Blog/January 2013/Jan 4th

Jan 4th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

B"H, our family members who last week were on the sick list, are back on the "pending-ok" list. Thank you for your kind words of support and your prayers! Politics are stormy as usual in the Land.

Our schedules haven't overlapped very much this week, so really I can't tell you much about my daughters. Even though Sarah lives in our house, we practically didn't see her at all -- she actually asked me yesterday, "did I even see you this week?". No, sweets, you didn't (except for yesterday). We heard that Daniela is getting better, but we also didn't really have an opportunity to communicate much with her. Sorry for the lack of info... Similarly, Chris (my nephew) is staying with us but was mostly elsewhere the whole week. Kids, these days!

At work, I was under strong pressure to meet a January 1st deadline. We were using a software library from a third party, for which the license expired at the end of December, and for which we were unwilling to renew the license. So my job for the past several months has been to take another software library which we purchased outright, and bring it "up to spec" for the work we do. There was a crucial bit that wasn't working correctly, and which we needed to have working for the 1/1 deadline -- and, mirabile dictu! -- I got it working in the nick of time. So that was a successful conclusion to a quite stressful several months.

The secular year ended and the new one commenced, without many people in Israel taking note. Chris went to Tel Aviv to festivate, but as usual Esther and I barely noticed anything different. However, since it is common to list the accomplishments of the past year, here's a list of Israel's top-10 stories from 2012 (as told by the Israel 21C site).

Esther and I attended our first political convention ever, the Third Annual Conference on the Application of Israeli Sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. It was absolutely packed, and was an interesting event to attend. Inevitably, however, the speakers were "preaching to the choir" so to speak, and we didn't hear much we hadn't heard before. Except for one thing, which we didn't know: that the Knesset had in fact already passed a law just after the '67 war, giving the government of Israel the authority to annex the reconquered lands. According to that law, all that is required from an Israeli-legal point of view is a government decision to act on it. Interesting, I thought.

As I mentioned last week, Netanyahu attacked Naftali Bennett, leader of the "Jewish Home" party. As a result, Likud started taking a dive in the polls, and Jewish Home started rising. That trend continued into this week, as more virulent anti-Jewish Home ads were released. So as of yesterday, polls were showing "Jewish Home" taking second place, surpassing Labor; and "Otsma Leyisrael" taking six seats instead of the two it currently has. I guess Netanyahu isn't as smart a politician as everyone thought, huh? It is looking more and more like the "left wing" of Israeli politics is disappearing and becoming largely irrelevant -- though they still control the supreme court, academia and large swaths of the government apparatus as well as the public companies.

I don't want to dwell too much on Israeli politics, but I will now explain to you why I'm voting "Otsma Leyisrael", which has been variously labelled "far right", "fascist", "racist" and numerous other epithets. Why would I do that to myself?

None of the epithets are accurate, not even the "far right" one. As I explained to people this week, "right" and "left" are convenient shorthand terms which have very little meaning. In Israeli politics, "right" generally means "nationalist", but in the US (for example) it usually means "socially conservative". So while this party is "right-wing" in the nationalist sense, it is for example "center-left" on social issues. Each of the parties running can be classified on several axes: security, economy, social issues, privacy rights. But back to the party I'm interested in and why.

In my opinion, the most crucial issue facing Israel is security. Without proper security, there will be no country, and no need to worry about any other issues. Over the past twenty years, since the failed Oslo Accords, Israeli governments have held to the notion of "land for peace". We have relinquished land, but we have not received peace in return; quite the opposite: almost 1,500 Israeli Jews have been killed as a direct result of the Oslo Accords! So clearly it is time to abandon failed theories. But what should we do instead?

We should annex the entire area we conquered in 1967, and apply Israeli civil law to the entire area. Arabs living there should be given the status of permanent residents but not citizens. They should retain whatever citizenship they currently have (most are Jordanian citizens). If they desire to become Israeli citizens, they would need to pass the same process as any non-Jew who wishes to become a citizen. If they want to leave for another country, they should have that right. This, in short, is the platform of "Otsma Leyisrael", and it's what I've been saying for years now. It's the only plan that can possibly work in the long run.

I told you last week I would give you a rundown on various "window managers" (for Linux), but I think I'll pass on that this time around and instead move on to everyone's favorite part of the blog, the menu. This shabbat we've got a full house! Friends from the Olde Country will be staying with us, as will my nephew. The menu will include: orzo salad, radish salad, salatim, baked denis fish, red lentil soup, roast beef, meat burekas, roasted potatoes, roasted peppers, carrots with mushrooms, crock-pot chicken, date-pecan cake, strawberry-cream ice-cream and sheseq ice-cream

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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