Flights of fancy

Michael Domb was nervous, alright. There, thousands of feet in the air, he took the controls of the small commuter airplane for the first time. The adrenaline rush was overwhelming as he guided the little Cesna 172 for what felt like an eternity. But he kept his cool, knowing that if he was ever to pilot one of Israel’s F-16s, he would have to acquit himself well right away.

Afterward, back on the ground, Michael buzzed with excitement as he waited for a ride home – from Mom and Dad. He was, after all, only 12 years old.

“It’s kind of weird that I can fly a plane but I can’t drive a car,” the unusually mature and exceedingly polite teen told The Jerusalem Post with a laugh. He still has more than two years to wait before hitting the highway on his own – even though he has earned his private pilot’s license, and will take his first solo flight next month when he turns 14. All before he has started high school.

Michael got his start when his uncle, also a pilot, let him tag along on flights.

“Mike would come home and say, ‘Hey, I got to take the controls!’ We didn’t believe it at first, but then we realized he was actually flying the plane,” said his mother, Liz, who is the music director at the Fieldstone Day School here Michael studies.

Soaring over the skies of Toronto, Domb said, was addicting. “Flying is something that hooks onto you and stays with you.”

After that maiden flight, Michael pleaded with his parents to let him study to be a pilot.

“At first it didn’t sound like the right thing for a 12-year-old to do,” said Michael’s father, Uriel, an Israeli-born aerospace expert. “He had gone sailing before and I thought that was fine, but flying seemed a little too high, a little too far and way too early. But he was persistent.”

“With certain kids, you just don’t bother saying no,” Liz explained. “Michael is like that. He was the kid on rollerblades at age three.”

Even so, said Uriel, “We thought he would give it up after one or two times. Instead, he only wanted to do it more.”

Ground school took about a year, Michael said, noting that he got some tutoring for the physics and some of the other studies. Upon graduating – he finished at the top of his class – he was initially assigned to fly out of Buttonville Municipal Airport, then was transferred to Markham Airport.

“The squadron at Markham is considered a high-ranking squadron,” he explained. “It mostly consists of older pilots working toward their commercial license. There are a lot of Indian pilots there and quite a few Israelis.”

The Israelis, he said, “have their own approach to flying. It’s a much smoother way, really; they fly better than most of the pilots training here. And their respect for safety is tremendous.”

Even better, Michael said, the IAF veterans “have been sharing a bunch of stories with me. They treat me as one of the gang. As long as you can fly well, you’re one of the gang. So I’m trying to get some ‘protektzia.’”

Maybe it’s working: On a visit to family here just before Pessah, Michael was invited to take a spin in one of the IAF’s training planes. (The flight was cancelled due to an alert in the North, but officers showed him around the Ramat David air force base.)

Domb has made other, deeper connections in Israel, too. While he was studying at a boarding school outside Binyamina last year, Michael spent a lot of time visiting the Stuckleman family in the Jezreel Valley yishuv of Timrat. The Stuckelmans’ son Gilad had grown close to the Dombs while traveling, working and teaching Hebrew in Canada following his military service. When Gilad returned to Israel for the Second Lebanon War and fell in battle, it strengthened Domb’s bond with the Stuckelmans.

“Michael really sees us as family,” said Gilad’s younger brother Yair, adding, “He’s very curious – he wants to learn about everything. He’s very interested in learning about Israel, especially. In fact, he knows more than most Israelis his age!”

Domb came to Israel for his bar mitzva, then stayed at the boarding school to sharpen his Hebrew skills and get used to everyday life here, hoping to prepare for his aliya after high school.

“Even though I’ve been to Israel many times throughout my childhood, when you move there, and actually get into your real life routine, it’s very different,” he said. “After staying at the school for a while, I didn’t like it, and returned to Canada. I got to a point where I wasn’t really learning more… and I realized that I really wanted to be at home.”

One of the difficulties, Michael said, was the forced break from flying.

“I talked to a lot of flying schools in Israel,” he said, “but by law, you can’t fly there until you’re 17.”

To fill that gap, he raced on the Haifa sailing team. Sailing, though, is just one of Michael’s hobbies, which also include snowboarding and playing the guitar.

“It’s hard to balance everything, but it does work out,” he said. “You just have to learn how to balance things and manage your time.”

And your finances, too.

“Flying is quite expensive,” Michael said, “about $200 an hour. I fly twice a month, which works out to about two hours a month, or $400-$500 a month. My parents weren’t going to pay for that, so I got a job fueling and dispatching aircraft at Markham. That brings in some money, plus I get a discount on my flight time.”

