NEVER FORGOTTEN
Kathryn Blaze Carlson
National Post, March 8, 2011
It has been 1,717 days since Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas, and Karnit Goldwasser is counting. Ms. Goldwasser—the stalwart widow whose two-year fight for the release of her kidnapped husband, Ehud, ended only when his body was returned in a 2008 Israeli-Hezbollah prisoner swap—is counting because she cannot stop, will not stop.
Her petite frame and freckled face lend an appearance younger than her 34 years, but her voice ages her as she describes the ongoing task of ensuring that Gilad Shalit, like her late husband, is not forgotten. “‘All for one and one for all’ is not just a statement in Israel, it’s a way of life,” Ms. Goldwasser said at a café in midtown Toronto, where she will spend the next two days encouraging Canadians to take up Mr. Shalit’s cause. “For me, this is the same as if someone was injured during combat and he is lying there in the middle of a firefight. Someone must go out there and help him.”
Mr. Shalit, who was 19 when he was captured at the Kerem Shalom border crossing and whose whereabouts in the Gaza Strip are still unknown, was kidnapped three weeks before Ms. Goldwasser’s husband and another Israeli soldier, Eldad Regev, fell into the hands of Hezbollah—the Lebanon-based Muslim group supported by Iran and Syria.
Later that summer, once the 2006 Lebanon-Israel conflict mostly subsided, the three families met at the law offices of Ya’akov Ne’eman, the current Israeli Minister of Justice, to pool their energies and foster a plan.… “The point of the meeting was not to hug each other and say everything would be alright—you don’t have time to be emotional,” Ms. Goldwasser said.… “The point of the meeting was to work together, to think together.…”
Ms. Goldwasser’s tenacity led to meetings with now-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Pope, all in the hopes that maybe—just maybe—she could convince them to lean on the Red Cross to demand a visit with her husband.
In 2007, she snuck into a press conference in New York and faced off with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insisting to know why he would not allow the Red Cross to see…her husband.… The incident garnered international attention and, although the Red Cross never did visit [Ehud], she hopes the outcome will be different for Mr. Shalit and his family. “If someone could go and visit Gilad Shalit, and then go back to his mother, Aviva, and say, ‘I saw your son, he looks good. He’s quite sad, but he’s okay. He’s asking you not to worry’—try to imagine what that would mean for his mother,” said Ms. Goldwasser.… “Imagine what it would mean for Gilad Shalit, who is sitting alone over there and no one has yet visited him. Imagine if someone went to him and said, ‘From here, I am going to see your mother and I’m going to tell her that you’re OK’.”
Ms. Goldwasser said she is not under the illusion that a rally or a media interview will secure the release of Mr. Shalit, but she said that if enough people become “ambassadors for Gilad”—that is, if enough people speak “loudly and clearly,” and “keep Gilad on the agenda”—then maybe the pressure will culminate in a visit from a non-governmental organization. “It has been 1,716 days that he has been in captivity, and I worry that he thinks we have forgotten him,” she said. “Who knows if he’s aware that we’re fighting for him.”
It has been more than two years since her husband’s coffin was returned to her, and Ms. Goldwasser has certainly not forgotten.… “This issue has changed me, I have become different—it has changed my personality, maybe I am more mature,” said Ms. Goldwasser.… “I paid a very, very high price for my country, so it’s more hurtful to me now when something bad happens in Israel.”
Since [her husband’s body was returned in the] July 16, 2008 prisoner swap, [Ms. Goldwasser has visited the Shalit family at their protest tent next to the Prime Minister’s house in Jerusalem on several occasions. “They are sitting, and they are waiting.… They are there to remind the government of their son.…”
But the return of Mr. Shalit is about far more than the return of one man, Ms. Goldwasser said: Young men and women join the Israeli army every single day, and they must be confident that the Israeli government is their greatest protector—that its politicians will do whatever it takes to secure their return. “No matter how [we get] Gilad, we’re going to bring back our values and our self-confidence,” she said.… “It’s about the message and our confidence in our country.”
