It’s going to take time for the Hamas-Israel cease-fire to take hold, which is why Israel’s military hasn’t responded to the firing of Kassam rockets from the Gaza Strip over the last three weeks, Ha’aretz writes in an editorial. Hamas is trying, Ha’aretz says:

Hamas’ public effort to fully keep its commitment is evident. The Hamas mufti has called anyone who fires a Qassam a “criminal,” and its leadership is declaring that the Qassams damage Palestinian interests…

This does not mean Israel must sit on its hands and do nothing for six months, absorbing Qassams with no response just so the cease-fire will be observed on its part. However, it must allow the Palestinians the opportunity to enforce the agreement, without playing into the hands of gangs or splinter organizations, thereby crushing the responsible party in Gaza at the moment.

Meanwhile, Ynet’s Alex Fishman writes that Israel has failed to take advantage of the relative lull in the fighting to improve defenses in Israel’s Gaza-adjacent communities to prepare for the next round of rocket attacks:

The ceasefire is the first lull in Hamas’ “war of independence” since it took over Gaza. The group uses every moment in this lull in order to better organize and build up strength ahead of the next round of fighting. And what do our leaders do in order to take advantage of the lull ahead of the next round? Nothing. We’re on vacation…

If the homes are not fortified people will be leaving…

Seemingly, the lull came at the right time. Residents could have expected to see their communities flooded by contractors and laborers the moment quiet prevailed, with secured rooms being constructed at a dizzying pace. After all, this is what was decided; this is precisely what the government promised.

Moreover, it is clear to everyone that the relative quiet brought by the lull is only temporary, and that every day that passes without it being used for building fortifications and improving our anti-rocket alert system is a wasted day. Yet for the time being, nothing has changed on the ground. Not one brick has been laid, and no wall has been moved.

On Sunday, Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff of Ha’aretz wrote that captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit has turned into a hostage of the crisis over Gaza’s border crossings, which Israel has been closing in response to rocket attacks from Gaza.
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Gilad Sharon pens an angry Op-Ed in Ynet delivering Israeli Arabs an ultimatum: “Do you wish to enjoy all the good Israel bestows upon you? Then be completely loyal to it. If you cannot do it, be prepared to pay the price.”

Sharon’s missive was prompted by last week’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem by a Palestinian from eastern Jerusalem who carried an Israeli ID card. Though not an Israeli citizen, the terrorist lived within Israel’s borders. Sharon, a son of the former prime minister, writes:

The repeated terror attacks carried out by Arab terrorists possessing Israeli ID cards highlight the need for a frank and open discussion regarding relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel and the future of these ties…

This pretention must stop: You shall stop pretending that you are loyal to the State the way it is, and the State will stop pretending that it does not discriminates against you, because it does. It has no choice, as you come out against its essence as a Jewish state and are working to turn it into something else. For example, how can we not discriminate against an elected representative such as Azmi Bishara or Ahmad Tibi, who served as an advisor for Arafat the terrorist, when it comes to sharing sensitive security information?

This juggling act, whereby on the one hand Arab Israelis enjoy the State’s health and welfare services and freedom of expression unlike anywhere else in our region, while on the other hand their representatives condemn and attack Israel at every opportunity, and particularly in enemy states, must end.

Decent points, maybe, but the hole in this argument is that the converse can be argued just as easily. Israeli Arabs can say to Sharon and the Israeli government: When you stop discriminating against us, when you treat us like equals, when you craft a national anthem and flag that speaks of us, then we will be loyal to the state.

It’s a complicated situation.

A day after the second major terrorist attack in four months by a Jerusalem-area Palestinian, the Jerusalem Post’s Calev Ben David asks how Israel can protect its people against terrorists among the 200,000 Palestinians who live on the west (i.e. Israeli) side of the West Bank security fence. It’s not so easy.

Sascha Baron Cohen narrates “the running of the Jews” in Borat.

The serious-minded former director of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Yossi Alpher, who also is co-editor of Bitterlemons.org, a Palestinian-Israeli Web site, writes about a close encounter of the Bruno kind in his latest column in the Forward.