The bigger cost is the time involved. “For every hour in the air, I can spend up to five hours training and preparing on the ground. It’s a lot of time and a lot of work. I do it,” he said, “because I really love flying.”

And what he loves most about flying, he said, is aerobatics – “flying extremely fast, upside down, pulling 2 or 3 Gs.” (Yes, the kid has the lingo down pat.)

“Some people don’t like it,” Michael added. “I mean, I’ve seen lots of people come in for their first flights, and I can tell you that not everyone enjoys it. I understand that, too. It can be nauseating. You’re cramped into a very small space. You’re extremely close to the instructor in a cockpit that is very small.

“Also,” he continued, “There’s very little room for error. It takes a lot of time to build a feel for the airplane. You have to develop fine motor skills, learning how to make your hands and feet work together. You have to make everything work smoothly. It takes a lot of practice. You have to adjust your body to be able to work in tough conditions.”

Then there are the tough conditions that the planes face.

“Winter takes a toll on small planes especially,” Michael said, and all the more so in frigid Canada. “Recently we had ice build-up on our airplane and had to make an emergency landing.”

Michael spends a lot of time practicing spins, emergency procedures, takeoffs and landings. The highest he has flown has been 6,000 feet and, yes, he sometimes takes his friends for flights.

“Early on, I wouldn’t watch him fly,” said Liz. “It was only recently that I dared to watch. And the first time I saw him go up in the air, I thought I would die… Actually, his instructor jokes that he’s the one who should be getting the attention, as he’s the one who has to fly with a kid!”

Domb responds to the danger of flying by shrugging off fear and preparing thoroughly. Handling pressure and aiming high, though, seem to be family traits. His sister was accepted to Harvard at 16. His uncle, the pilot, was accepted to the prestigious Juliard School as a musical child prodigy, who later performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic symphony orchestra at the age of 15.

Domb’s father worked for NASA on the first lunar landing and on the Apollo missions before moving into satellite technology. Uriel helped Canada launch its first communications satellite and worked on Israel’s Ofek and Amos satellites, among others; “I’ve worked on probably 50% of the satellites launched around the world by now,” he said.

“Michael doesn’t seem to feel the pressure to be exceptional,” his mother said. “But he feels sense of obligation. I mean that not just in his desire to serve in the Israeli air force, but the sense that if he has a talent, he has to use it.”

Liz’s only concern is what challenge her son will pursue next. “He’s been talking about skydiving,” she noted with trepidation. “Flying, by contrast, doesn’t seem so bad.”

Durban II? Yawn…

For the record, I don’t care one whit about Durban II. What I do care about is Bushehr, Natanz and Isfahan. Everything else is just a sideshow, and a waste of time.

No ‘poultry’ matter

In Dubi Lang’s and Yudke Friedman’s ideal world, every red-blooded Israeli would be obsessed with breasts. Turkey breasts, that is.

Lang and Friedman are the chief economist and the chief veterinarian, respectively, for Ramit, part of the conglomerate that effectively controls 80 percent of the poultry market in Israel. And while the situation at Ramit isn’t nearly as bad, for example, as it is at Off Ha’emek – the chicken slaughterhouse in Galilee that has made headlines in recent days for teetering on the brink of collapse thanks to millions of shekels in debts that the faltering business can’t repay – they aren’t encouraging, either. The turkey industry in general, according to Ramit CEO Boaz Shkedy, is facing “an unprecedented crisis.”

The trouble is a combination of the global recession and the local factors that make the Israeli market unique.

For years, Israel has led the world in per-capita consumption of turkey meat. The contest hasn’t even been close. Whereas Israelis consume an average of more than 20 kg. of turkey meat per year, the next-highest consumers, Americans, eat just under 8 kg. per person. The same goes for turkey as a percentage of poultry consumed: Here, the figure is more than 20 percent, while in the US that figure stands at roughly 15%, and in Europe it is only about 5%.

That the US would rank so high is not surprising, given that North America is the turkey’s place of origin. The custom of serving a whole turkey for Thanksgiving (and, for some, on Christmas as well) also accounts for a significant amount of annual sales. No other country or region can match that demand.

So it is surprising that Israel outranks America, given that it is all but free of those winter holiday turkey-eating customs (except, of course, for the small number of American immigrants who preserve their Thanksgiving culinary tradition with special orders for whole turkeys) and the bird had to be imported to, well, take off here.

