1. When Edward Machnik’s parents brought him to Israel from the Ukraine ten years ago, they were sure that at last they would live in a country dedicated to the defense of Jews against nazis and anti-Semites. They had seen more than their share of anti-Semitism before and after communism collapsed in the Soviet Union.

   Edward joined the Israeli army under the same supposition. Little was he to know that the Israeli government had adopted a set of appeasement policies known as Oslo whose purpose would be to turn all of Israel into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

   In the army Edward served in the offices in the Gaza Strip that were supposed to be where the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army held their coordination meetings. Under the Oslo Accords, the PLO was committed to cooperating in security matters with Israel. Yossi Beilin and Yitzhak Rabin had promised it would be so. The PLO would fight against terror with no "Betselem or Supreme Court" restraining them, in full cooperation with Israel.

   Edward had assumed there would be no danger THERE. After all, the Israeli government was assuring him and the rest of the country that the violence was coming from street Palestinians whom Arafat cannot control and against Arafat’s own wishes. But Edward was assigned to the offices serving the officers of the Palestinian Authority’s official "police force", under the direct personal command of Arafat. Indeed, these offices were being carefully operated and maintained by both the PLO and Israel to retain some semblance of pretension that the PLO was actually cooperating with Israel in suppressing terror. Hence they should be the very model of the PLO’s show of good behavior. The safest place an Israeli soldier could be stationed. Besides, Edward believed in his government. His friends insist he supported conciliation with the Palestinians and opposed reprisals.

   Yesterday the officers of Arafat’s "police force" who use the coordination offices in which Edward works suddenly fled en masse from the offices and a few minutes later one of them came back tossed a bomb into the office in which Edward sat, the office in which Oslo was to be proven to be working, in which the Palestinian police coordinate things with the Israeli police and military.

   Edward was killed instantly. In cold blood. He was probably unarmed.

   Another human sacrifice by the Israeli government to the great pagan idol of Oslo.

2. The Gush Shalom splinter movement is led by Uri Avnery, father of Israeli anti-Zionism, and is composed of assorted communists and Far-Left lunatics. It has demanded that everyone refer to the events of the past two months as the "Palestinian War of Independence", morally equivalent (if not superior) to Israel’s own in 1948-9.

   Gush Shalom basically would like to see the PLO put as many Jews as possible into concentration camps, but assumes that Far-Leftists who support the PLO will be spared because they want peace. In any case, Avnery has been sending out personal letters to all businesses and factories located across the Green Line, including in Jerusalem neighborhoods, warning them that they will have to move themselves out of "Palestinian lands", and if they do not do so now voluntarily they will be forced out by the PLO at gunpoint and then get no compensation.

   When Avnery sent the letter to one factory in the West Bank, the owners wrote back to him in a letter that has been making the rounds on the internet. Our factory, explain the owners, is on lands that were first bought by Jews during the Ottoman era and so have been Jewish-owned for nearly 100 years. We would not think of relocating our factory to lands in the industrial park of Ashkelon inside Israel’s Green Line, as these are lands that were expropriated from Arabs, and so we are determined to stay on lands legitimately belonging to Jews here in the West Bank.

   In one of the signs of growing sanity in post-Oslo Israel, the leftist religious sub-party Meimad, Israel’s Tikkun, announced they would be organizing support for the settlements in the "territories" from now on.

3. At the cabinet meeting Wednesday evening, the Israeli cabinet of Barak decided to stop the helicopter shellings and missile shootings at PLO empty buildings. As you know, Barak’s military strategy consisted of warning the PLO which buildings would be targeted in retaliation for the PLO’s atrocities, giving the PLO time to empty them out, and then making a big show of shooting into them. The deterrence effect of course was zero, simply proving that Israel is governed by pusillanimous woosies afraid to use force. Even worse, it looked bad on the CNN and BBC. (Have you noticed by the way that both CNN and BBC have returned to their earlier habits of referring to Palestinian who murder children or blow up buses as "activists"? Strangely, they never refer to the fellas who blew up Oklahoma City as activists.)

   So the official policy of Barak is once again to turn the other cheek and to defeat terrorism by shaming the PLO into stopping it through exhibition of good Christian pacifist behavior by the Jewish state.

4. There is a new Jewish activist group (I guess the politically correct term at BBC and CNN would be "terrorist group") called Jews for Truth Now with large ads in all the Israeli papers today, in which the truth about Oslo and Barak’s policies is openly discussed. They are based in LA. Do not know who is involved, but I’d say they deserve your support. Their web site is jewsfortruthnow.com Drop in.

5. Maariv today reveals that the same construction company that built Israel’s new Embassy in Berlin had earlier constructed the bunker in which Hitler hid and in the end took a pistol and blew out his brains in an act of committing Oslo, with his dog and Eva Braun.

Copyright © 2000 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission