The fireworks in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to rein in government employee unions aren’t over yet. Unions have declared war on any Wisconsin businesses that won’t publicly oppose Walker, and the budget repair bill has been blocked by an activist judge, turning next week’s state Supreme Court election into a proxy battle on the issue.

Oh, and we’re not done with the onslaught of violence and vitriol on behalf of the unions and the educational establishment, either. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that Wisconsin resident Katherine Windels is now facing felony charges for death threats she made against state Republican lawmakers:

The subject line of the second email was: ”Atten: Death Threat!!!! Bomb!!!” In that email, she purportedly wrote, “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks.”

“I hope you have a good time in hell,” she allegedly wrote in the lengthy email in which she purportedly listed scenarios in which the legislators and their families would die, including bombings and by “putting a nice little bullet in your head.”

According to the criminal complaint, Windels told investigators “I sent out emails that I was
disgusted and very upset by what they were doing.”

Asked if she intended to follow through on any of her threats, Windels told the investigators “No,” according to the complaint.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey reveals two key details about the story that the Sentinel left out: first, Windels is a pre-school and kindergarten teacher, and second, this isn’t the first time she’s done something like this—she sent the emails using the name and email address of Lisa Patterson, a woman who she allegedly sent threatening text messages to in October 2010.

Granted, as new details about wrongdoers trickle out, it’s only natural that some outlets will catch wind of them sooner than others. But there’s reason to suspect there’s more to the media’s delinquency here—in a March 19 post on Newsradio 620’s website, George Mitchell publicizes an email exchange with Sentinel managing editor George Stanley on the paper’s lack of coverage of the protestors’ less-savory antics:

Stanley responded, “Both sides are demonizing each other with deliberate, dishonest propaganda….You reap what you sow.”

I asked, “Are you suggesting that the behavior of Walker supporters is comparable to that of his opponents?”  He replied, “I don’t ‘suggest’ like you, George. I didn’t say a word about behavior or go to your links. I prefer honesty to bullshit.”

I replied, “You use the word “propaganda” and say “both sides” are guilty.  Death threats.  Nails in the driveway.  Obscene graffiti.  The list goes on and on.  This amazing and unwarranted conclusion apparently is how the MJS rationalizes not covering the story.”

I asked Stanley if I could quote him, as I wanted to submit an op-ed to the paper.  He said, “No, you’re just full of shit, that’s all I’m saying.”

Yeah…I mean, it’s not as if we just had a prolonged media circus about alleged right-wing incitement of violence, prompting the President of the United States to call on all Americans to strive for greater civility or anything…and it’s not like the fact that a woman who told politicians their families were going to die is entrusted with the education of small children has much relevance to a debate about the condition of Wisconsin’s education system…

This case tells us a great deal about the Left.  First, the fact that Sarah Palin might as well have personally driven Jared Loughner to Gabrielle Giffords’ doorstop, yet we haven’t heard a peep from the civility police about this, or numerous other stories of left-wing civility to come out of Wisconsin, speaks to their utter insincerity about the state of American public discourse. Second, while the average teacher isn’t a nut like Windels, the nation’s public schools have a higher share of refuse—political and otherwise—than many are willing to admit—as Megan Fox wrote on March 8, “the public school system, which is about the same size as the Catholic Church in America with a school in every parish, has more sexual abuse cases in ten years than the Catholic Church has had in fifty.”

Why? Because America’s educational establishment sees teaching as a vehicle for ideological indoctrination rather than a sacred duty to raise the next generation of virtuous, independent, well-adjusted citizens, and because union rules insulate their members from accountability.

Anti-Republican anger of a less murderous sort is still high in Wisconsin, and I still have doubts that my home state’s conservative leaders are making their case as effectively as they could be (a case Morrissey sees reason to believe the American people are receptive to). But they can’t give up—from fiscal solvency to the quality of our schools, this fight simply has too much at stake.

The Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks” were ostensibly launched this week. U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell is expected to shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah, seeking to find a path to “direct” talks whose purported aim would be peace. To say all this is a triumph of hope over experience is a severe understatement.

Many have pointed out why even the “indirect” or proximity talks bear no positive potential, and there is no need to belabor these matters. If Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas couldn’t reach an agreement with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert—who, at least as far as the PA is concerned, bought totally into the “peace” ideology—how would he reach one with current prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who doesn’t? And what about the fact that the Palestinian Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are now bifurcated into distinct entities—the Fatah-run PA and Hamas-led Gaza—that are at loggerheads, with Hamas officially shunned by the U.S. as a terrorist organization?