The explanation for the enigma is manifold. A dearth of grazing land relegates cattle raising to just a small business; the majority of beef consumed is raised and slaughtered overseas, mostly in South America. Fish is commonly consumed, but not as much as meat, by weight. And since pork consumption is extremely low in this Jewish and Muslim country, poultry dominates the meat-eater’s chart.

There’s something else, though, that makes our consumption of turkey meat peculiar: We eat the dark meat. Whereas elsewhere the part of the turkey most likely to find its way to the plate is the breast, here it is the fattier red meat portions that are most often consumed. It is also “hidden,” in the sense that it appears not as steaks or as strips, like chicken, but primarily as deli meat or as shwarma. The turkey business has soared here, then, thanks to pastrami sandwiches and the ubiquitous shwarma stands that dot every bus station and busy street.

“We eat turkey all the time, not just around holidays, but we’re also one of the few places in the world where we eat turkey in pieces,” Friedman explains. “Because we eat the dark meat to such a high degree, there is less of a premium on the white meat of the breast – which is why we export so much of the breasts. Generally speaking, we export the breasts to Europe. [Israel exported 3,000 tons of turkey breast meat to the EU in 2005.] So, now there is a crisis because the global economic downturn means less exporting.”

“And when the export falls, the price of breast meat domestically falls, because there’s more supply in the market. So the economic damage comes in both directions,” adds Lang.

SO, SINCE the Israeli market relies overwhelmingly on the red-meat parts of the bird, there is now too much “white” turkey meat in the domestic market. This drop in demand from Europe hits especially hard, too, because breast meat makes up the largest portion of the weight of turkey products that are consumed. And those turkey breasts are extra large.

“Because we don’t put a whole bird in the oven, our turkeys are larger than the average American turkey,” Friedman explains.

Turkeys have been bred to be so big that the males – some as massive as 30 kilos, Friedman says – can no longer mate successfully, and fertilization must be done in vitro. “In the wild,” the veterinarian notes, “male turkeys only grow to about 5 kilos. Here they are slaughtered at 17 kilos and beyond, well into the 20-kilo range.”

That time is quickly approaching for some 7,500 birds at David Hilman’s farm in Ein Irron, where he has been raising turkeys since 1993. At 16 weeks, the birds weigh about 17 kg each. Adding about a kilo a week, they’re close to the weight of 18-20 kilos they’ll reach before being sent to slaughter for a glatt kosher food company.

Ironically situated between a cemetery and the Nirvana plant nursery, Hilman’s turkeys congregate in their enclosure in a field of blossoming peach trees. He comes to check on them several times a day, making sure they’re getting enough food and water to keep growing apace.

Dressed in a white full-body jumpsuit and rubber boots, Hilman enters the enclosure and is greeted with a raucous round of “singing” from the birds. “Gobble, gobble” doesn’t do justice to the calls, which are more of an exuberant “gerugadurgle-durgle-durgle!” While the serenade is nice, Hilman’s focus is on checking the turkeys for signs of illness or injury.

“They’ll fight each other,” he says. “They’re cannibals, just like us!”

Hilman is counting on his diligence, and his luck, seeing him through this uncertain period. He has already had the good fortune that, when bird flu struck flocks here three years ago, his farm was outside the infection radius.

That was just one of two blows that smacked the poultry industry in 2006, with the bird flu outbreak costing the poultry industry more than NIS 10 million in losses due to forced culls. (“Actually, we were very fortunate to have gotten hold of that situation pretty quickly,” Lang says.) There was also a final decision in the High Court of Justice to enforce a ban on force-feeding geese, shutting down a NIS 150 million foie gras industry that was the third-largest in the world.

Israeli attempts to establish markets for more exotic birds, such as ostrich and quail, have met with only limited success, so the turkey is not alone in facing difficulties. More to the point, the broiler chicken continues to pull ahead as the undisputed poultry king, “and it’s like that all over the world,” Friedman says.

So what can turkey farmers do to ensure their product’s survival?

The Egg and Poultry Board is betting on better marketing, while farmers are aiming for greater efficiency.

TURKEY BREAST is hailed by health professionals because it is very low in sodium, fat and cholesterol, and high in protein. But as “chicken wars” in the supermarkets drive down prices for broilers, and as eating habits move away from frozen chicken and toward fresh chickens and prepared chicken products, fresh turkey meat is being overshadowed. There is also no long-standing tradition like chicken soup and chicken schnitzel to make turkey the staple that chicken is.