REDISCOVERED, ANCIENT COLOR IS RECLAIMING ISRAELI INTEREST
Dina Kraft
NY Times, February 27, 2011
One of the mysteries that scholars have puzzled over for centuries is the exact shade of blue represented by “tekhelet,” which the Bible mentions as the color of ceremonial robes donned by high priests and ritual prayer tassels worn by the common Israelite.
What [is] known about tekhelet (pronounced t-CHELL-et) is that the Talmud said it was produced from the secretion of the sea snail, which is still found on Israeli beaches. Traditional interpretations have characterized tekhelet as a pure blue, symbolic of the heavens so that Jews would remember G-d. Not so, according to an Israeli scholar who has a new analysis: tekhelet appears to have been closer to a bluish purple.
The scholar, Zvi C. Koren, a professor specializing in the analytical chemistry of ancient colorants, says he has identified the first known physical sample of tekhelet in a tiny, 2,000-year-old patch of dyed fabric recovered from Masada, King Herod’s Judean Desert fortress, later the site of a mass suicide by Jewish zealots after a long standoff against the Romans. “It really is majestic,” Dr. Koren said of the shade, which he said remained close to its original hue and appeared to be indigo.…
The fabric he examined was one of many items discovered at Masada in the 1960s and stored at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It came to his attention when a British historian, Hero Granger-Taylor, who specializes in ancient weaves, asked him to analyze some textiles. Dr. Koren said he was the first researcher to make the connection between the fabric and the snail dye. He found that the dye used in the Masada sample, a piece of bluish-purple yarn embroidery, came from a breed of Murex trunculus snail familiar to modern Israelis. Such shades on textiles are rare finds since they were typically worn exclusively by royalty or nobility.
Determining what exactly tekhelet would have looked like in its day has been the subject of conjecture and curiosity among rabbis, religious commentators and scientists for centuries; it is considered the most important of the three ritual colors cited in the Bible. The other two are argaman, a reddish purple, and shani, known as scarlet. “It’s especially exciting for religious Jews who place great importance on this color,” said Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, a University of Haifa archaeologist specializing in mollusk shells.
Some time after the Jews were exiled from Israel in A.D. 70, the knowledge of how to produce the tekhelet dye was lost. The dye was also prohibitively expensive to make: hundreds of snails were used to make even a small batch, and some in ancient times claimed it was worth 20 times its weight in gold.…
In modern Hebrew, “tekhelet” is the word for light blue.… The blue of the Israeli flag was inspired by tekhelet.… [However], even though [the new finding suggests that tekhelet] is not [sky blue], Dr. Koren said, the traditional notion of tekhelet—meant to serve as a reminder of the heavens—still fits. “Tekhelet is the color of the sky,” Dr. Koren said in his laboratory. “It’s not the color of the sky as we know it; it’s the color of sky at midnight.” He paused and added, “It’s when you are all alone at night that you reach out to G-d, and that is what tekhelet reminds you of.…”
JEWS’ CONNECTION TO THE LAND
MUST NOT BE SEVERED, EVEN IN HEBRON
Moshe Arens
Haaretz, February 22, 2011
Moshe Arens’ Jews’ Connection to the Land Must Not Be Severed, Even in Hebron, is a critique of Gideon Levy’s Haaretz editorial, entitled How school trips to Hebron resemble visits to Auschwitz. Below, please find excerpts of Levy’s piece, followed by Mr. Arens’ full article.