There’s also the matter of the supposedly more moderate PA’s ongoing “incitement”—or, more accurately, its inculcation of a terror-cult centering on the mass murder of Israeli Jews, as heavily documented by Palestinian Media Watch and others. Seemingly the notion of a peace partner for Israel and the notion of an anti-Israeli terror cult are mutually exclusive. The U.S. State Department has praised Abbas for saying he “will work against incitement of any sort” and Netanyahu for purportedly calling off construction for Jews in a Jerusalem neighborhood. As usual, the moral equivalency between terror and building homes is repugnant, and the chances that Abbas could negate seventeen years of PA hate-indoctrination in a few months, even if he tried to, nil.

If, then, the talks are likely to lead nowhere, are they simply unimportant? Unfortunately not—because they sustain the fiction of the PA’s legitimacy despite its murderous ideology, and the fiction of Israel’s supposed need to reduce itself to the death-trap 1967 borders.

Meanwhile another Arab party with which Israel did sign a peace treaty, Egypt, has been pushing to get Israel’s nuclear-weapons capability (never officially acknowledged but universally believed to exist) on the international agenda—and not without success.

The Obama administration’s reported interest in Egypt’s proposal for a “Middle East nuclear-free zone”—a euphemism for defanging Israel—has already been publicly confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at this month’s nonproliferation conference at UN Headquarters in New York. (In a separate but related development, the International Atomic Energy Agency is reportedly considering subjecting Israel’s nuclear program to “unprecedented scrutiny” next month.) Egypt is calling specifically for negotiations on a nuke-free Middle East to begin in 2011.

All this is anathema to Israelis of all political persuasions. From the days when major figures of Israel’s founding Labor Zionist movement, like its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion and its current president Shimon Peres, first began to build Israel’s nuclear capability in the 1950s, it has been seen as a fundamental deterrent and insurance for Israel’s survival in a Middle East where Israel is drastically outnumbered by Arab and Muslim populations and military forces.

Why, then, would Egypt—not only formally at peace with Israel for three decades but often said to be tacitly in alliance with it against radical actors like Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas—be working to undo this mainstay of Israel’s endurance?

Some might say it’s out of fear. But as Israeli commentator Caroline Glick points out,

Notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary, Israel’s neighbors fully recognize that the purpose of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal is to guarantee Israel’s survival…. This is why although it is four decades old, Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal has never caused a regional nuclear arms race.

Unlike, that is, Iran’s imminent nuclear capability—which the Middle East does fear and, unlike Israel’s, will undoubtedly spark a nuclear buildup in the region if it comes to fruition.

In other words, there appears to be no explanation for Egypt’s push against Israel’s nukes except malevolence. But if the result of thirty years of formally sanctioned peace, and a degree of pragmatic cooperation against mutual foes, is that Egypt is still working to neutralize, through international pressure, a guarantor of Israel’s existence—that is, to put Israel in acute jeopardy, albeit by diplomatic instead of military means as in 1948, 1967, and 1973—what does that say about the depth of the “peace”?

At the start of “Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks,” such sobering thoughts are, of course, no more welcome than the facts about Palestinian “incitement.” Attending to them would indicate that continuing the pressure on Israel to give up its vital strategic buffer in the West Bank is profoundly dangerous to it in such a hostile environment. Better to hear and see no evil and keep the “process” grinding away.

The US has given private assurances to encourage the Palestinians to join indirect Middle East peace talks, including an offer to consider allowing UN security council condemnation of any significant new Israeli settlement activity, the Guardian has learned.

The assurances were given verbally in a meeting a week ago between a senior US diplomat and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Since then - and after months of US diplomacy - it appears Israeli and Palestinian leaders are close to starting indirect "proximity" talks, which would be the first resumption of the Middle East peace process since Israel's war in Gaza began in late 2008.

There was no official confirmation of the details of the meeting and Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, denied assurances were given. "It's not true," he said. "We are still talking to the Americans."

But a Palestinian source, who was given a detailed account of the meeting, said David Hale, the deputy of the US special envoy, George Mitchell, told Abbas that Barack Obama wanted to see the peace process move forward with the starting of indirect talks. The diplomat said Washington understood there were obstacles and described Israeli settlement construction as "provocative".