“Turkey’s nutritional benefits are widely acknowledged, but we need to emphasize that it can be as good to cook with as chicken. To that end, we are now distributing pamphlets with recipes and serving suggestions,” says Egg and Poultry Board spokeswoman Ruthy Pugatch.

“Even though turkey meat is consumed at a very high rate in Israel, it still suffers from certain stigmas that we are working to overcome. Until now we have counted on shwarma and exports, but now we realize that we need to develop a broader market than just pastramis and sausages.”

Farmers like Hilman, who earn roughly half a shekel for every kilo their turkeys weigh, are looking to maximize their return and minimize their costs. Automated feeding apparatuses keep Hilman’s birds fed and watered. He can monitor their growth simply by pressing a button on a panel attached to a massive plate under the four-dunam (one acre) enclosure; he can tell by the weight whether the birds are developing apace, and adjust their food and water accordingly.

“It’s quite advanced,” says Lang, who has been working with Hilman for years. “And this farm is actually considered outdated by current standards. Modern facilities are much bigger and much, much more hi-tech.”

Technology’s most significant application is in the feed supplied to farmers. Firstly, it has become so nutritious that birds grow much faster now than they used to. When Friedman made aliya from South Africa some 35 years ago, he says, chickens took nine weeks to reach their slaughtering weight of 1.5-2 kilos. Now it takes just six weeks, and similar improvements have been seen in turkeys.

More nutritious feed means shorter growth cycles, which means more birds sold. But it also means that less feed is needed, and that is another important saving. Whereas chickens require less than 2 kg. of feed for every kilo of meat sold, turkeys need close to 3 kg. – but that is much less of a disparity than was the case in the past, Friedman says. The bottom line is that farmers are now able to raise larger birds for less.

ADDITIONALLY, THE quality of feed is being improved and ensured through filtering and treatment processes that Friedman and Lang liken to the “clean room” facilities at microchip manufacturers. Next door to their offices stands a poultry feed “clean facility” – one of few like it in the world, they boast – that treats feed to keep it free of bacteria and disease that could decimate flocks.

“It’s a very strict biosecurity facility,” Friedman says, describing multiple layers of precautionary measures observed at the plant. “If we want to avoid problems like bird flu and other illnesses, we have to make sure the food is very, very, very clean. Because if the birds eat something contaminated, they will be contaminated.

“Biosecurity means protecting your investment. If a flock dies of an illness, that’s a lot of money lost.”

The final piece to the puzzle is a more sophisticated business model, including streamlining and integration.

“Thirty years ago,” says Lang on the way out of Hilman’s farm, “there were 1,200 turkey farmers in this country. Now, there are fewer than 100, and production is slightly higher than it was back then.

“Today it’s mostly large companies, using more efficient methods. And they’re all integrated. Tnuva, Tirat Zvi, everyone has a deal worked out to connect their businesses. The days of Farmer Brown tending his chicks are over.”

As long as the days of Farmer Hilman (and the big companies, too) aren’t over as well. Turkey meat is a NIS 500 million-a-year industry, and one that a slow economy can’t afford to lose. While Americans had the promise of “a chicken in every pot” during the Great Depression, Israeli farmers will be anxious to see whether “a turkey in every oven” – or at least a breast in every pita – is a slogan that will fly.

The pen is mightier…

Uh-oh. The ADL is hysterical about this political cartoon by Pat Oliphant that depicts Israeli soldiers as headless Zio-Nazis, rolling over innocent women and children in Gaza. Prepare for the usual “You can’t criticize Israel without being labelled an anti-Semite” nonsense.

The ADL is right, obviously. This cartoon is terrible. But I’ve seen this kind of thing in American newspapers, European newspapers and, of course, Arab newspapers too many times before to be shocked. In fact, I have to say, this particular cartoon is poorly drawn and rather uncreative. This has been done so many times before, and so much “better,” so to speak.

Regarding the content, it stems from this report in Haaretz, according to which veterans of Operation Cast Lead purposely shot at non-combatants. This story has caught on quickly and been embraced with the zeal you might expect from people who are all to eager to envision Israel’s army as being full of jack-booted, blood-thirsty automatons happy to carry out genocide against the poor, helpless, peace-loving innocents who struggle in their spiritual quest for Palestinian self-determination. (Am I laying it on too thick?)

