Israel's big post-weekend story...

In cold blood

You might think ordinary Israelis began their work week on Sunday focused on the UN Human Rights Council's lopsided endorsement of the unfair Goldstone Report; or perhaps the continuing absence of a Turkish ambassador in our country; or even what the attack on senior officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, not far from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, might mean.

But what actually grabbed most folks' attention was the slaughter - and we do not use the word carelessly - of three generations of the Oshrenko family, grandparents, parents and children, in Rishon Lezion early Saturday. The six victims have been named as Ludmilla and Edward Oshrenko, both 56, Dimitri and Tatyana Oshrenko, 32 and 28, three-year-old Revital and three-month-old Natanel. News of the killings was so appalling that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu used the weekly cabinet meeting to express the pain and horror all Israelis feel.

Criminologists will reassure us that crime is not galloping out of control, merely trotting apace with previous years and comparable to other advanced societies. Indeed, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 171 murders in Israel (population 7.4 million) during 2008 - though police have officially labeled only 122 of these as definitely murders. By comparison, the New York City (population 8.3 million) updated murder figure for 2008 is 516. London (7.5 million) averages around 170 homicides annually.

Rishon, with a population of over 200,000, has been solidifying a bad reputation for weekend violence largely traceable to its expansive entertainment and bar district. Last month, for example, Vodja Milnik allegedly stabbed IDF Sgt. Uri Chen to death during a brawl. Readers of The Jerusalem Post have become resigned to the reality that our Sunday edition is often loaded with news about weekend hooliganism in various localities, including the capital.

There are no obvious commonalities between the usual weekend mayhem our society seems to have reconciled itself to - stabbings, shootings, youthful brawling, teenage binge-drinking, and nuisance loitering - and the Oshrenko case. Still, if we are to be brutally frank, we can acknowledge that not a small amount of the weekend violence involves youths whose families stem from the former Soviet Union and who have remained cut off, even here in Israel, from their Jewish heritage.

There is a limit to what we know or are allowed at this juncture to say about the Oshrenko tragedy. There is speculation that this nadir of brutality - people say the country has never experienced anything like it - is traceable to "the Caucasus mafia."

We know that the Oshrenko family, who reportedly owned several thriving businesses, among them a delicatessen located on the block where they lived modestly, did nothing to attract unfavorable attention from their neighbors.

THE murders are, mercifully, a horrible aberration. But a good way to honor the memory of the family is to reinvigorate efforts to make Israel a less violent society. Naturally, that requires better policing, capable prosecutors and wise judges; yet something more is called for.

No one expects 21st-century Israel to be a Herzlian utopia where citizens spend their Friday nights either around the traditional Shabbat table (though, happily, many do) or around campfires engaged in earnest ideological discussion about the fine points of Zionist ideology.

But surely it would not be overreaching to strive for a middle ground between a country that is a caricature of its founders' ideals and one that is oblivious to them altogether. Put another way, if young people are inculcated with good - dare we say Zionist - values, we ought to have nothing to fear if they want to spend part of their Friday nights clubbing. The key, however, is to impart Zionism, civility and, by example, ethical norms.

In mourning the Oshrenkos, we would do well not to berate ourselves as a uniquely violent society (because we're not); nor, at the other extreme, to imagine that there is absolutely nothing to be learned because this crime is unique. Instead, let us urge the institutions that shape societal values - the Rabbinate, the media and entertainment industry, schools and families - to transmit messages of inclusion, on the one hand, and zero tolerance of violence on the other.

How to understand the Turkish Break with Israel and the West

Who lost Turkey?

Could Israel have done anything to avoid the apparent rupture of its relationship with Turkey? Could we have made it inconceivable for the Turks to air, on state television, a serial portraying the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a struggle between sociopathic Zionists and wholesome Palestinians?

No doubt, had Israel responded to the violent Palestinian "resistance" not with an Operation Cast Lead but with Gandhi-like passivity, with a declaration that so long as there were women and children in Gaza, our army would not shoot back - had Israel, instead of imposing a "siege," responded to Hamas's takeover of Gaza by supplying concrete for an airstrip that would accommodate Iranian cargo planes - Israeli and Turkish jets might now, we suppose, be conducting joint maneuvers.

But let us go further.

