The Ravs Writings

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appointed a three-person investigative committee to visit the site in Jenin where Israeli efforts to uproot the infrastructure of terror have prompted Arab allegations of “massacre.” However, before the “fact-finding team” is dispatched, those who care about fairness should carefully investigate the investigators.

Jenin was the center of terror that trained 28 home-grown suicide bombers.

Twenty-three of them succeeded as homicide bombers. The area was controlled by the terrorist networks of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al ...

The irony for Israel and her supporters is that Arafat always has provided a clarity that many others around him obfuscate because the others wear business suits and ties rather than kaffiyehs and gun-holsters. They speak more cleverly, in the manner of Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erekat, than Arafat ever has. In his absence, extraordinary pressure will mount against Israel, even from her friends, who will insist: “We stood with you for all the Arafat Years and refused to ...

So it turns out that the Arabs of Judea and Samaria really hate the guts out of us Jews.

For seven years, Israel had been engaging in confidence-building steps. Israel even gave Yasser Arafat weapons to build a police force and agreed to patrol in “joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols” to maintain the civility of the polity in Judea and Samaria. For peace, Israel pulled back from Jewish holy sites and ceded land she rightly could have claimed for eternity.

Arafat never quite ...

It took me forty years to figure it out, but I think I finally have figured out that Israel is not going to win any PR wars. The best we can hope for is that Fox News remains the way it is, along with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Until Israel gives up Judea, Samaria, and half of Jerusalem, she will not win any PR wars. Only after she does so will she enjoy the great-and-enduring PR gains ...

Today’s “J Street” was yesterday’s Peace Now and Breira. Always rushing to “make peace,” to trust Arafat to keep his word, to encourage and push Israel to sign Oslo Accords.

I like to think of myself as an intellectual, too. I do not cede that ground to the “J Street” crowd. But I also grew up a bit on the streets. I know both sides – the people who attended Columbia University with me, the law school types, the scholars. ...

When the thunderous claps in Heaven jolted Orange County out of our rooms a few Sunday mornings ago, I thought of Israel.  When the earth – almost simultaneously – thundered below our feet in a 3.8 earthquake, I thought of Israel.  What must it be like to live in Nahariyah, Tz’fat, Ashdod, or Haifa – and be jolted out of bed all night and out of one’s home all day by incessant thunder and earthquake?

That Sunday morning’s earth-shaking rattlings ...