Articles which have caught my interest. Mostly Israel stuff and other nubbins from the ongoing holy war.

 
Bush vs. Everybody

It's been one of those irritating weeks where it seems like things are spiralling in bad directions. China has decided to join France and Russia for a little display of muscle-flexing. The Turks are making problems. The Vatican is pushing its weight behind the peace-at-any-price stand. Even Britain has begun waffling a bit, trying to push a compromise second resolution through the UN.

What drives me nuts is that getting rid of Saddam should have been a no-brainer. There are very few undisputed bad guys in the world, but by all rights Saddam is one of them. The guy has very few supporters, even among those who might otherwise be romantically inclined to view him as a figure of Arab resistance against Western colonialism.

But Saddam doesn't much feature in the anti-war discourse. In the bizarro world of the anti-war coalition and the European allies, Bush is the enemy, the threat, the murderer. I've been waiting for the slide down the slippery slope that will lead to Saddam being painted as the victim of this.

The big question is less what happens next -- America goes to war, with or without the support of anyone else -- but what happens after that. A quick campaign to oust the Butcher from Baghdad and everyone will rush to jump on the bandwagon. Something messier and I don't want to think.

posted at 7:36 PM

 
Haifa: 15 Dead

Another suicide bombing, this one on a bus in Haifa not far from where I used to live.

As usual, this kind of thing really takes away the urge to write. One thing that should be emphasized (and LGF made the point a little more strongly than I would) is that newspapers report that this is the first bombing after a two-month lull is inaccurate. This was the first successful bombing in two months. The IDF reported that in the same two months they have managed to foil some 120 attempted suicide attacks, or roughly two a day.

Given the situation with the war in Iraq, I don't expect the government to respond too severely. We certainly won't see a repeat of the reprisals aimed at Arafat's headquarters like we saw last year.
posted at 9:11 PM

 
Garofalo, Redux

Jonah Goldberg turns his attention to Janeane Garofalo and her rather loopy political opinions and is much nicer about it than anyone would have expected.
posted at 10:44 PM

 
One Comes in, the Other Goes Out

The biggest change we'll probably see with the new government will probably be in the Interior Ministry, which among its powers controls everything related to marriage and citizenship. For years, the office was the sinecure of Shas who used it to enforce the strictest mandates of Jewish law when any questions came up. As a result, Israel was stuck with a fairly large number of people from the Former Soviet Union who weren't eligible for citizenship or weren't allowed to be married here because they weren't halakhically Jewish.

Now things have flipped 180 degrees and the Interior Ministry now belongs to Shinui, the anti-Shas. This was, in fact, Shas' nightmare scenario and one which they used as part of their doom-and-gloom campaign ads. All for naught, it would seem. Incoming Interior Minister Avraham Poraz replaced outgoing minister Eli Yishai yesterday in a damned uncomfortable-looking ceremony.

The two politicians took turns playing Shecky Green with each other. Yishai told Poraz that he is named after the patriarch Abraham and should basically do his job based on "What would Abraham do?" Poraz then asked Yishai, "You guys haven't shredded all the documents, have you?"

It will be interesting to see how much Shinui can do with its new ministry. They are bound by their coalition agreement with the National Religious Party not to monkey around too much with the rules. Which for the moment means that they can extend recognition of marriage to citizens who up till now have been unable to marry. Poraz has also extended citizenship rights to parents of one of the victims of the Dolphin disco bombing two years ago.

The bigger issues of civil marriage and the recognition of Reform and Conservative converts as Jews are still a ways off. If Shinui manages to pull that off, then they'll really have reason to be proud.
posted at 9:08 PM

 
Lady MacJudy

This weekend's Ha'aretz magazine features a none-too flattering portrait of Judy Shalom Nir Mozes, the new Foreign Minister's utterly insufferable wife.

Judy, scion to one of the country's media baronships (her family owns the daily newspaper Yediot Ahoronot and numerous other holdings), has one goal in life: to get her husband Silvan Shalom elected prime minister. To this end, all actions are kosher. She wines and dines Likud activists, cozies up to reporters, and uses her radio appearances alternately to cry about the unfair treatement doled out to Silvan and to make veiled threats against the Prime Minister's office and the police.

The article is filled with all manner of nasty tidbits. Judy checks in with friends in the various newspapers to find out what they'll be publishing about Silvan the next day and makes suggestions on what could be changed. Occasionally, she also threatens to use her own newspaper connections to get back at whatever politician or Likud activist has crossed her path. One Knesset member, reached for comment, actually tells the Ha'artez reporter "We didn't have this conversation."

Finally, Sarah Netanyahu has some competition for most odious political spouse.
posted at 3:27 PM