He told Abbas the Americans had received assurances from the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that one particular settlement project in East Jerusalem, at Ramat Shlomo, would not go ahead, at least for now. The site is important because last month an agreement on indirect talks collapsed within a day of being announced, after Israeli officials gave planning approval for 1,600 new homes in the settlement. The US vice‑president, Joe Biden, who was in Jerusalem at the time, condemned the Israeli announcement in unusually strong language.

Hale then told Abbas that if there was significantly provocative settlement activity, including in East Jerusalem, Washington may consider allowing the UN security council to censure Israel. It was understood that meant the US would abstain from voting on a resolution rather than use its veto....

JERUSALEM - The Obama administration has encouraged "resistance" by Palestinians to protest Israel's presence in eastern Jerusalem, a senior Palestinian Authority official claimed to WND.

The senior PA official, speaking from Ramallah on condition of anonymity, said that in recent meetings with U.S. envoys to the region, the American diplomats supported and encouraged the concept of Palestinian protests to pressure Israel into evacuating eastern sections of Jerusalem.

The PA official's claim follows a meeting in Jordan last week between PA President Mahmoud Abbas and George Mitchell, Obama's envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At a press conference immediately following the meeting, Abbas declared the Palestinian "right" to "resistance" against Israel.

The U.S. has come down hard on a decision by the Jerusalem municipality to approve 1,600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, an already-existing Jewish community in eastern Jerusalem. The decision was made public during Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the region earlier this month.

The Palestinians claim eastern Jerusalem as their future capital, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he does not intend to give up the Jewish sections of the city.

Netanyahu has stated that he had not been aware of the decision to build in Ramat Shlomo and that the announcement was not timed to coincide with Biden's visit.

Still, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod called the Ramat Shlomo announcement an "insult." Other administration officials called the Jewish neighborhood expansion an impediment to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations....

What planet are these people on?

(Planet jihad, apparently.)

"Clinton: Israel must prove commitment to peace," by Matthew Lee for Associated Press, March 16 (thanks to Mark):

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday said Israel must prove it is committed to the Mideast peace process with actions. But she brushed aside suggestions that relations with the main U.S. ally in the Mideast are in crisis over Israeli plans to build new Jewish housing in east Jerusalem.

Clinton said Israel must back up verbal pledges to talk peace with the Palestinians and improve an atmosphere poisoned by last week's housing announcement if stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are to be relaunched. She stressed that the U.S. remains committed to Israel's security despite current tensions.

Resolving what has become the most serious spat between the two countries in decades has become a top priority for the Obama administration as it strives to restart the moribund peace process with indirect, shuttle diplomacy by special Mideast envoy George Mitchell. Yet Clinton made clear that Israeli steps were needed first.

"We are engaged in very active consultations with the Israelis over steps that we think would demonstrate the requisite commitment to the process," Clinton said....

Do the Palestinians have to abandon jihad? End the genocidal children's shows? Stop teaching Jew-hatred? Nope. None of the above. They don't have to do anything at all.

U.S.-Israeli relations have hit a 35-year low over the contentious east Jerusalem building project. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren said: "Israel's ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975...a crisis of historic proportions." This is because, according to Barack Obama, Jewish homes in the Jewish homeland "hinder peace" with Muslims. According to the Associated Press:

Israel's already strained relationship with the U.S. hit a new low last week when it announced the construction plans during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden. The timing of the announcement deeply embarrassed the Obama administration and put plans for indirect peace talks with the Palestinians in jeopardy.

What about the timing of the Palestinian Authority's "honoring" of a mass-murdering female genocidal bomber, for whom the Palestinians are naming a square in Ramallah? The Jerusalem Post reported: "The ceremony was scheduled to take place on the 32nd anniversary of the attack, the worst terrorist incident in Israel's history, in which terrorists commandeered a bus and murdered 37 people, including 10 children." It too was scheduled to take place during Biden's visit, but was postponed for a week after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asked Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, to get the Palestinians to cancel it.

"The announcement of the settlements on the very day that the vice president was there was insulting," said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama adviser David Axelrod also said: "This was an affront, it was an insult, but most importantly, it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region. For this announcement to come at that time was very, very destructive."