The only problem is that the story is bogus. The soldiers who relayed these harrowing tales of cold-blooded war crimes didn’t actually witness them, it turns out, but were only reporting events they heard had taken place. Once confronted, they even admitted as much. And the head of the academy where these stories were first told is an extreme left-winger whose own writings show a distorted and biased belief that his own army is immoral; it has been suggested, in so many words, that the soldiers in attendance were goaded into telling these tales by this man, or offered them because they thought such reports would please him.

Nonetheless, the bottom line is that these atrocities never happened… but now that they have been immortalized by Oliphant, what does that matter? Those who wanted to believe that the IDF was evil before the cartoon will continue to believe it even after it has been shown to be a lie — probably because they will never bother to read the refutations, or to accept them if they do read them. Nor will they bother to read the accounts of soldiers sending letters of apology and money to Gazans whose homes they commandeered during the raid, or any number of other accounts that reveal an IDF much, much different than the one portrayed in Oliphant’s cartoon.

If Oliphant had any integrity, in fact, he would make some minor adjustments to his cartoon: This time, a headless cartoonist hoisting a pen rather than a sword would push, not a Star of David but whatever symbol represents the pro-Palestinian liberal agenda, steamrolling an Israeli soldier while he consults the strict code of conduct by which he must abide to determine his response to the incoming threat.

I’m not holding my breath.

One lie about two states

Countless times in the past few weeks, foreign reporters and commentators have stated, as fact, that Binyamin Netanyahu is not committed to the two-state solution. That’s bogus.

Here is an exerpt from the speech that Netanyahu delivered to Congress shortly after he won the prime ministership in 1996:

Perhaps our most demanding joint effort has been the endless quest to achieve peace and stability for Israel and its Arab neighbors. American presidents have joined successive Israeli governments in an untiring effort to attain this peace.

The first historic breakthrough was led by Prime Minister Begin and Presidents Carter and Sadat at Camp David. The most recent success was our pact with Jordan under the auspices of President Clinton. These efforts, I believe, are clear proof of our intentions and our direction. We want peace. We want peace with all our neighbors. We have no quarrel with them which cannot be resolved by peaceful means. Nor, I must say, do we have a quarrel with Islam. We reject the thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations. We do not subscribe to the idea that Islam has replaced Communism as the new rival of the West, because our conflict is specific. It is with those militant fanatics who pervert the central tenets of a great faith towards violence and world domination. Our hand is stretched in peace to all who would grasp it. We don’t care about their religion. We don’t care about their national identity. We don’t care about their ideological belief. We care about peace, and our hand is stretched out to peace.

Every Israeli wants peace. I don’t think there is a people who has yearned, prayed and sacrificed more for peace than we have. There is not a family in Israel that has not suffered the unbearable agony of war and, directly or indirectly, the excruciating, ever-lasting pain of grief. The mandate we have received from the people of Israel is to continue the search for an end to wars and an end to grief. I promise you: We are going to live up to this mandate. We will continue the quest for peace, and, to this end, we are ready to resume negotiations with the Palestinian Authority on the implementation of our Interim Agreement.

I want to say something about agreements. Some of you speak Latin, or at least studied Latin. “Pacta sunt servanta” – we believe agreements are made to be kept. This is our policy, and we expect the Palestinian side to abide by its commitments. On this basis, we will be prepared to begin final status negotiations as well.

That was not the first time that he made such statements, and it was not the last. His remarks are not hidden, nor are they kept solely in Hebrew. Anyone willing to do 5 minutes of research can find them. Which means that anyone who says Netanyahu is not committed to the creation of a Palestinian state is either a fool, or a liar.

It must still be Purim

What a week of reversals this has become! First, Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to raise child allotments by a whopping NIS 1.5 billion over the next three years. Then, Ehud Barak won an internal Labor poll to join his party to Netanyahu’s shaky coalition.

This is rich — Netanyahu as Robin Hood, taxing the rich to rain money on the poor, and Barak playing the sidekick to Netanyahu. It must still be Purim.

Netanyahu reversed his own policy, from his time as finance minister under Ariel Sharon, of limiting child welfare payments. This policy, it is now generally agreed, was one of the key financial reforms that drove the country’s economy forward. Backtracking on this policy now runs counter to Netanyahu’s stated economic aims of cutting welfare payments and encouraging productivity.

It also undermines the social ideology behind the original move. What he had originally corrected was the inexplicable discrimination in payments that provided more money for the third and fourth children, and so on, than to a family’s first and second children. Obviously, this arrangement is desirable to haredim, who have large families. But it is indefensible on so many levels — because it attaches a higher value to one child than another; because it discourages the heads of large families, haredi and Arab alike, from seeking employment; because it punishes small families with smaller payments per child.