Marty Peretz has a piece in The New Republic that echoes JTA’s analysis last week about Israel’s sudden “peace offensive.” Peretz declares the chances of success of an Israeli-Syrian peace deal (as measured by Syria moving away from Iran) virtually nil, and he opposes Israel’s latest cease-fire with Hamas in the Gaza Strip (which doesn’t seem to be working so well).

Though Peretz gets Mahmoud Abbas’ name wrong (he calls him Mohammed, which I don’t believe is the same thing), he more than makes up for it by sticking that line through the “o” of Terje Rød-Larsen’s name. Well done, Marty.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto suggests that the accidental killing of American activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli tractor in March 2003 may have given the Palestinian who perpetrated yesterday’s tractor attack in Jerusalem the idea for turning a tractor into a deadly weapon.

Come on.

On a related note to my post yesterday about the battle over language in the Middle East conflict (“Arab” vs. “Palestinian”), now that we know the perpterator of the attack was Palestinian, we can say so.

And my colleague Dan Sieradski was exacting enough to point out that the deadly weapon used in yesterday’s attack was neither a bulldozer nor a tractor, but a backhoe loader. Given that it’s part tractor, I think we’ll still be safe if we keep calling it a tractor. And if someone calls it a bulldozer, we may just let it slide.

Many readers — and some fellow reporters — are questioning JTA’s use of the more general term “Arab” rather than “Palestinian” to describe the terrorist who perpetrated Wednesday’s deadly attack in Jerusalem.

A note of explanation: In the aftermath of the attack, it was not immediately clear exactly who the perpetrator was. His name was spelled a variety of different ways in the Israeli and international press, his age was given alternately as 30 or 31, and he was described as a resident of eastern Jerusalem.

Now, here’s where things get tricky. Eastern Jerusalem is code for the part of Jerusalem that was controlled by Jordan until the 1967 Six-Day War — i.e. Arab. But now Jerusalem is a united city, since Israel annexed East Jerusalem in the war’s aftermath (though almost no one in the international community officially recognizes that action). When East Jerusalem became part of Israeli Jerusalem (and we began calling it “eastern Jerusalem” — note the lowercase), the Arabs who lived there were offered Israeli citizenship. Some accepted it, but most did not. Virtually all, however, were granted Israeli ID cards.

JTA’s style is to refer to Arabs who are citizens of Israel as Arab Israelis (occasionally we slip up and call them Israeli Arabs), but these people mostly call themselves as Palestinians, or Palestinian Israelis. We refer to other Arabs in the neighborhood as Palestinians.

So, is someone from a village on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem — which was not even considered part of Jerusalem when the Jordanians controlled the territory — who has an Israeli ID card an Israeli?

It wasn’t clear to us whether or not the terrorist had Israeli citizenship; hence, our preference for the more general term. The only thing we could say with certainty is that he was Arab.

(Some news outlets, like the New York Sun, never use the term Palestinian, instead using Palestinian Arab).

In this part of the world, language, identity and conflict are all interconnected.

Finally, if you’re wondering why I used the word “tractor” above and not “bulldozer,” take a look at the video from the attack. Looks like a tractor to me.

Borrowing a page from Fatah’s playbook, Hamas is criticizing Fatah militants who are shelling southern Israel from Gaza as acting against the Palestinian national interest by risking the shaky truce begun June 19 with Israel.

Years ago, it was Fatah — then led by Yasser Arafat — that was signing agreements with Israel and criticizing Hamas for undermining the Palestinian national interest by firing at Israel (see this statement from 2003). Now the tables are turned.

In those days, Israel took actions to bolster Fatah against Hamas, and in the 1990s Israel provided the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority with weaponry to secure its dominant position in Palestinian affairs.

Leaving aside for the moment that it didn’t take long for Palestinian police to turn that weaponry against the Israelis who gave it to them — and that they’re doing the same now, in Gaza — this is yet another sign that the ideological differences between Fatah and Hamas are academic, if they exist at all.

Put simply, these are two Palestinian factions (and not the only two), each of which has a beef with Israel and with each other. Historically, Israel has dealt only with Fatah — described these days as “relatively moderate” but with a bloody history of terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews — but now Israel is pursuing peace with Hamas (June 19 cease-fire agreement) while pursuing the terrorists in Fatah (see this week’s IDF counter-terrorist operations in the West Bank).