Neither Clinton nor Axelrod mentioned anything about the honoring of the jihad terrorist being insulting. And it will still take place, just a week late. Yet Obama is pressuring Israel, not the Palestinians. Jews living in their holiest city is unacceptable, but senior Palestinian Authority officials joining the Fatah youth movement in a "popular inauguration" ceremony for a square named for a terrorist is just fine. The stalkers of the Jews are no hindrance to peace.

What is insulting is America's abandonment of our most loyal and trusted ally in a region that can only be described as a hot mess, full of backward, oppressive, and brutal hellholes -- save for Israel.

America is profoundly pro-Israel; yet Barack Obama is taking on our best friend and most strategic ally in the Middle East and creating an environment, a free zone, for rampant anti-Semitism.

It is no coincidence that as all this unfolded, Palestinian Arabs were rioting every day in Jerusalem and elsewhere, because of their false charge that Israel is trying to destroy Islamic holy sites. And instead of working to calm the situation, the "moderate" Palestinian Authority is trying to make things worse by fabricating yet another libel against the Jews: now they're saying that Israel tried to burn down Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969.

This is eerily reminiscent of many of the blood libels spread by Muslim leaders against the Jews throughout history, specifically the ones that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spread in the Muslim world before he co-conspired with Hitler to exterminate the Jews during the Holocaust.

On April 4, 1920, there was carnage in Jerusalem. Muslims spent four days massacring Jews and burning down buildings in the Jewish quarter. The future Mufti was arrested and charged with incitement to violence. Historian Maurice Pearlman in his 1947 book The Mufti of Jerusalem explains that the riots were touched off by al-Husseini's "inflammatory articles in the newspaper, Suriyahal Janubiyah." Pearlman adds: "In the weeks preceding the attack faked pictures had been disseminated among the Arabs showing the Mosque Omar in ruins. The caption beneath declared that it had been destroyed by Jewish infidels who were now seeking to build on its site the Jewish Temple."...

Read it all. And read more about Obama's hardline anti-Israel stance in our forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America, coming this July from Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster. Pre-order here.

Conspicuous for its absence in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last week was any mention of what is variously called the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Middle East peace process. Israeli analyst Yoram Ettinger suggests that this “reflects a US order of priorities and, possibly, a concern that mediation in the Arab-Israeli conflict does not advance—but undermines—Obama’s domestic standing.”

Conceivably, a similar premise underlies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent demonstrative acts in favor of settlement in the West Bank. Last week, just after a meeting in Jerusalem with U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Netanyahu marked the tree-planting holiday of Tu Bishvat by planting trees in public ceremonies in the Jerusalem-area West Bank settlements of Kfar Etzion and Maale Adumim. He capped it off on Friday with a tree-planting ceremony in Ariel, a settlement somewhat deeper in the West Bank in Samaria. There Netanyahu suggested that the settlement was a crucial part of Israel:

“Everyone who understands the geography of Israel know how important Ariel is. It is the heart of our country. We are here where are forefathers were, and we will stay here.”

And on Sunday Benny Begin, son of the former prime minister and a member of Netanyahu’s inner security cabinet, took part in a cornerstone-laying ceremony in yet another West Bank settlement, Beit Hagai, and said:

“The state of Israel and the people of Israel have interests in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and in Jerusalem, which are not only security-related, but based on an ancient affiliation.”

Considering that in November Obama harshly criticized Israel for planning to build within a neighborhood of Jerusalem, also conspicuous for its absence, so far, is any public U.S. rebuke of Netanyahu or Begin for these gestures. Ettinger suggests that Obama’s “involvement with the Arab-Israeli conflict has diverted his attention from issues which are much more important…eroded [his] support among the American people, [and] complicated his relations with friends of Israel on Capitol Hill, whose support is critical to Obama’s legislative agenda.”

Although it may be too early to assume a waning of Obama’s pressures on Israel, his words in his recent Time interview also strengthen that impression. “This is as intractable a problem as you get,” Obama said. “Both sides—the Israelis and the Palestinians—have found that the political environment [was] such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation.” If so, a lull in the grimly relentless diplomatic activity on the Israeli-Palestinian front would be a chance to rethink some assumptions that have become all too axiomatic.

One is that the Palestinian side should always be coddled, with infinite patience, and should never have to pay a price for its failures. With Netanyahu having declared in November an unprecedented ten-month freeze in new construction in the West Bank, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas continuing to refuse to hold talks with him, it can be hoped that Netanyahu’s and Begin’s affirmations signal a new Israeli assertiveness. It is only for the Palestinians that land, and offers, are kept indefinitely on hold even as they preach hatred and practice rejectionism. Energetically resuming settlement activity at the end of the ten months would, for once, be a fitting response.