If tomorrow, Israel withdrew to the 1949 Armistice Lines, redivided Jerusalem, abandoned Judea and Samaria, strategic settlement blocs, the Jordan Valley - the whole kit and caboodle - in the name of "ending the occupation;" if we came down from the Golan Heights, accepted the influx of millions of Palestinians "returning" to our newly truncated, 15 km.-wide state; agreed not to contest the extradition of the IDF General Staff to The Hague to face trumped-up war crimes charges; and if the Jews held their tongues as their state was dismantled while Palestinian factions fought it out for supremacy - comity would likely reign in Turkish-Israel relations. We can even imagine the UN General Assembly deferring discussion of "the Question of Palestine."

Plainly, what is inhibiting this nirvana is Israel's stiff-necked insistence on the same right to self-defense other sovereign states enjoy.

THE TRUTH: Turkey's turn against Israel is best understood in the context of its evolutionary transformation from the secular, nationalist and Western-oriented ethos of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to the dogmatic, radical, pan-Islamic and Middle Eastern attitudes of its current rulers. This is most clearly reflected in Turkey's apparent decision not to actively pursue membership in the European Union because it has given up trying to reconcile what it wants for itself with what the West wants for it.

On Wednesday, Olli Rehn, the EU official in charge of enlarging the community, sharply criticized the Islamist government in Ankara for imposing punishing taxes on media outlets critical of the regime. But today's Turkey feels the EU needs it more than it needs the Europeans.

As for the military, which has historically served a homeostatic function whenever Turkish governments strayed from Ataturk's path, it has been politically neutered and made subservient to the regime.

IT IS senseless for Israelis to ask ourselves what we did to cause Arab, Persian and now Turkish rulers to ascribe the most villainous of intentions to us - for example, conspiring to demolish Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount, or relishing the systematic murder of Arab children. While not wishing to disregard the damage caused by this or that Israeli policy of commission or omission, in the final analysis, Israel did not lose Turkey any more than it lost Iran or the "moderate" Palestinians.

The Palestinian national movement, for all its self-destructive obduracy, appeared under Mahmoud Abbas and Salaam Fayad to be glacially inching toward grudging acceptance of a two-state solution. But it has been outmaneuvered by Hamas. Any move Abbas now makes in the direction of moderation - agreeing to temporarily shelve the reprehensible Goldstone Report for instance - gets pounced upon as perfidy. This environment has led even a sensible man like Fayad to hold cabinet deliberations on whether Israeli soldiers are stealing the organs of Palestinian youths. This week, he referred to a Palestine born of territorial compromise as a potential "Mickey Mouse state."

THE overriding explanation for what is happening in Turkey and among the Palestinians (and happened decades ago in Iran) is that these polities could not make peace with modernity. Instead, to varying degrees, they turned to radical Islam, which promised an end to ethnic and national rivalries and the promotion of socioeconomic equality.

These fragmented societies succumbed to the opiate of radical Islam because it provides absolute answers about right and wrong and uplifting distinctions between believers and infidels.

But it also ensures never-ending estrangement from those who have chosen another path.

Since this predicament stems from within Muslim civilization, so, too, must any solution.

A HOUSE GOES BOOM IN SOUTH LEBANON

See a war crime in the making? Report it


What if you looked out of your window and noticed a group of men on a nearby roof training what appeared to be shoulder-held anti-aircraft launchers at jetliners approaching the airport? Or what if you had good reason to suspect that the new upstairs neighbors had transformed their apartment into a makeshift explosives laboratory?

Plainly, you would call the police - out of a sense of both obligation and self-preservation.

Likewise, the same moral, legal and commonsense rules would prevail if you were to stumble upon a group of heavily armed men fleeing down a flight of basement steps in your hospital, or sneaking crates marked "Danger Explosives" into your local mosque.

So here is a revolutionary idea: Apply these same principles in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

INTERNATIONAL humanitarian law obligates parties to an armed conflict, including non-state actors, to take every feasible precaution to protect civilian populations against attack. Clearly, the overriding obligation is not to place military targets among civilians. The intentional use of civilians to render certain areas immune from attack is illegal under international law. For instance, taking over a family's house and transforming it into an arms cache is a form of human shielding, and illegal.

It is true that international law permits retaliating against homes, places of worship, hospitals, schools and cultural monuments which are illegally being used by terrorists. But there ought to be a better way.

Why not encourage - perhaps somehow even obligate - the denizens of southern Lebanon and Gaza to conduct themselves as if they lived in Liverpool or Chicago or Barcelona? When you see a war crime in the making, report it.

The need for some fresh thinking on this score is made urgent not just by the patently inequitable Goldstone Report, but by the deaths late Monday of Said Nasser Abdel Issa and his son (along with three others, according to Arab media reports) when the arms cache in their home blew up.