What this agreement says is, “To hell with ideology, I just need to buy some coalition members!”

Barak, too, has made a quick retreat from his election-night speech, in which he said Labor would sit in the opposition. But, a few fat ministries in hand, he dropped that plan and dragged half his (shrinking) party back into the government. This, too, screams, “To hell with ideology, I need to be at the center of attention!”

In the past few days, Labor has been called a bunch of “rags,” and Barak’s maneuver makes it hard to disagree. Of course, he couldn’t have done it alone. That so many in Labor would follow him into Netanyahu’s arms says something about them, too, and it is this: “We have nothing of our own to offer anyone.”

It’s almost funny to imagine the day, not long from now, when this marriage of convenience between Likud and Labor breaks apart. Because that is inevitable. And when it happens, both parties will have regretted the whole thing.

Strange bedfellows

Binyamin Netanyahu’s improbable courtship of Ehud Barak is proving the popular saying of American essayist Charles Dudley Warner that “politics makes strange bedfellows.”

How ironic it is that Barak, who defeated Netanyahu in the 1999 elections and reversed his policies, is now lining up behind the Likud leader. How ironic it is that Netanyahu, whose ”concerned citizen” speech helped unravel Barak’s government as the second intifada took hold, is now carrying a torch for Barak’s views on national security.

In trying to explain this unlikely love affair, some commentators have suggested that the two men, who share a well-known history of competition dating back to their time in the elite Sayeret Matkal reconnaisance unit, have come to understand one another.

Naivete aside, though, this alliance is clearly about political survival. It recalls another quote, this one from Napoleon Bonaparte: “Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.” Well then, what do these men fear? Being out of power, being irrelevant. And what is their self interest? Remaining in power, remaining relevant.

Without joining forces, they both risk stinging defeats that neither man can accept. If Netanyahu’s narrow coalition fails to hold, his grip on the premiership will slip. If Barak heads a weakling Labor in the opposition, he will not only lose the Defense Ministry but he will lose his status as “Mr. Security.” Social affairs was never his strong suit, so he will quickly fade within his party and be replaced by a younger candidate with much stronger welfare state credentials.

Now, there is nothing unusual about politicians jettisoning political principles for political expediency. What is particularly galling about the embrace between these two men, however, is this: We just had an election, and Likud and Labor were at opposite ends of it. They have changed their tune from “Not him, but me” to “Well, hey, how about us, together?”

As much as both men are trying to sell this move as a necessary step in extraordinary times, it doesn’t wash. There has been no new event from the period of the campaign until now that justifies totally abandonding the decision of the electorate. There has been no 9/11, for example, to wipe out distinctions between one Zionist party and the other. There is only this: an inconclusive election result, leaving little room for indecisive leaders to maneuver.

Actually, I use the word “leaders” loosely. Both Netanyahu and Barak ran on the vague cache of their personal experience and charisma; their campaigns conspicuously lacked a clear articulation of the men’s vision for this country and their plan for moving it toward that vision. It was one of the most disappointing aspects of the election.

Following the muddled and ineffective government of Ehud Olmert, this country desperately needs someone who is willing to stand up and declare, “This is my goal, and this is my path. Follow me!” You know, the kind of thing you would expect from someone who had grown up in Sayeret Matkal.

Instead of leading, though, Netanyahu and Barak are trying to merely inherit power. They have traded courage for conniving.

The less likely it becomes that Netanyahu will be able to cobble together a coalition under the current circumstances, the more it becomes necessary to consider the possibility of a new election. And this time, let us put the leaders of the four largest parties — Tzipi Livni of Kadima, Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman of Israel Beiteinu and Barak — in front of a camera, and let us make them tell us, as clearly as can be, what it is they want to do for us and for this country. Then let us decide.

…And when we do, let us also remember another one of Napoleon’s gems: ”In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”

Deal, or no deal?

Several things were noteworthy about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s announcement on Tuesday night that negotiations for the return of Gilad Schalit had broken down:

1) News of the development was presented as a failure of the government to complete the deal. The language and tone indicated that success in this affair was solely a matter of Israeli compliance, and that Olmert, by refusing to accede fully to Hamas’s demands — even though he was prepared to make alarming concessions — had failed the test of leadership. That responsibility for Gilad Schalit’s continued imprisonment lay with Hamas was not mentioned once. There was nary a hint of anger at the terrorist organization for its extortion. Hamas was treated as the reasonable and predictable party, Olmert and the government the disappointing ones.

