MK Elazar Stern (Yesh Atid) has proposed a law by which there would be rules set for hostage negotiation, should it, God forbid, ever be necessary.

Stern's proposal has two elements to it:
1. hostage negotiations to exchange Israelis captured by enemy for terrorists in Israeli jails would be on the basis of 1 for 1. No more trading thousands of terrorists for one or a few Israelis. 1 for 1, and that's it.
2. As soon as an Israeli is taken hostage by the enemy, Israel will harshen the terms of imprisonment for terrorists in Israeli jails. This would apply to terrorists associated with the organization behind the abduction.
source: IBA

The worst part about this law proposal is that it is being proposed by a member of the Opposition, and specifically Yesh Atid. They don't get along too well with coalition members right now, so I see it as having a high chance of being rejected. Hopefully they will approach it on its merits and garner enough support to put it through the process.

We all know the story of how early colonialists purchased Manhattan from the Indians for about $24.

Other great land purchases include the Louisiana Purchase, for $15,000,000 from France and the Alaska Purchase from Russia for $7,200,000. Of course there are some biblical purchases as well, such as Abraham's purchase of the Cave of Machpela, King David bought the area of Temple Mount to build an altar, Yaakov bought Schchem..

I don't know if Bet El will go down in history as one of the greatest land purchases ever, but the idea has come up as a possible solution in peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

We, the Israelis led by PM Netanyahu, want and expect to keep in our hands, in the event of a peace agreement in which land from Samaria is given to the Palestinians, blocs of Jewish towns and villages (a.k.a. "settlements"). One of those blocs would be the bloc of Bet El - the city and the towns in the area. Part of the proposal, as recently revealed, is that Neyanyahu is offering to pay for keeping the bloc of land.

NRG says it is not clear at this point whether the Bet El Purchase would be a straight-out purchase or a long-term land lease, but there is an offer of some sort of purchase. This is different than other blocs that are under discussion of land-swaps - Bet El would be comprised of both a land swap and a monetary purchase.

The Americans and Jordanians have supposedly confirmed the proposal, though it has not yet been passed along to the Palestinians.

Somehow I don't think Bet El will be as cheap as Manhattan, but almost nothing else ever has been...

MK Yaakov Litzman (UTJ) proposed a law, that squeaked through the ministerial committees approval with a 5-4 vote, and will eventually head to the Knesset for approval.

Litzman proposed that the only way the government would be allowed to enter negotiations with the Palestinians regarding the possibility of giving away parts of Jerusalem would be if it is first approved by at least 80 Members of Knesset.

Immediately after the committee passed the bill, Livni appealed the decision. her appeal will prevent the bill from going to the Knesset next week for voting.
(source: NRG)

Will 80 members of Knesset ever agree on anything? I think if they can get 80 MKs to agree about negotiating on Jerusalem, it will already have to be the days of Mashiach, rendering the negotiations moot.


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Donate to the Schneider Hospital so I can run the Schneider benefit marathon..

Some secrets were meant to be kept, and some secrets were meant to be leaked.

I don't know how long this secret has been kept under wraps, but considering the release of 104 terrorists was only announced a few days ago, the secret deal between PM Netanyahu and Habayit Hayehudi cannot have existed for very long.

It seems that they had a secret arrangement by which Habayit Hayehudi would support the release of the 104 terrorists, in exchange for the construction in Judea and Samaria of thousands of additional housing units.

Habayit Hayehudi has not confirmed the secret deal, which was given an awful lot of exposure for something so secret, and has said that they are constantly demanding continued construction of additional housing in Judea and Samaria, and they voted unanimously against the decision to release terrorists. Other anonymous Habayit Hayehudi officials said that the secret deal is what allowed the release to pass fairly quietly - even though Habayit Hayehudi voted against, they did let it pass quietly without making much of a ruckus.