The incident took place in the village of Tayr Filsay, on the southern bank of the Litani River, about 10 km. from the Israeli border. Hizbullah identified Issa as one of its "brothers," so, in this instance, the homeowner was party to the placement of the explosives. Israeli authorities know there are hundreds of weapons stores in other homes, mosques and commercial properties throughout southern Lebanon.

The explosion came on the heels of the explosion on July 14 of the Hizbullah arms depot in Khirbat Salim, which ignited a fireball seen miles away. Both incidents illustrate that Hizbullah, which controls southern Lebanon and is a powerbroker in Lebanese politics, continues to flagrantly violate UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the basis of the cease-fire being observed by Israel.

OF COURSE, Shi'ites in southern Lebanon and Palestinians in Gaza sympathize with the respective goals of Hizbullah and Hamas. But even those who may oppose using UN facilities, school, hospitals, ambulances and private homes to stage their "resistance" against Israel can't simply pick up the phone and call the cops - without reaching the bad guys themselves.

That is why the civilized world needs to set up a mechanism, something akin to an Interpol hotline, which could handle tips in anonymity and, perhaps, even offer a witness protection scheme. It makes no difference if the affected civilians sympathize with the goals of those who have commandeered their dwellings, or if they have been cowed into collaborating. Standing by with folded arms while your neighbors smuggle weapons into a tunnel below the village square is wrong.

Islamist extremists employ attacks against enemy civilians while shielding themselves among their own people - a sort of 21st-century poison gas. This leads to retaliatory attacks - as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and here in our region - costing the lives of innocent noncombatants.

One way the civilized world can preserve its values as it confronts "militants" who have no compunction about flying airliners into skyscrapers or sending suicide bombers to blow up buses is to reduce the chance that civilians will be injured in retaliatory strikes. And the best way to do that is by encouraging the local population to start taking some responsibility for its own safety.

TURKEY TURNS

Ankara must decide


Who would have thought - Turkey and Armenia agreeing to normalize political relations. Armenia's president planning to attend a football match in Turkey. And George Papandreou, the new Greek prime minister, making Turkey the destination of his first trip abroad.

These are encouraging examples of how age-old animosities are being relegated to the dustbin of history.

Too bad, then, that Ankara appears to be simultaneously doing everything it can to junk its relationship with the Jewish state.

On Sunday, in an unprecedented slap in the face, Turkey cancelled joint military exercises that were to have included pilots from Israel and NATO. At first, the Turkish Foreign Ministry lamely denied politics was involved. Then Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu admitted on CNN that only when the "situation in Gaza" is improved could "a new atmosphere in Turkish-Israeli relations" be established.

Analysts in Jerusalem suspect the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the unfortunate civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead as a pretext for distancing Turkey from Israel - diplomatically, strategically and economically.

ORDINARY Israelis find it hard to believe that faced with similar provocations - its population pounded by 8,000 rockets, murderous cross-border incursions, the kidnapping of one of its soldiers, the refusal of the enemy to abide by a cease-fire - the Turkish military would have refrained from taking action to stop the rocket fire and reestablish its deterrence out of fear that in defending its own citizens the lives of enemy civilians would be jeopardized.

Indeed, it is debatable whether more Palestinians died at the hands of Israel in the Gaza conflict than Muslim Kurds died in Ankara's repeated bombardments of northern Iraq (though Turkey insists that the only Kurdish loses were to livestock).

Political scientist Efraim Inbar is convinced that Erdogan's Islamic AKP party places greater value on Turkey's ties with the Muslim world than on its political and cultural links to the West. Or does Turkey expect to jettison its relationship with Israel, cozy up to Iran and Hamas, and yet maintain strong ties with Washington and Brussels?

ISRAEL'S relationship with Turkey has always had its ups and downs. Turkey voted against the 1947 UN Partition Resolution to create two states - Jewish and Arab - in Palestine, but it quickly established diplomatic relations with Israel. In the 1970s, weathering an economic crisis, it began building bridges to the Arab world. By the 1980s, thousands of Turks were working throughout the Middle East. The Iran-Iraq War cemented ties between Turkey and the Arabs when Saudi Arabia began supplying oil to Ankara.

Even during periods when the Turkish military was in power, relations with Israel were sometimes sacrificed to persuade the masses that the government had Islamic bona fides. In 1975, Turkey recognized the PLO though the group was then publicly committed to Israel's destruction. In 1979, Turkey refused to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest because it was being held in Jerusalem. Following the Knesset's passage, in 1980, of the Basic Law affirming united Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Ankara closed its consulate in our capital. Turkey even condemned Israel's 1981 raid on Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor.