Does this mean Israel now should bolster Hamas against Fatah? Or, was this strategy of picking sides in the Palestinians’ internal conflict flawed from the get-go?

Perhaps rather than choosing favorites regardless of their popularity or power on the Palestinian street (Palestinian Authority President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is virtually powerless and largely discredited among Palestinians), Israel should let the Palestinians sort out their internecine conflicts on their own and then deal with the victor, whoever it is.

Israel cannot choose the face of the Palestinians for them; the Palestinians must do it on their own. They are doing it through violence and through the ballot box: Hamas scored victories in January 2006 (ballot box, in Palestinian legislative elections) and in June 2007 (violence, when Hamas routed Fatah from Gaza).

The international community and Israel reacted by roundly ignoring these developments and crowning Fatah the representative of the Palestinian people.

But, as Israel has learned over the past year or two, this doesn’t really work. Hamas’ power continues to grow, and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority is as ill-equipped as ever to deliver on its promises of peace to Israel, or on its promises of increased freedoms for Palestinians.

Israel can’t be blamed for wanting to bring this matter to a head, and quickly. After all, Israel is the target of all these Palestinians factions, and they will continue to attack Israel in a bid to win popular support and consolidate their power among Palestinians.

Yet Israel’s suffering notwithstanding, it may not be within Israel’s power to bring it to an end. Alas, that power may lie only with the Palestinians.

The publisher of Ha’aretz, Amos Schocken, has a piece today under the headline “Citizenship law makes Israel an apartheid state”:

The law stipulates that the interior minister does not have the authority to approve residence in Israel for a resident of Judea and Samaria (unless, of course, they are Jews - that is, settlers). This is so even regarding family reunions, meaning marriage, when it comes to Palestinian spouses who are younger than 35 (for men) or 25 (for women). In effect, the law prevents young Israeli citizens from marrying the spouse of their choice and living with this spouse in Israel, if the spouse is a Palestinian from Judea and Samaria.

It is obvious that this has barely any effect on the right of young Israeli Jews to live in their country with the spouse of their choice, because there are hardly any marriages between Israeli Jews and Palestinians from Judea and Samaria. On the other hand, these Palestinians constitute Israeli Arabs’ natural pool for choosing a spouse. For this reason, the law severely discriminates when comparing the rights of young Israeli Jewish citizens and young Israeli Arab citizens.

When the law was first passed in 2003, supposedly as a temporary one-year measure, it was accompanied by security reasoning - the risk of implanting terrorists in Israel via marriage. The reasoning was faulty even at that time: Every Palestinian who wishes to enter Israel must be addressed individually. It is the Shin Bet security service’s task to do this and thus carry out its mission - protecting the security of Israel’s citizens such that the country remains democratic, with equal rights for all. However, as the years go by, it becomes clear that the security argument and the term “temporary measure” are merely a deception aimed at “koshering” discriminatory legislation for demographic reasons.

The claim that there are indications of an apartheid state in Israel is widely heard in the Western world. The word apartheid is catchy and understood in many parts of the world, which makes it useful to send a message that we resent and which we claim has no connection with reality in Israel. However, we do not have to identify the characteristics of South African apartheid in the civil rights discrimination in Israel in order to call Israel an apartheid state. The amendment to the Citizenship Law is exactly the kind of practice that leads to the use of such a term, and it is best that we not try to evade the truth: Its existence in the law books turns Israel into an apartheid state.

If Fatah militants are now firing Kassam rockets at Israel in a bid to embarrass Hamas and prompt the collapse of the group’s cease-fire with Israel, does this mean Israel should bolster Hamas’ military wing so that it cracks down on these renegade Fatah militants and can impose its rule on Gaza?

Madness, you say? Perhaps. But I recall Israel doing just that some years ago when the tables were turned and it was Hamas militants trying to ruin the truces between Israel and the Fatah faction of Yasser Arafat.

Now it’s Hamas’ gain, Fatah’s loss.