The exposure of a secret deal like this is surely not going to be viewed upon favorably by those working on peace negotiations, specifically John Kerry who has done a lot to bring the Palestinians to the table, nor to the Palestinians themselves, who will likely exploit this to halt the negotiations (even though there never was an official building freeze since the 10 month freeze a few years ago) that have hardly begun, and the Left wing politicians in Israel who point to it as an indication that the PM is trying to undermine the negotiations right from the start - even though no building freeze was made conditional for the start of negotiations.

Either way, some people just can't keep a secret. Unless they never intended to..

the campaign against the latest round of suspected goodwill gestures to jump start negotiations

Rumors have been swirling about the release of Gilad Shalit being imminent, as a deal is in the final stages of being closed. To this end, Hamas has announced that the current holdup is surrounding an argument over one prisoner - Hamas wants a specific terrorist released and Israel is saying no to that one.

I generally have not commented on the rumors, because they are just rumors. We have heard many times already that a deal is imminent and his release is just days away. It obviously has not happened yet, so I take rumors in the media to be just rumors and not worthy of comment.

This, however, is not just a rumor, but a statement by Hamas. I am not commenting on the rumor of Shalit's coming release, but on the hamas statement of Israel holding up the deal because of one name.

Clearly, Hamas is trying to put pressure on israel by making such an announcement. Most people who hear such a thing will say "One name? one name? that is it? one name, just forget it. throw him in. we are releasing all those others anyway, what is one more?" or something to that effect.

Have you ever argued with a taxi driver over the price of a ride, and he will say to you "you are arguing over 2 shekel?", and then you feel kind of stupid that you are getting all worked up over that small amount.

The truth is, and I often will say something to this affect in similar situations, the other guy is also arguing over just "2 shekels" (or whatever the small amount is), so you should feel no less or more stupid than he should feel, (NOTE: despite my saying this, I am a certified freier and generally will be the one who ends up paying the difference), and you have no reason to not argue for it just like he feels he has the right.

Hamas is doing the same thing. By saying the argument is over one name, they are making us feel stupid, like we are holding up the deal to release Shalit because of one insignificant point in the deal. The truth is, they are holding up the deal just as much, and they should be the ones to forgo that one name, just like they are claiming that we should forgo it.

Hamas knows that we are a democracy, and the government has to keep the people happy. If they can make us feel stupid over this, they will have exerted the appropriate pressure, via the average Israeli citizen, on the Israeli government. And by doing that, they will likely get what they want.

nobody wants to feel stupid.

I got a ticket the other day. First time in like 10 years. I was driving to Bnei Brak for a wedding, and nearly missed the turn up to Givat Shmuel - Bnei Brak. There is no sign warning of the impending highway exit. It just happens with a sign at the exit itself.

So, I see the sign at the exit and swing in. It seems that is a fairly common spot for things like this to happen and the police lay there in wait and grab offending drivers. My crime was not waiting in line but cutting into traffic ahead of other cars in the lane. I didn't even know this was illegal - I thought as long as you cross a dotted line it is legal - I signalled with my blinker and cut in. And my second crime was crossing a bold line. I didn't think I did - I thought I cut in before the bold line appeared, as I cut in as soon as I saw the sign for the turn, but maybe I just missed it.

Anyway, the cop pulls me over and she tells me what i did wrong. I am not one to argue about these things. She asks me what I have to say for myself, where I was going, and if I am in a rush. I said I am on my way to a wedding in Bnei Brak, but I am not in a rush. I found out later she was a bit disappointed by that answer, as if I had said I was in a rush it would have been an admission of guilt - I am in a rush so I cut in. But I wasn't in a rush, just only saw the sign at the last minute. If not in a rush, a driver is less likely to do the crimes she was stopping me for.

Anyway, she thought for a minute and then the funniest exchange took place between a driver and a cop.

She started negotiating with me whats he would write me up for. She was basically negotiating with herself, as I am horrible at that kind of stuff - talking my way out of tickets and the like, but it was still funny. She started weighing all the options of what she could throw at me, and what the ramifications would be. She in the end decided to write me up for only one of the transgressions, not both, and told me what I have to do to get it converted to a warning, considering I have not had a ticket in 10 years or so. She told me not to pay the ticket, but to copy it and mail it to the the Traffic Office of the police and request they convert it to a warning because I am not from the area and was unfamiliar with the roads, etc.