2) After several days of (possibly false) reports from the Prime Minister’s Office that Hamas had softened its stance and that an agreement had all but been reached, it became apparent that the group had in fact not wavered from its maximalist position even one iota. This, despite the crowing of senior officials in the waning days of Operation Cast Lead that the punishing offensive had weakened Hamas to such an extent that the group, recognizing its inferior position, would accept much less in negotiations for the release of Schalit than it had demanded before. Apparently, though, the mercy that Olmert’s government showed to Hamas two months ago actually emboldened it. If Hamas can turn down the deal that Olmert offered, it must believe it has less to gain by it than Israel — and especially Olmert — does. How telling.

3) Had she chosen a different course of action, Tzipi Livni today would not be the foreign minister in Ehud Olmert’s cabinet, facing a term that can be measured in hours, but the foreign minister in a new cabinet under Binyamin Netanyahu. And she would be joined in that cabinet by Ehud Barak as defense minister. Together, they would have greeted Gilad Schalit in his return to Israel. Instead, when the Schalit portfolio is transferred to Netanyahu and his cabinet, it will be held by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and defense minister Moshe Ya’alon. It doesn’t get any more hawkish than that.

1,001 Arabian nights

It was with much skill and cunning and more than a little charm that young Scheherazade entertained Sharyar, weaving enchanting stories whereby, for 1,001 consecutive nights, she bought herself a reprieve from the jealous sultan’s pledge to lop off the pretty maiden’s head.

As Gilad Schalit approaches his own 1,001st night in captivity in Gaza, one wonders what tales have filled his mind and kept the young soldier sane, and hopeful of his own reprieve. Here in Israel, ever since Schalit was kidnapped in a cross-border raid on June 25, 2006, many have been keeping a vigil for him – and repeating a fantasy of their own.

For two and a half years, the question of Schalit’s safe return has come down to what price Israel was willing to pay, i.e., how many Palestinian security prisoners it would release. And all along the government has played a duplicitous game, pretending that it did not accept this demand as a basis for negotiations, while at the same time practically imploring the public to demand that it pay any price necessary to “bring the boy home.”

But there were bumps on that road: Hizbullah attacked the northern border, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded with a war so large and so bumbling that poor Schalit became an afterthought. Then Hamas violently overthrew Fatah in the Gaza Strip, making any concession to them unseemly. Then the rocket fire on the Negev became so brazen and so massive that even Olmert could not ignore it anymore, ordering a major incursion that smashed large parts of Gaza City and left no room for negotiations.

Now – in his final days in office — Olmert has dispatched his emissaries to Cairo for one last attempt to appease Hamas and score a stunning victory for himself. If negotiations in Egypt go well, the “prisoner swap” agreement is to be brought before the cabinet on Monday, where it is expected to pass by a slim margin.

Rushing to the defense of such a deal have been not only Schalit’s family, which erected a protest tent in front of Olmert’s residence visited by thousands of supporters — and, especially, politicians who until now have done nothing for Schalit but who suddenly see the profit in embracing the public’s sympathy for his family – but by the media, and even former security figures.

The latest quotes come from Ami Ayalon, speaking in his capacity as former head of the Shin Bet:

“There is no prisoner sitting in an Israeli jail worth Gilad Schalit’s continued captivity,” Ayalon told Israel Radio. “There is simply no one like that.”

He went on to say that freeing 450 “high-level” prisoners on the Hamas list would not necessarily lead to an increase in terror attacks.

“Terror depends less on the identity of terrorists that are freed than on diplomatic horizons and the atmosphere on the Palestinian street,” he said. “I am not ignoring the dilemma, there are contradictory values and people with blood on their hands, but on the other hand, there is a soldier that we recruited to the IDF and sent out to battle.”

Here, in the space of just a few words, is the fantasy that the Israeli people have been sold, the lullaby for their collective conscience that is paving the way for the enormous prisoner release now in the works. For, “there is no prisoner sitting in an Israeli jail worth Gilad Schalit’s continued captivity” is undoubtedly true. Yet it is irrelevant. It is a false equation.

