The best side of Israel?

Nicholas Kristof wrote the following in a New York Times editorial a few days ago:

Yet it is also here [in Judea and Samaria] that you see the very best side of Israel. Israeli human rights groups relentlessly stand up for Palestinians. Israeli women volunteer at checkpoints to help Palestinians through. Israeli courts periodically rule in favor of Palestinians. Israeli scholars have published research that undermines their own nation’s mythologies. Many Israeli journalists have been fair-minded toward Palestinians in a way that Arab journalists have rarely reciprocated.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, raq rega! The best side of Israel is when “Israeli courts periodically rule in favor of Palestinians”? That doesn’t make any sense:

Trusting Abbas

When I saw PA leader Abbas’ claim last week that Israel and Hamas were holding secret negotiations, which both Israel and Hamas immediately denied, I couldn’t help being amused. The only possible benefit of Abbas making such a claim is that he might be taken more seriously as a leader if he decided to tell the truth while Israel and Hamas continued to lie to the public.

Truth is, I expected such negotiations might be going on (as did many other writers) but when Israel explicitly denied such talks, one of two outcomes were possible. Either Israel was in fact not negotiating with Hamas, or the government was so politically inept as to believe that it could actually stop people from finding out the truth.

So, when I read this morning in the JPost that negotiations are in fact taking place, and that “Israel is demanding that a formal calm with Hamas be preceded by a 30-day “feeling the pulse” period,” I couldn’t help but smile a little.

The Terrorist Opposition Party?

There are a couple of interesting articles this morning I’d like to write about, but this one was by far the most outrageous. For the last few years there have been various efforts in Britain to attack Israel politically, the most recent being an academic boycott. Yet just as it seemed the redcoats had finally given up picking fights Israel, the British government announced yesterday that Likud leader Moshe Feiglin was banned from entering the U.K. on the grounds that his actions

foment or justify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs; seek to provoke others to terrorist acts; foment other serious criminal activity or seek to provoke others to serious criminal acts and foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.

What continues to confound me about stories like this is that Britain is supposed to be a world leader in academics. The Ivy Leagues in the US all imitate the academic style of Cambridge and Oxford.