BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

By David Weinberg The Obama-Netanyahu confrontation is that the White House wants to move Israel rapidly towards a division of Jerusalem. However, the widely held presumption that splitting Jerusalem will lead to prosperity for the city and to peace for Jews and Arabs is an egregious error. Partitioning Jerusalem will destroy the city. It will die, in every way - culturally, religiously, economically and more. And politically, the shearing of Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish sovereignties will turn it into the bull's eye of Mideast battle - a city that will make Belfast at its worst look like paradise. The main reason for this is that any section of the city handed over to Arab rule will immediately become ground zero for the fierce war being waged within the Arab world over Islamic lifestyle, ideology and legitimacy. Just who is going to rule in Arab eastern Jerusalem? Will it be the declining secular Palestinian national movement (whose sway in the West Bank is tentative a...

by David Harris Throughout his life, one of Yasser Arafat's favorite themes was that there was no historical Jewish connection to Israel. He would assert that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, that the Western Wall has no Jewish significance, and even that Abraham himself wasn't a Jew. Indeed, he went so far as to reject the Jewish link to Jerusalem in the presence of US President Bill Clinton during the Camp David talks, evoking outrage from the American leader and offering insight into why the negotiations were doomed to fail . Arafat's views, unsurprisingly, were echoed relentlessly by Palestinian media outlets and textbooks, not to mention Muslim clergy. Generations of Palestinians were "educated" to believe that the Jews were interlopers, not a people indigenous to the Middle East. This had nothing to do with history, since there was abundant evidence of the intimate Jewish tie to the land dating back well over 3500 years, not to mention the spiri...

U.S. furious over Israel's demolition of East Jerusalem homes By Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya The dispute between the United States and Israel over the razing of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem is intensifying and will likely become the first clash between the Obama administration and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. argues that the destruction of homes constitutes a violation of commitments made as part of the road map. Israel says this is a domestic issue of law enforcement and that the future status of Jerusalem is only to be discussed in the final status negotiations. "Apart from a dispute this issue will lead to nothing," a senior government official told Haaretz. U.S. attention to the demolitions began after the visit to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, catching Israel by surprise. Clinton was highly critical of Israel regarding the matter during her visit. She said that the demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusa...

Islamic terrorists have taken a Chabad Center in India hostage, holding Jewish Americans and Israelis in danger. Please take a few seconds now, click this link, and call the State Department to encourage them to act powerfully to protect Jewish Americans as well as all hostages. Anyone in the USA and Canada can call. ** JOIN the Facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48604349160 ** CALL NOW (free!): http://jewishhostages1.callsforjerusalem.org

The Tree of Life By Boruch Cohen With a name like "The Life of Sarah," this week's Torah portion sounds like a promising biography. Too bad she dies in the second verse. One of the fundamentals of our faith is that the Jewish way of life is everlasting. This is why the doing of good deeds is compared to planting a seed. When a seed is planted, it disintegrates in the ground, losing its puny identity to the nourishing soil and creative potential of mother earth. A seedling sprouts, which will one day grow into a tall tree. In time, the tree will bear fruit, and seeds, which themselves might become an orchard, and ultimately, a vast forest. Likewise, a good deed takes root and sprouts in a nourishing eternity of good deeds and Jewish values. These deeds and values give life to ourselves and our offspring, that we too might one day grow into tall fruitful trees; that our fruits might one day become orchards. That's why the Torah is called the "Tree of Life." Th...

Israel decides to take advantage of Thursday's bloody terror attack in Jerusalem in order to launch aggressive campaign against Hamas by Itamar Eichner Israel has decided to take advantage of Thursday's bloody terror attack in Jerusalem in order to launch an aggressive campaign against Hamas. Yedioth Ahronoth has learned that the political echelon instructed the Government Press Office to distribute the shocking images from the yeshiva shooting worldwide, including pictures of holy books perforated with bullets, a blood-stained praying shawl and the terrorist's body inside the yeshiva. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni decided that the Foreign Ministry would work to convey the Israeli messages to the international community. Livni spoke to a large number of foreign ministers and expressed the State of Israel's abhorrence over the deadly attack. A sources in the Prime Minister's Office said Thursday, "There is a direct link between this...

Truth or convenient excuse? Only Hasbro P.R. & Marketing knows for sure! A mid-level employee with Hasbro Inc. decided on her own to eliminate the word ''Israel'' after the name ''Jerusalem'' in an online contest to select names for a new, global Monopoly board game after pro-Palestinian groups and bloggers complained, the company said Thursday. Her decision sparked even more protests - this time from the other side - prompting the company to apologize a day later and pull all country names from cities listed on the site. ''It was a bad decision, one that we rectified relatively quickly,'' Hasbro spokesman Wayne Charness said. ''This is a game. We never wanted to enter into any political debate. We apologize to our Monopoly fans.'' The issue has been a sensitive one for decades: Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem _ home to Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites _ in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it. The...

PORTRAIT IN CORRUPTION A worthless person, a wicked man, Walks with a perverse mouth; He winks with his eyes, He shuffles his feet, He points with his fingers; Perversity is in his heart, He devises evil continually, He sows discord. Proverbs 6:12-14 When I saw this article tonight about Olmert ( or as my friend Chaim at Freedom's Cost calls him 'AllMerde'... I just love that! ) all I could think is DUH!! Of course he is. How could ANYONE see that he just gives pieces of Israel away to terrorists like they are some blue light special? How could he not take swift and immediate action to stop the destruction of precious artifacts at the Temple Mount? How could he NOT be corrupt when he lays down with dogs (like Condi or Abbas)? Where is the man's Jewish pride? Where is his human pride? Those are rhetorical questions because he doesn't have any pride or none of the things happening in Israel would be happening. Annapolis is already a joke. Obviously no one rem...

INSTANT KARMA Let me be very clear that I am in NO WAY implying that PM Olmert deserved prostate cancer. I do believe that perhaps this illness is a wake up call. Hashem does that - send us little wake up calls all along the way in our lives. Sometimes our pure God-center (that part of us that is always connected to the Divine), I believe, sends them to us too. Sometimes we can be the wake-up call or 'accountability moment' for someone else. I've been reading about Olmert's antics for the last few months. I haven't blogged about it because I truly feel others at JBlogs have done a much better and thorough job. But I am disheartened. The trust of the people of Israel, I feel, has been slapped by Olmert - who seems content to give away pieces of Hashem's promise to the Jewish people to anyone who bullies him enough. Whatever it is I will pray for Mr. Olmert's healing. I will also pray that Hashem changes his heart about isses like the division of Je...

COMPLAINT RESOLVED? What about the ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS??? Ridiculous!! gggrrrr The BBC apologized this week for referring to Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and promised not to repeat "the mistake," following a complaint by four British organizations. Arab Media Watch, Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Friends of Al-Aksa and the Institute of Islamic Political Thought sent a joint complaint to the BBC after a presenter on its Football Focus program on March 24 mentioned that Jerusalem was Israel's capital and "historic soul." The BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit posted a response on its Web site: "The reference was a passing one in a context where the focus was on sport, not politics. While recognizing the sensitivity of the issue of the status of Jerusalem, the ECU took the view that the program-makers had taken sufficient action by acknowledging the error and rectifying the Web site." The Editorial Complaints Unit's ruling was: "Complaint r...