Hamas

It’s getting harder to tell urban legends from reality in this age of drive-by talk radio and an anarchic Internet.

Case in point: the widely proliferating rumor that the Obama administration is spending $20 million of your tax dollars on “resettling Palestinians with ties to Hamas in the United States.”

That rumor was reportedly the motivation behind a spending bill amendment by Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) — quickly withdrawn when it was revealed to be an Internet myth.

I hadn’t seen Nissim, owner of my favorite kosher restaurant in my Queens neighborhood, for a while, but he saw something new on me right away.
“That’s one of those Three Weeks things, right?” he said, pointing to my face with a note of concern. It had sprouted a growth of unkempt, untrimmed beard since I last had sampled his steamed dumplings and egg roll.

Full-scale wars, which Israel has fought many times in the past, and major army operations, which Israel has found itself in during recent weeks in Gaza and Lebanon, usually bring stories of troop maneuvers and military analysis, call-ups of the reserves, and civilian sacrifices. The human side of war is often hard to picture from a distance, particularly when the fighting involves Israel, a country that few Americans, even American Jews, have visited.

An empty picture frame at Rodger Kamenetz’s seder table this year is not an empty gesture.
Kamenetz sees Tibet in the frame.

This past week, while Israel prayed for a kidnapped Israeli corporal and Israeli soldiers struck at Gaza, a future Israeli soldier was buried in Jerusalem.

As far back as the Munich Olympics of 1972, Palestinian terrorists and their supporters have used kidnapping as a political tool, abducting Israeli civilians and soldiers to be used in potential prisoner swaps and to obtain other concessions from Israel. Following is a chronology of prominent Israeli kidnappings and MIA cases:
1972: Members of the Black September terrorist group sneak into the Olympic Village in Munich and take 11 members of the Israeli delegation hostage. All 11 are killed.

A middle-aged school administrator in Los Angeles, Hershey Fellig has been battling kidney failure for five years. Feeling tired each day, he was following a strict diet, taking a regimen of pills, waiting for a kidney donor and praying that someone would call with good news. A year ago someone called. Lauren Finkelstein, a stranger from New York, told Fellig she’d help get him a donor.

In what officials of the group were pitching as a statistical response to a recent survey of Jewish public opinion by the dovish J Street, the Anti-Defamation League this week released a poll showing significantly lower approval of President Barack Obama’s handling of Middle East issues and overwhelming support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza early this year.

In a speech that could be a dry run for his upcoming meetings with President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said his government is ready to “resume peace negotiations” with the Palestinians “without any delay, without any preconditions, the sooner the better” and called for a “triple-track” approach that includes political as well as economic and security negotiations.

While President Obama met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu halfway on the volatile issue of Iran during their inaugural meeting in Washington this week, gaps between the two allies on the issue remain wide — and could get wider still as the administration begins dealing with a palate of unattractive policy options.