There is no logical connection between the prisoners in Israeli jails and the young Israeli soldier being held ransom in the Gaza Strip. The prisoners were convicted of terrorism and guerilla warfare; they murdered Israelis in the name of jihad, or maimed Israelis while trying to murder them in the name of jihad, or were stopped en route to attempting to murder Israelis in the name of jihad. Their conviction and their incarceration uphold the principle of justice; their release would undermine it. Rather than mitigating the crimes that these people committed, the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit (and the murder of two of his fellow soldiers in the same raid, let’s remember) marks an additional crime above and beyond them. By rights it demands not a softening of Israel’s response toward Hamas and its partners in terrorism, but a hardening of it.

…Alas, this fundamental truth is ignored, and replaced with the idea that, if only we would rid ourselves of several hundred (or possibly well over a thousand!) low-lifes, we could rejoice in the safe return of the precious lad whose cherubic visage we have all been shown over and over again for nearly 1,001 nights.

And when someone has the nerve to ask whether it is wise to send convicted terrorists back to their masters, people like Ami Ayalon come to remind us that “terror depends less on the identity of terrorists that are freed than on diplomatic horizons and the atmosphere on the Palestinian street.” How reassuring!

Nevermind the fact that dozens, if not hundreds, of Israelis have been murdered or maimed at the hands of terrorists who were released from Israeli prisons. Nevermind the fact that terrorism is entirely disconnected from the “diplomatic horizons and the atmosphere on the Palestinian street” but is supremely dependent on terrorists’ belief that they will succeed in weakening their enemy, and that it often comes in a direct attempt to thwart any “diplomatic horizon” from developing. Damn the facts, man, “there is a soldier that we recruited to the IDF and sent out to battle!”

Yes, there is a life at stake, and it is precious. Yet there is absolutely no reason to believe that releasing hordes more of Palestinian terrorists in exchange for Gilad Schalit will prevent the further loss of life, while there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it will in fact cause more of it. When Ariel Sharon negotiated with Hizbullah in 2004 for the return of kidnapped businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum and the bodies of Israeli soldiers killed in a cross-border raid four years earlier, those who warned that releasing more than 400 terrorists was a dangerous precedent were called cold, callous and short-sighted. Yet it was in emulation of that result that Gilad Schalit’s captors dug tunnels under the Gaza border fence in June of 2006 and raided his base in the hopes of dragging home bloodied Israeli soldiers whom they could hold as bargaining chips of their own. And it was due to the success of both those raids that Hizbullah again attacked an IDF patrol along the Lebanese border less than three weeks after Schalit’s capture, succeeding in kidnapping reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

Perhaps the saddest part of this whole saga, though, is that no one has the guts to tell the Schalits the truth: that releasing terrorists in exchange for their son is wrong, and endangers other Israelis; that treating Hamas with trepidation, out of fear for Schalit’s life, only emboldened the movement and invited it to step up its rocket attacks on the Negev, as well as profoundly complicating the recent incursion into Gaza, and that their son’s suffering is a tragedy but that it does not outweigh the greater security concerns of the entire state.

Of course, if Gilad Schalit does return home, it will be right and proper to cheer his freedom and his safety. And when the next Israeli is kidnapped to release even more terrorists, no one will dare ask him whether he feels responsible for it. Unfortunately, though, no one will ask Ami Ayalon or Ehud Olmert that question, either.

So long, Salaam

Well, it finally happened. After numerous threats to do so, Salaam Fayad has tendered his resignation as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.

As Khaled Abu Toameh explains,

Fayad, from the Third Way Party, was not only an obstacle to the formation of a “unity government,” but as an independent figure, he was regarded by both parties as an outsider.

Many Fatah members have long been demanding the removal of Fayad from power, saying that his efforts to reform the PA were being carried out at the expense of Fatah’s standing.

What bothered Fatah was that most of the international aid was going directly to Fayad’s government and not into the bank accounts of its leaders in Ramallah. Fatah needs a lot of money to buy loyalty and maintain its grip on the PA, and that’s where Fayad was not being cooperative.

Fatah was also worried by the fact that Fayad’s government was not dominated by its men, as was the case in almost all the previous Palestinian governments. Most of Fayad’s ministers were not even affiliated with Fatah.

Furthermore,

Hamas and Fatah were worried that the international community would insist on channeling the funds only to Fayad’s government, a move that would have further strengthened his status among the Palestinians at their expense.

This all makes so much sense. I mean, which sane Palestinian would want an independent, internationally recognized economist, unbeholden to either of the parties that have systematically destroyed any chance of a viable Palestinian state, in charge of the billions of dollars in financial aid that foreign donors have lavished on his people?

…And now a “unity” government can be established that will accomplish nothing.