After ridiculing claims by Jewish right-wingers that the iconic shooting of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura was a hoax, the Jerusalem Post’s Larry Derfner responds to a rebuttal by Richard Landes and Philippe Karsenty with a detailed analysis of what is, and isn’t, known about the shooting.

Karsenty is the French Jewish media watchdog who was sued in a French court for claiming the al-Dura incident, which helped fuel the flames of the second intifada, was staged. Karsenty initially was found guilty of defaming the journalist who filed the report, France 2 TV’s Charles Enderlin, but last month a French appeals court overturned the verdict, supporting Karsenty’s right to charge that the incident was a hoax.

The upshot? Derfner agrees with Karsenty, the IDF and Jewish observers who say that al-Dura likely was killed by Palestinian fire, not by Israeli troops, but Derfner says there’s no evidence to show the boy’s shooting was staged:

In short, the French appeals court upheld Karsenty’s legal right to cry hoax. It by no means upheld the substance of his claim. There are light years of difference between the two.

Yet while it’s pure Jewish paranoia to claim that Enderlin and his co-conspirators knew all along that the Palestinians killed al-Dura, and it’s way beyond paranoia to think the Palestinians killed the boy deliberately or that he never died at all.

It’s completely understandable that the parents of Israel’s captive soldiers are doing all they can to bring their sons home. In a nation where most sons serve in the army, the sentiments of anxious parents carry a lot more sway than they do in America (Remember Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in the Iraq war?). But that doesn’t mean that the parents of Israel’s captive soldiers should dictate Israeli policy, Israeli columnists and pundits caution.

On Wednesday night, Miki Goldwasser penned a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demanding that he accede to Hezbollah’s demands for the release of convicted murderer Samir Kuntar in exchange for the return of her son, Ehud Goldwasser, who was taken captive in a July 2006 cross-border attack. The letter, which was carried by all the Israeli papers, argued that Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah will not stop attacking Israel until the release of Kuntar, a Lebanese Druse who snuck into Israel in 1979 and killed four people, including a 4-year-old girl and her father. Goldwasser wrote:

If Kuntar is not considered a bargaining chip today, more kidnappings will follow, perhaps involving Israeli civilians touring abroad this time. Nasrallah is determined to bring Kuntar back come hell or high water.

Meanwhile, a furious Noam Shalit, father of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, demanded that Israel reject any cease-fire offer from Hamas that does not include his son’s return, pledging to take his fight to court to thwart the cease-fire.

But Israel knows that Hamas will not back down on its demand for a cease-fire as a precondition to a prisoner swap deal involving Shalit, and it is dangling both the carrot and the stick in front of the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. Israel has gone ahead with the cease-fire that took effect Thursday morning, but at the same time Olmert is warning that the truce is Hamas’ last chance to avoid a major IDF invasion of Gaza. For now, word is that negotiations to secure Shalit’s release will resume next week.

After calling on Olmert last week to accept a cease-fire deal, Ha’aretz praised Thursday’s truce. Ynet’s Sever Plocker slammed it, saying it destroyed the only leverage Israel had with Hamas, while Ynet’s Uri Misgav wrote that the lull of a cease-fire could create positive conditions for negotiations to free Shalit.

Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit writes that a confrontation between Hamas and Israel is inevitable, but Israel should try a cease-fire first to demonstrate that it has exhausted all avenues for dealing with the group.

Of course, will any Israeli effort ever be considered enough by those who blame Israel’s isolation of Hamas for its extremism and terrorism?

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Stephen Walt, at the podium, with “Israel Lobby” co-author John Mearshimer and Israel activist Uri Avnery at a speaking engagement in Tel Aviv on June 12, 2008. Photo by Dina Kraft.

In the following podcast, JTA’s Israel correspondent Dina Kraft speaks with Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, co-author of the controversial book “The Israel Lobby” who, with his co-author John Mearshimer of the University of Chicago, visited Israel last week on a speaking tour sponsored by the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom. Walt said he welcomed the dynamic and lively debate in the Jewish State and said he hoped their book might prompt discussion about the policies of the Israel lobby among Israelis themselves. You can read Ms. Kraft’s full story on the subject here.

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To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

On the eve of an apparent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza, the chatter in Israel already has moved onto another subject: Israel’s other threatening neighbor, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The New York Times reports that Israel is willing to engage in peace talks with Lebanon about “all issues,” including a disputed piece of land on the Israel-Lebanon border called Shebaa Farms. But what Israel is most interested in is the return of its two captive soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in the deadly incident that sparked the 2006 Lebanon war.

The families of the two soldiers met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s negotiations chief on Wednesday, and Israel reportedly is discussing the outline of a prisoner swap deal with Hezbollah. A deal likely would include the return to Lebanon of Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druse man who snuck into Israel in 1979 and murdered an Israeli man and his 4-year-old daughter, along with two Israeli policemen. This release of Kuntar is a cause celebre among many Lebanese, Palestinians and others who mistake the murder of a little girl and her young father for an act of heroism.

Nevertheless, Ha’aretz’s Uzi Benziman says repatriating Kuntar for Goldwasser and Regev would be a price worth paying, even if politically unpopular. Echoing that sentiment, Ynet’s Sima Kadmon says waiting might result in the Regev-Goldwasser captivity turning into that of Ron Arad, the Israeli airman who went down over Lebanon in 1986. Arad survived the fall and was captured, but he has not been heard from in some 20 years. His whereabouts remain unknown, and Israeli intelligence officials privately say it is highly unlikely he is still alive.

