. This afternoon she announced the launching of her new party, to be named: The Movement under the Leadership of Tzipi Livini. And if you figured that it only sounds this bad in English, trust me, it sounds just as bizarre in Hebrew.

Tzipi Livni, chairwoman of the movement led by Tzipi Livni, with her dark blonde Prince Valiant, obviously after a good, pre-run diet to trim that zaftig post-defeat figure, told a room packed with her supporters (a huge no-no in Israeli politics, you don’t bring your fans to a press conference – as one Israeli reporter made sure to protest loudly during the live broadcast) that she had spotted a vacuum at the center of Israel’s political map, a vacuum created largely by the colossal failure of her own party – and that she was determined to go after those low hanging fruits of Israel’s mythical, undecided centrists.

The press conference and the announcement against a backdrop of campaign posters that bore her name, marked a kind of last stand for a leader whose career was always hers to lose. Like Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, Livni is member of the Likud royalty, a princess among princes, daughter of Eitan Livni, the chief of staff of the Irgun, Livni picked up her engraved invitation when she was appointed by Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 to manage the privatization of government-owned companies. In 1999 she made it, after one failed attempt, into the Knesset, and shortly thereafter was picked up by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to serve in his government. She followed Sharon out of the Likud and into Kadima, all the time serving in a variety of ministerial positions, including a stint as Foreign Minister for Sharon’s successor Ehud Olmert.

Then, in 2009, after Olmert was forced to resign following corruption charges, Livni led theKadima party to victory in the polls. She beat Netanyahu’s Likud party by one vote, 28 to 27. But Tzipi Livni who had made a superb second and third in command for three masters, was unable to apply the lessons she had learned and ended up being outmaneuvered by the wilier and more experienced Netanyahu, earning the dubious record of being the only party leader who won the numeric vote and didn’t get to form the coalition government.

This afternoon, a reporter hammered that point in with the kind of cruelty one expects of the Israeli press: With all due respect, she asked the candidate, the voter has already given you a mandate four years ago, and you dropped the ball. Why should anyone choose you again?

Livni, who had clearly been practicing for just this kind of an in-your-face dig, was nevertheless shaken by it. She answered that she had lost her first chance because she stuck by her values, and preferred to sit out the term on the opposition benches rather than lower her standards.

Ah, well, that’s encouraging.

With the date for submitting the final party lists approaching (next week), Livni received a generous prediction in one of this morning’s polls – 9 seats. But does she even have nine potential seat-worthy candidates, or is she going to follow the example another narcissist, Yair Lapid, and appoint her hairdresser, gardener and trainer?

It was a disheartening press conference of a political hack well past her prime who believes she has any credit left with the voters. From what we’ve seen this week at the Likud primaries, the Israeli voter has no problem dropping his leaders when they’ve disappointed him – and Tzipi Livni is one big, self inflated disappointment.

Israeli citizens are instructed to take shelter in the hallways and stairways of their apartment buildings after warning sirens sound, signaling an incoming rocket. We in the Tel Aviv area have not experienced this kind of thing since 1990. Our animals are particularly perplexed: it looks like we’re out on a walkie, but then no walkie, we just stop at the stairs? What the heck kind of outing is this?

They say animals can tell by a sixth sense when something’s about to happen, but the fact is, once something actually happens they have no clue what’s going on.

Our cats are not the least bit disturbed by the tension around them. With brains the size of a walnut, they don’t store tension – they let go of it, to make room for new things – moth!

The fact is our hallways cannot protect us from a direct hit, God forbid, but they’re pretty solid against shrapnel. Plus you get to meet and talk to neighbors you didn’t even know you had. Did you know she had a dog? I didn’t know she had a dog. Like that…

Hamas has said that the IDF’s killing of one of their top terrorists was a declaration of war.

But who declared war first? The official Hamas Charter, written in August 1988, says:

1. “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it has obliterated others before it”
2. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Hamas’ charter is itself an official declaration of war, and all who join Hamas are automatically the sworn enemies of Israel. The fact that Israel chooses not to attack Hamas for long periods of time does not in any way absolve Hamas of its guilt of being in a permanent state of war against Israel for the past 24 years. So when its spokesmen try to influence public opinion by accusing Israel of starting a war against it, they are being the worst kind of hypocrites.

Let no one be deceived that the current conflagration was started by this or that attack in 2012; those who founded Hamas declared war on Israel in 1988, and no amount of media hype can change that fact.

Every now and then an email comes my way warning about the day when the government unleashes the military against its own citizens. This day isn’t likely to come because for one thing the current regime is not particularly fond of the military.

The Obama Administration isn’t inflicting massive cuts on the military, cutting their health care and pushing veteran officers out the door because it likes the military as an institution. It doesn’t. And it won’t until it remakes it into a fully politically correct institution dedicated to promoting tolerance and fighting global warming. Progress has been made on that front, the Navy is cutting ships and spending money on Green Energy. The Marines are celebrating gay marriage. Any day now the Air Force will be announcing its first wheelchair pilot. But it’s still a poor fit with the culture of the left.

If Obama has to have any kind of military, he prefers the kind where young men with college degrees sit in a room, push buttons and kill people thousands of miles away from remotely controlled aircraft. That kind of military is a closer cultural fit with a campaign that is in love with technocratic solutions and always looking for shortcuts to avoid the dangerous and dirty hard work that has to be done. It’s also much less dangerous.

Unleashing the military on a civilian population carries a price. Once you call out the troops to protect your regime, one of two things happen. Either the troops don’t do it and your government is done. Or they do it and your regime now lives or dies by the support of the military. Within the last few years the use of the military in Egypt and Iran turned generals into the arbiters of political succession. To the left, the idea of the people they despise deciding who should run the country and how is their biggest nightmare. It is one reason that we still have a democracy.

The more that a country depends on its military, the more likely it is to be run by the military. After the United States kept the Union together through a civil war, the first elected President after Lincoln was General Ulysses S Grant, the man credited by many with winning the war. His successor, Rutherford B. Hayes was a another general and a Civil War hero. As was Hayes’ successor, James A. Garfield and his successor, Chester A. Arthur. Democratic draft dodger Grover Cleveland briefly broke the pattern, but then the Republicans were back with Benjamin Harrison. From 1869 to 1893, America was ruled by the Republican victors of the war who had at one time been able to put the title of general in front of their name. And that’s in a democracy.

Popular wars have led to generals becoming presidents. The Revolutionary War gave us Washington. The War of 1812 gave us Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor. The Spanish-American War gave us Teddy Roosevelt, though he was only a Colonel. WW2 gave us Eisenhower. The Gulf War nearly gave us Colin Powell. The current war may yet give us Petraeus. But the Civil War gave us the largest amount of generals in the White House because it was an internal conflict.

Israel, another democracy which is heavily dependent on the military, has seated three generals in the Prime Minister’s chair since the 1990′s and far more who are involved in politics. The leader of the opposition is a general and there are five generals in Netanyahu’s cabinet. This is a direct result of the elevation of the importance of the military as an institution. The more important the military is to the welfare of the country, the likelier it is to become a career track to prominent positions in the business world and in politics. And that’s in a democracy. Imagine the situation in a dictatorship that depends on the military to stay in power.

The Soviet Union did not depend on the Red Army, it did depend on the secret police. And the KGB took over. The KGB nearly seized power after Stalin’s death and had to be suppressed by the Red Army. In 1982, power fell to an actual KGB Chairman. Today Russia is run by former KGB officers, including a fellow by the name of Vladimir Putin.