The fact that she started negotiating with me what she would write me up for was humorous and a bit surreal. I guess she expected me to start arguing, and had prepared for that by mentioning the worst she could do, but she had not actually planned on doing it, considering I was a nice guy (I even held her flashlight for her so she could see while she wrote me up). Very strange, but there must be a lesson in the incident somewhere, aside form don't cross bold lines and don't cut into traffic..

So if the Syrian Foreign Minister is telling the truth, and Israel really did agree to a full withdrawal from the Golan already in the first day of official negotiations, what is there left to negotiate? Why have they not signed the deal and why has Israel not already pulled out of the Golan?

In what kind of negotiations do you agree to everything the other side wants at the beginning of the discussion?

Shas was not established; not for the outposts and not for the settlements. Shas was established to renew the glory to the crown [of the Sephardic community]. The dismantling of illegal outposts will not be a reason for us to leave the coalition.

----Communications Minister Ariel Attias (Shas)

The joke is that Shas was not established for the settlements.... but was only established for taking money. As long as Olmert keeps giving large payouts to Shas, they will find no reason to leave the coalition. As soon as Olmert refuses to give them some money, they will abandon the coalition.

Seriously though, I agree with Attias that Shas is not the settlement party, and their agenda never was the settlements, even if they, at times, supported settlement activity. The NRP, the Ichud Leumi, and others wave the flag of creating settlements. Shas does not, and therefore does not need to leave the government just because Olmert decides to cleanse a few mountains from Jews.

The question really is how much breathing room is Shas giving Olmert. Shas believes, or at least they say so publicly, that there are no serious negotiations taking place between Israel and the PA. It is all just a show. Therefore they feel comfortable staying in the coalition. As soon as it gets serious and Jerusalem, or other items that are beyond the Shas red line, are put on the table, in a serious fashion, they will jump ship.

Can they really know when Olmert is talking seriously with the PA and when he is just talking to make people think there are negotiations happening? I don't know, but I doubt it.

But even if they are able to know when the talks are serious and when they are not, it is clear that what will happen is that Olmert will come to an agreement on Jerusalem and call for new elections. He will run the elections declaring it a referendum on his peace initiative. By then, even with Shas leaving the government and elections being scheduled, it will be too late because what good leftist will vote against an imminent peace deal, even if it goes beyond what he would normally accept and agree to. We are at the edge of peace and you are going to reject it! So even if they would normally disapprove of talking about jerusalem, they would easily be swayed to support it once a deal had been reached. And Shas is letting those talks happen regularly and is just waiting for Olmert to finish the talks and call for new elections before they wake up.

As a side note, stickers were supposedly passed around the country, with a hig concentration being placed near the homes of the ministers of Shas, saying "Jerusalem for Gold", playing on the common expression "Jerusalem of Gold"

The political situation reminds me of the old book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. In The Giving Tree, the boy befriends a tree and the tree provides the boy with all his needs. Fruit, shade, vines to swing on, branches, etc. The tree gives the boy everything he asks for. The tree even allows the boy to cut it down so he can have wood to build a boat.

Here we have a government giving the Palestinians everything they want and ask for and Israel asks for nothing in return. And anything the Palestinians promised to give Israel has been ignored and forgotten.

I have no problem with the government negotiating and giving away land and releasing prisoners and receiving security and other things in return. I should preface that and say that theoretically I have no problem with it. I think this specific government has no legitimacy due to its corruption and its failures, so this government has no right to do so.

I might not want it, as I believe all the Land belongs to us, but I understand it and accept the fact that to resolve the conflict we will need to negotiate and give away land in order to receive security. I also do not believe we have a reliable and trustworthy partner, so I believe that the only way such negotiations are acceptable and I would be resolved to them is if we did have a reliable partner. As long as our "partner" is using the negotiations as a tool to destroy us and not to live peacefully with us side by side, then I will still not be resolved to the situation.