Now, with the AKP in power, relations have deteriorated more systematically. In August 2008, Turkey broke ranks with the West by welcoming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Just before the outbreak of the Gaza war, Erdogan became angry at what he felt was his shabby treatment by Ehud Olmert while Turkey was mediating between Jerusalem and Damascus - a factor in his vituperative outbursts against Israel during the conflict.

OTTOMAN Turkey sought to hold on to its empire by using pan-Islam to legitimize its rule over the Arabs. But Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey as Western-oriented, secular and nationalist. Islam was disestablished. The Turkish army performed a watchdog function to protect these ideals. And Israelis knew that no matter what abuse Turkish politicians might heap on Israel, our two militaries continued to cooperate at the strategic level. Is that, too, now over?

Turkey is an irreplaceable ally. Israelis want our two countries to enjoy cordial relations despite everything that's happened. The onus is now on Ankara to make plain that it, too, wants the relationship to continue. It would thereby also be signaling that Turkey wants to be a bridge between Islam and the West - instead of yet another barrier.

Barack Obama's Nobel Prize -- An Israeli Perspective

Eyes on the prize


Barack Obama went to bed Thursday night under attack for "flip-flopping" on Afghanistan-Pakistan, his centerpiece health care reform plan ever further from congressional approval, and having failed to deliver the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago. As he drifted off, news reached Washington of yet another spate of deadly car-bombings in Iraq.

On Friday, he awoke to a bolt from the blue: the news that he had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, beating out 204 other nominees, whose identities remain secret.

With fitting modesty, the president said he did not view the prize "as recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership."

The committee said it selected Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy" and for his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons." We imagine the committee was particularly struck by the president's April 5 Prague speech on nuclear disarmament.

Whatever the impetus, this award gives Obama added legitimacy in leading an intensified worldwide campaign to block Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Alfred Nobel intended his awards go to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," specifying that the peace prize was to go to the person who did the best work to promote peace. It was never intended exclusively as a payback for achieving peace.

REACTION to the Nobel committee's decision ranged from bemusement to bewilderment. Paradoxically, Obama-haters were overjoyed. Rush Limbaugh: "We could not have made the world laugh at our president, but the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and their award pulled it off. We owe 'em a debt of gratitude." Here, a page one tabloid headline read: "A Norwegian joke."

This year's committee was chaired by Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister who served with George Mitchell on the 2001 Mitchell Committee investigating the causes of the second intifada. That panel is remembered unfavorably in Israel for "evenhandedly" assigning responsibility for the violence.

While the prize has often been presented in appreciation for definitive achievements - to George Marshall, for instance for the post-WWII reconstruction of Europe - it has not infrequently been awarded by a quixotic committee to persons whose accomplishments either would not have a long shelf-life, or were nonexistent.

Woodrow Wilson received the award in 1919 for founding the League of Nations - which collapsed with the outbreak of WWII. Frank Billings Kellogg, an American secretary of state, received the award in 1929 for the Briand-Kellogg Pact, which outlawed war. Henry Kissinger was granted the prize in 1973 for peacemaking in Vietnam. Two years later, the South fell to the communists. Kissinger's Vietnamese interlocutor, Le Duc Tho, was the only laureate to decline the prize, citing continuing violence in his country.

Yasser Arafat got the award in 1994, yet died an unrepentant terrorist. And, in 2005, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Mohamed ElBaradei was the winner, though he continues to downplay the danger posed by Iran's quest for the bomb.

In acknowledging the award, Obama made clear he's no pacifist. Without mentioning Islamist imperialism by name, he declared: "I am the commander-in-chief of a country" confronting "a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies."

WE WERE struck - and not ungrateful - that Obama made it a point Friday to single out his desire to help Israelis and Palestinians achieve peace. Though frankly, with his administration placing so much emphasis on the red-herring settlement freeze issue; with supposedly moderate Palestinian leaders inciting their people with false claims that the Netanyahu government is sending "settlers to pray at the Aksa Mosque;" and with the biased Goldstone Report gaining momentum in international forums - Israelis hardly see peace around the corner. Obama's value-neutral peacemaking approach has unintentionally raised Arab expectations that he will deliver a prostrate Israel.

His presidency is not yet a year old. There is time for Obama to emphasize that accepting Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state is an absolute prerequisite for resolving this conflict.

There are those who would begrudge him the peace prize. We hope, rather, that the president finds the wisdom to pursue the path that can best lead to a genuine, secure and lasting peace.