By Stan Goodenough
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tried Friday to explain the reasons why the Jewish people have "no choice" but to surrender the cradle of their nationhood and the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the Muslim Arabs for the creation of a Palestinian State.
Anyone who believes that Israel can maintain its current hold on all Judea and Samaria is "living in a dream," he insisted. Israel "needs to withdraw."
In an apparent effort to sweeten the pill, Olmert told a group of Jezreel Valley farmers Israel would not withdraw unilaterally as it did from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
The abandonment of any more land to the Arabs would be negotiated step-by-step with the terrorist Palestinian Authority, he pledged.
Olmert further tried to persuade his audience as to the "necessity" of taking these steps.
"Everyone understands that the State of Israel can't exist without a guarantee of a Jewish majority," he said.
In order "to ensure" this majority Israel would have to make "tough decisions."
Israeli leftists have successfully used this specter of the "demographic bomb" to buttress their arguments in favor of land surrender. The findings of other groups which dispute this demographic ...   more »

Who knows what course histroy would have taken had the Israelite kingdom not split
The Man Who Saved Olmert
What Destroyed Solomon's Temple?
Moshe Ya'alon As a National Metaphor  
Next week, as mourners converge on Jerusalem the way they have been doing every Ninth of Av since 71 AD, Jews the world over will recall matter-of-factly that the temples were destroyed "for unwarranted hatred." Who can disagree? In this case, faith and research concur.
Yet this pertains to the Second Temple, the one that was built by Herod and torched by Titus after its defenders, while braving Roman arrows, found time to betray, starve and knife each other. Less thought is paid to the circumstances of the First Temple's destruction some five centuries earlier.
True, biblical Judah's catastrophe is the focus of the graphically morbid Lamentations ("Alas, women eat their own fruit, Their new-born babes! Alas, priest and prophet are slain, In the sanctuary of the Lord!") whose public reading launches the fast, yet that tragedy is more distant, and less documented, than the one we were handed by Rome.
The Second Temple is a vivid memory. We have accurate descriptions of its architecture, we know its remaining wall ...   more »