Gideon Levy writes:
“More than half of Jewish school children in Israel have visited Auschwitz; each year more than 10,000 go on a trip to Poland or on the March of the Living, a pilgrimage to the death camps. They come back shocked and nationalist. These tours mislead the weeping students for a moment as they wrap themselves in the [Israeli] flag.… These programs bring back thousands of teens who have learned nothing.… Just more and more blind faith in strength, xenophobia, fear of the other and inflamed passions.…
Now Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar wants to add a tour to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Thousands of teens will be taken in armored buses to the danger zone, accompanied by soldiers and armed bodyguards.… The students will be hurried into the ancient site that is believed to be the Cave of Machpelah—the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs who are probably not buried there.… Their guides, the most violent and atrocious of the settlers in the territories, will not tell them what they have done. They will discuss the history of the place with Zionist selectivity.…
Here, too, as at Auschwitz, they will only scare them more and more. At Auschwitz they will make them frightened of the Poles and in Hebron of the Arabs. Everyone always wants to annihilate us. They will return from Hebron excited at having touched the ancient stones.…[but] they will see nothing and learn nothing. As at Auschwitz, they will come home even more nationalist: Hebron forever, and the force of arms.…
Moshe Arens writes:
Who are the people, including the editorial writers of this newspaper, who have gone ballistic over the education minister’s announcement that students should be taken on heritage trips to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron? Are they Zionists, non-Zionists, post-Zionists or anti-Zionists? Have their roots in the Land of Israel withered over the years, or have they lost hold of their senses in these tumultuous times?
They seem to have forgotten the very foundation of Zionism: that the Jewish State is located in the Land of Israel just because it is the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, and that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem are the icons of the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel—constant reminders to one and all that the Land of Israel is the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, who have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
They seem to have fallen under the spell of the “1967 borders.” They are infatuated by the “Green Line” drawn like a scar across the Land of Israel. West of this line Israel is kosher, not an occupier of another people, but east of that line, you had better watch out. These, they hold, are occupied territories where Israel rules over another people, and no Jew should be living there, or G-d forbid, be allowed to settle there.
So what is this sacrosanct Green Line? It is nothing more than the armistice line agreed between representatives of Israel and Jordan at Rhodes on April 24, 1949. It was never intended to be a border between two nations. It simply represented, with some modifications, the line where the fighting during Israel’s War of Independence ceased. The British-officered and -equipped Jordanian Arab Legion that had invaded the newborn state of Israel on May 15, 1948 had reached the point during the fighting where its commander, Glubb Pasha, realized that unless Jordan agreed to a cease-fire, the Israeli army was going to advance to the Jordan River and his army would be powerless to stop it.
The armistice left the biblical heartland of ancient Israel, the mountains of Samaria and Judea, the major historical and biblical sites of the Jewish people, east of the armistice line. The War of Independence brigade commanders Moshe Dayan and Yosef Tabenkin had urged the Israel Defense Forces’ General Staff to allow them to capture the Old City of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron, but they were halted by the cease-fire of October 22, 1948.
With Jordan in control of these areas, not only were Jews not allowed to live there, but during the 18 years of Jordanian occupation, Jews were denied access to the Western Wall, the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s tomb. Masada, a site visited over the years by almost all Israelis, young and old, came under Israeli control only in March 1949, when IDF units moving from Be’er Sheva reached the Dead Sea at Sodom and Ein Gedi. One can imagine that had this “last-minute” operation not taken place, the very same people who now complain about students visiting the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron would be arguing against visits to Masada, located in “occupied territory.”
This perverse objection by some to visits east of the March 1949 armistice lines seems to be part of a wider boycott movement of the whole area. Whether it is Ariel or Hebron, these rootless Israelis will not set foot there. They give credence to the frequently heard Arab propaganda that the Jewish claim of a historic connection to this land is nothing but fiction.
The supporters of the “two-state solution,” who insist that Israel withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines and consider Judea and Samaria to be occupied territory, seem to give no thought to assuring contact between the Jewish people and these sites if such a withdrawal were to take place. Was this even on the agenda in the negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, or between Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni and the Palestinian Authority?
Perhaps [these] supporters…would prefer to sever the connection between the Jewish people and the sites that are reminders of the Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel. That might be one explanation for the objections voiced to visits by Israeli students to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
Note: Mr. Moshe Arens is a former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, and has also served as Israeli Defense Minister on three separate occasions. Mr. Arens will be the keynote speaker at CIJR’s upcoming Gala, scheduled for Wednesday, June 15, 2011.