Back to the situation, we have already given the Palestinians plenty of land. Some of it unilaterally while destroying Jewish families and homes in the process, and some of it under agreement. We have released many prisoners, some as part of negotiations and some as goodwill.

We keep doing things for the Palestinians and getting nothing in return.

Qassam rockets still rain down daily on Israeli cities. A soldier has been kidnapped and no contact with him has been allowed, even for humanitarian purposes (yes a tape was released of him but there was never any confirmation as to the timeframe of the tape). Terror reigns (we have not had suicide attacks because the Israeli security stops them, not because the PA security stops them). We hardly ever are allowed to go to holy sites in Arab areas. The PA textbooks in their schools still ignore the existence of Israel and the desire for the destruction of Israel is still taught. Palestinian militias have never been disarmed.

Basically we are the giving tree for the Palestinans.

Now we are going to Annapolis which will be opening up a new page in our negotiations with the Palestinians. And instead of making the PA keep and fulfill all the promises they have made until now but never fulfilled, and instead of saying you want x, y or z, let's negotiate and let your demands be part of the negotiations, we offer all that in advance.

Olmert has now announced a freeze in settlement building, even on natural growth expansion. Israel announced it is going to free 500 more prisoners as a gesture before Annapolis.

I see no reason why these should not be deferred to negotiations. Israel should say, you want settlement freeze? let's negotiate. Why do we accept that as a precondition?

Israel is The Giving Tree. The question is are we going to keep giving even until we allow the Palestinians to cut us down to a stump?

Yesterday's deal of a body swap for a missing dead Israel civilian for two dead Hezbollah and one sick Lebanese also included other information not yet made public.

Rumor has it that the information includes information on Ron Arad's fate.

While the info is still not public so we have no idea what it is or how reliable it is, today marks a special day. Today is the 21st anniversary of Ron Arad's captivity.

I hope that this day brings us closer to knowing what happened to Ron Arad and bringing him home, alive or dead.

I heard about this "on the street" last night before this was in the news. This morning I saw it in the major media sources, which means the seriousness of the incident will be increased.

An El Al flight from Toronto to Tel Aviv had to make an unscheduled landing due to technical difficulties. The flight landed in London. After some delay, El Al decided to continue the flight to Israel. Upon realizing that the flight would have to land on shabbos due to the timing, they transferred the flight to its subsidiary Sun Dor and put the religious customers up in a local hotel for the duration of shabbos.

According to the recent agreement between the Haredim under the authority of the Organization for the Guarding the Holiness of Shabbos and El Al, El Al has agreed and committed to not flying under the El Al name on shabbos. The Haredim agreed that under any non-El Al name the chilul shabbos can continue, just not under the name El Al because of the symbolism of it being a state company (even though it is not a state company).

Now the Haredim and the above mentioned organization are up in arms over the "fast-one" pulled by El Al to get around the problem of flying in shabbos. El Al has now come up with a great solution - they can fly all their customers on shabbos when ever they feel the need, simply by transferring the plane to the subsidiary Sun Dor. All this chillul shabbos now has the hechsher from the Organization for Guarding the Holiness of Shabbos with all the gedolim signed on it.

Looks like someone is eating crow right now.

Supposedly the Haredi groups are meeting to discuss what they can do about it, inclusing the possibility of re-opening the boycott. I suspect that they will end up issuing a "stern warning" to El Al and threaten them not to do this again, but will not actually proceed with re-opening the boycott of El Al. They must realize that to a certain extent this is their fault and is technically kosher according to the agreement (even if not in the spirit of the agreement) and they will look even worse now if they show everyone how they messed up the last negotiations.

There is qord that some Haredi leaders have personally cancelled their flights on El Al, but there is not yet a call for people in the wider public to do so, other than the Gerrer Rebbe. He has, supposedly, called on people to fly other airlines until this is resolved. If I am not mistaken, he was against the original agreement with El Al and only signed on begrudgingly after Rav Elyashiv said to.