It could also be asked whether the pursuit of a Palestinian state as a supposed panacea has ever made much sense in normative terms. Human Rights Watch has published its World Report 2010 and gives a rundown of the human rights situation in Middle Eastern Arab countries that is anything but encouraging. Regarding women’s rights, the report points out that:

“Perpetrators of so-called honor killings in Jordan (where there were at least 20 such killings), and in Syria (at least 12), benefit from legal provisions that mitigate their punishments…. Domestic abuse went largely unpunished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In Lebanon and Jordan, where domestic abuse can be tried as assault, protection mechanisms for women are largely inadequate and ineffective.”

As for prison conditions, “Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen failed to tackle frequent incidents of torture. Jordan’s prison reform program has not strengthened accountability mechanisms for torture….”

Minority rights—“Saudi Arabia discriminated against its Shia population…. Kurds, Syria’s largest non-Arab ethnic minority, were subject to systematic discrimination….” and so on.

Considering that all these abuses—oppression of women, torture in prisons, persecution of the Christian minority—already exist in the Palestinian Authority (not to mention Hamas-ruled Gaza), a diplomatic lull could be a time, particularly from an American standpoint, to question whether the dogged pursuit of a Palestinian state holds up to scrutiny. Instilling democracy in the Arab world may not have been realistic; creating another dictatorship—apart from the security threat it would pose to Israel—would appear worse than pointless.

Instead, a combination of Israeli assertiveness and U.S. benign neglect would convey the right messages to the Palestinians: that they, too, are subject to the cost-benefit calculi of human life and there are costs for clinging to radical positions rooted in a vision of Israel’s demise; that their present situation of enhanced autonomy under Israeli security control is quite feasible for Israel, which has always had its own interests and attachments in the West Bank.

U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell is here in Israel again, and it’s not stirring much excitement or even interest. On Sunday he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the latter saying Mitchell had “interesting ideas” on how to get Israeli-Palestinian talks going again but not saying what the ideas were.

On Friday Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas reiterated to Mitchell his refusal to talk with Netanyahu absent a total ban on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and East Jerusalem. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the fact that Israel had positions at all—on not giving up every inch of the West Bank, on the demilitarization of a future Palestinian state—made negotiating with Israel impossible.

Based on his statements to Time magazine’s Joe Klein last week, it can be surmised that President Barack Obama is not all that surprised by Mitchell’s inability to get anything moving. “This is just really hard,” Obama told Klein.

“Even for a guy like George Mitchell…. Both sides—the Israelis and the Palestinians—have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation…. From Abbas’ perspective, he’s got Hamas looking over his shoulder and, I think, an environment generally within the Arab world that feels impatient with any process.

“And on the Israeli front—although the Israelis, I think, after a lot of time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, they still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures….”

It is easy to poke holes in Obama’s evenhandedness here: the fact that while Netanyahu has been ready at all times to negotiate with Abbas, with not even his most right-wing coalition partners objecting to negotiations per se, it is Abbas who has stonewalled; the fact that it was not “after a lot of time,” but very quickly—in a matter of months since taking office—that Netanyahu made quite bold gestures of reversing his lifelong opposition to a Palestinian state and then announcing an unprecedented ten-month settlement freeze in Judea and Samaria, none of which has sufficed to lure Abbas back to the table.

It is also easy to cite the usual political reasons for the stalemate—that Obama, by hitting Israel hard on the settlements issue particularly in his Cairo speech in June, forced Abbas into an uncompromising stance where he could not appear less Catholic than the pope; that the Palestinians, more generally, saw Obama as an ally and were disappointed when he showed understanding for some of Israel’s positions. All of which is valid—but only grazes the truth.

Looking more deeply into what has “gone wrong”—and has kept going wrong ever since the formal Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process began in 1993—would require taking account, for a change, of the cultural difference between Israel and the Palestinian side.

It was less than three weeks ago that Netanyahu complained to the White House and State Department about Palestinian incitement—and not by Hamas in Gaza, but by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu was reacting to two particularly egregious incidents. In one, Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad paid homage to three Palestinian terrorists who had been killed by Israeli forces after murdering an Israeli rabbi and father of seven. In the other, Abbas named a square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, the Palestinian woman terrorist who led the “Coastal Road Massacre” in 1978—the worst terror attack in Israel’s history, killing 37 including 10 children. (More details about the Palestinian Authority’s lionization of these killers here and here.)