Arad’s family, however, say such a deal is not worthwhile.

On the Gaza front, Israel and Hamas continued to trade fire on Wednesday, with some two dozen rockets fired into Israel from the Palestinian strip.

Ynet’s Alex Fishman writes that the Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal

is taking shape for one reason: The two weak governments on both sides of the Gaza fence have an interest in seeing the deal succeed. Only one element has an interest in sabotaging this deal: The Iranians. They will make an effort to unravel it through the Islamic Jihad organization. This is where Hamas will be tested: Is it indeed an Iranian satellite, or does it only exploit Tehran for its own needs?

So everything that has happened and will happen in the day before the truce is a game: Who will emerge as “the man,” who will deliver the last blow, and who will fight to the last moment for its truce terms? This is what Hamas is doing, and this is what we’re doing as well.

Arieh Eldad, a Knesset member belonging to National Union-NRP, asserts in a piece posted on Ynet that the Israeli military needs a new attitude:

One after the other we hear the shameful reports of the IDF evacuating new recruits and administrative soldiers from bases at the front lines. In some cases the army is completely deserting bases and leaving the area open for hostile takeover.

The latest reports had to do with the evacuation of administrative soldiers from the liaison office at the Erez Crossing and the decision to evacuate new recruits from the Zikim base. Earlier, we saw the IDF evacuate its based in northern Samaria, even though this was not required by the Disengagement Law. The army also deserted bases in the Jordan Rift Valley, while removing, among others, all new recruit bases from Judea and Samaria.

Each one of these shameful moves came against a specific backdrop, and came with a reason and a pile of excuses. At times it was about “diplomatic reasons” – evacuating territory in favor of the Arabs. On occasion it was about administrative reasons – transferring new recruit bases to more proper sites.

The worst excuses were the ones about “security” – the bases are situated in a hostile environment and transporting troops to them and from them entails a logistical and security burden as well as the need to designate soldiers for guarding the bases instead of performing other security missions.

Recently, we heard the most terrible excuses: New recruits and administrative soldiers are not designated to fight, and therefore they must be removed from any location that presents danger. …

Shame covers our face. We knew, and said so, that those who run away from the terror in Gaza will have terror chase them. Yet even we didn’t know that the IDF won’t stop its retreat and would run away from Erez and Zikim too. Even in our worst nightmares we never imagined a situation whereby the people are staying in Sderot, Nir Oz, and Ashkelon, while the IDF is evacuating its troops to a safer place.

Ha’aretz has an article on how B’Tselem’s decision to distribute cameras to Palestinians may end up landing several Jewish settlers in jail for a recent attack on Arab shepherds.

Three months ago, the B’Tselem human rights organization gave Muna al-Nawaja a video camera. Nawaja, 24, lives near the Israeli settlement of Sussya, in the southern West Bank. Between caring for her young son and tending the family’s sheep, she learned to use the camera, fell in love with it and now carries it with her everywhere.

But its “baptism of fire” occurred last week, on Sunday afternoon. Most Israelis were busy preparing for the Shavuot holiday. But some had a different priority: savagely beating Nawaja’s relatives. She managed to capture a few seconds of the beating - in which her 57-year-old aunt was severely injured, and two uncles, age 60 and 33 were hurt - on film. But she never dreamed that it would prove to be the main, and possibly only, evidence available to the police investigating the assault.

B’Tselem has posted video clips from the incident in question.

Snoop Dogg is going to perform a concert at Ramat Gan Stadium in
Israel in September, Ha’aretz reports.

Marc Perelman reports in the Forward that “a recent flurry of signals from Al Qaeda leaders has fueled concerns among terrorism experts that Al Qaeda could be setting up to launch an attack on Israel.”

The worries about an impending attack actually grow out of the apparent struggles of the terrorist network, visible in mounting criticism from former members and leading Muslim theologians.

In recent weeks, the CIA chief has claimed that Al Qaeda had suffered setbacks in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and lengthy exposés in The New Yorker and The New Republic have detailed the inner debates raging within Al Qaeda, especially due to resentment over its indiscriminate killing of Muslims.

This perceived weakening has some experts predicting that Al Qaeda leaders would seek to repair the group’s image — and prove the skeptics wrong — with a spectacular attack on Israel, the one target on which all Muslim extremists seem to be able to agree.

The New Republic and the New Yorker both have long articles about Al Qaida’s problems in the Muslim world.

Over at JTA Election Central, we posted on Liz Cheney’s not so veiled swiped at the Bush-Rice policy of pressing for the Palestinian elections that culminated with a Hamas victory. Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo linked to our post, under the headline “All in the Family,” referring to Cheney’s vice-presidential dad.

Well, later in the week at the AIPAC conference, a Cheney family cousin (Barack something or other) also took a swipe at the Bush administration over the issue:

We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations. That is why I opposed holding elections in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot. The Israelis and the Palestinian Authority warned us at the time against holding these elections. But this Administration pressed ahead, and the result is a Gaza controlled by Hamas, with rockets raining down on Israel.

Rice is sticking to her guns. Here’s what she had to say about the topic in a recent essay that she wrote for Foreign Affairs: (more…)

Nextbook’s Jonathan Rosen has an op-ed in the NY Times on the hoopoe. Also, here’s more on kosher giraffe milk.