Ynet has posted an article by Yehuda Litani in which he says the excavations nearby and the renovations on the ramp of the Mugrabim Gate will lead to bloodshed and are not worth it. He wants Israel to abandon the renovations and excavations.

And this is after Israel has already given tacit permission to the Arabs to add a new minaret on the Mount while rejecting the Jews requests to build a synogague. They won't even let us do badly needed renovations and historical excavations.

Litani says, "We don't have to demonstrate our sovereignty over every inch of united Jerusalem in every case. At this time, which isn't easy for Israel and features immediate dangers, ranging from Hizbullah in Lebanon to the Iranian nuclear threat, we don't need this confrontation, which will give the Palestinians a reason to end their own bloody clashes and unite against Israel."

He might be right. There are possible scenarios in which it might just not be worth our "provoking" the peace loving Arabs to violence. After all, while sad that innocents are getting killed, it is better that they are killing each other in Gaza City rather than killing Jews or forcing us to kill them. A provocation by Israel could change all that. It could unite the various factions among the PA Arabs and get them to stop fighting with each other and start fighting with us again. Nobody wants that.

He might be right. But not when it comes to the Temple Mount. It is bad enough that the Arabs have acting control over the Mount and we Jews have to be debased and humiliated any time we want to go to visit the Mount with body searches for religious material and not being allowed to pray on the Mount.

They use our democratic society against us. We democratically have to give them control over anything they claim they are sensitive to. We democratically have to give them rights and freedoms in the name of peace and justice. Yet when they are in control of something they show us no liberties and offer us no rights and freedoms.

We have given them practical control over the Temple Mount. Do they let us have our religious freedoms and pray there, in the sight that is holiest to Judaism? No. Despite the fact that it is sovereign Israeli territory, we allow the Arabs enough control that they disallow jews to pray there. Freedom and liberty seems to only run one way when it comes to the Arabs.

Now Litani says we should not even demonstrate the slight amount of control we do have? If we let them hold the Mount hostage in this ridiculous baseless fashion and give in to their threats of violence, what would he say we should demonstrate our sovereignity over? only when they come looking for Lod and Ramle? Tel Aviv? Haifa? When will it be ok to demonstrate our sovereignity?

This is similar to the schoolyard bully who beats up the nerdy kid for his lunch money. He keeps on doing it for more and more power and money, until the kid realizes he has to stand up for himself. When he finally gets the courage to fight back, that is when the bully leaves him alone.

My three year old daught got a new book recently. It is a book about a kid who has low self esteem and is picked on by the other kids. A new kid moves into the neighborhood and the kid oozes with self esteem and immediately has all the other kids respect. The low self esteem kid asks him how he can be "strong" like him. His response is not to let them pick on you. When they tell you to do something, if you do not want to do it say no. Stand up for yourself. He says they will leave you alone if you just say no. It is not muscles that make you strong, rather the confidence and will to stand up for yourself.

It is time we stopped giving in to every threat the Arabs throw at us. It is time we stood up to them and told them we will not take it from them anymore. Let them show us how civilized they can be.

Even Judge Cheshin said yesterday (referring to the new Justice Minister who advocates changing the judicial system), "This is my house and I will cut off the hand of anybody who threatens it."

It seems final that the agreement between El Al and the organization authorized by Rav Elyashiv to negotiate has been signed.

It is in the general media, but I have not yet been able to confirm it from the haredi media or other haredi sources. (UPDATE: IT IS CONFIRMED)

One interesting point: part of the delay in signing the deal had been what happens if they violate the agreement and fly. The haredi organization was insisting on El Al refunding the cancellation fees to its haredi customers. El Al refused (I do not know why). The negotiated agreement compromises that in such a situation El Al will pay the money into a fund that will be used for subsidizing medications not included in the "health basket" subsidized by the government. The Gerrer Rebbe is supposedly the source of this interesting solution.

More details after shabbos...

Have a great shabbos everyone