Obama, for his part, had no public reaction to Abbas and Fayyad’s behavior, did not mention it in his interview to Klein, and clearly was not deterred by it from sending Mitchell for another round of attempted diplomacy. As Obama did say to Klein: “we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty and can start focusing on developing their economy and improving the lives of their children and grandchildren.”

In other words, even-steven—both sides wanting their peaceful place in the sun. The possibility that peace is not a value for the Palestinian Authority in the way it is for Israel—that there may be an unbridgeable gap between a Western democracy and a non-Western entity that glorifies and perpetrates terrorism—does not, from the evidence available, exist in Obama’s, or Mitchell’s, mental lexicon.

But it is high time that it did, high time that the administration start giving its democratic ally, Israel, more credit and start reexamining the assumption that achieving sovereignty for the Palestinians—Dalal Mughrabi Square and all—is an American interest. Which is, alas, too much to hope for from this administration.

As an oleh chadash (new immigrant) that came to land of the Jewish people not due to persecution or suffering but because of deep-rooted beliefs in Zionism, like many I have a big problem with all the latest discussions over Gilad Shalit.

As an oleh chadash that has recently received a profile score of 97 to serve my mandatory army service in a combat unit, and as an oleh chadash that for the past year has lived in the Gaza border city of Sderot I have an enormous problem with the latest discussions over Gilad Shalit.

I do not hold some seat in the government with some fancy title but I know what is going on now is wrong and it pains me to watch it happen.

Why is the discussion during the past week about how many terrorists we are going to give Hamas, Fatah, and the PA as a whole for Gilad’s return? Why isn’t the discussion about how we are going to make Hamas pay a huge price for the kidnapping of Gilad or about a plan to retrieve him?

Because we simply have entered into the Arabs’ shuk of hostage negotiating they have already declared a victory that will only empower them to kidnap more soldiers. It is laughable if one believes that they care if they get back 400, 1000, 980 or even 5 of their terrorists because they are in no way lacking numbers, and moreover as they use their own sons and daughters as human shields they clearly don’t value the lives of those they are receiving.

After a 21 day operation inside the Gaza Strip and we didn’t see Gilad back home, and now with our government, providing our enemies with the future opportunities to kidnap more of our sons and brothers- what am I supposed to think as someone soon entering the Israeli Defense Forces for ideological reasons when I know that my homeland won’t rescue me and will minimally take over 3 years to trade me only at the cost of future capture of others like me?

As someone living in Sderot since Operation Cast Lead it is hard to believe that this cowardly surrender to our enemies will bring anything but more missiles to more cities in Israel. It is awing to me when even the Defense Minister Ehud Barak has accepted the reality of rockets in our lives when last week in Sderot he described the situation as quiet. Friday before Shabbat we surpassed a count of 280 qassams, mortars and grads fired since Operation Cast Lead- apparently an acceptable amount to our elected leaders.

So what am I supposed to think as someone who lives in Sderot for the same ideological reasons that I have come to my homeland and will serve in our army, when I know our government is giving our enemies the opportunity to fire more missiles at me and others like me?

Can we really not get Gilad back with our infamous intelligence sources, stealth, and military training? Or has our government already sacrificed him and others to be so that they can get political points with all the world on-lookers and as a result maybe Bibi can also get a handout Nobel Peace Prize?

While all of this is happening and is considered a movement toward a greater peace deal, are we really supposed to believe it is all because of that scary hot-topic term “settlements.” Sderot, Ashkelon, and Beersheva are all targets of missile attacks that are not considered “settlements” by our administration or the Obama led American administration. Gilad Shalit was born in Nahariya and grew up in Mitzpe Hila, both of which are not “settlements.” So how can disallowing the growth of the Jewish nation or what George Mitchell and Barack Obama deem illegal settlement building really help bring Gilad home, stop the future capture of Israelis, and stop missiles from being fired at Israelis?

I do not intend to be facetious in writing all these questions but I am truly asking. As an oleh chadash soon entering the IDF and living in Sderot, what I am observing baffles me and leaves me with a load of questions.

Jacob Shrybman is a writer for the Sderot Media Center.

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