Courtesy of “Eretz Nehederet,” Israel’s answer to “Saturday Night Live.”

A very smart entrepreneurial student at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva designed this T-shirt:

They’ll be a hit! (pun intended…)

The Hebrew order form is here. I presume overseas shipping can be arranged with the guy whose Email appears on the website.

Bono: New York Times Columnist

Congratulations to ‘Waltz with Bashir!’ Guess I’d better see it! Now, could an animated film win a “Best Foreign Film” Oscar?

That’s what a Dutch reporter asked me today when she called me looking for a way to contact our incoming Everyman for an interview.

“Oh, boy, aren’t you afraid that Joe is going to stay and take over the Pajamas Media bureau? Then you’ll have to replace him in Ohio! ” Cute. (Hmmm, maybe I will work on my drain-unclogging skills. You never know…bet it pays better than writing…)

Seriously, why do journalists need to get their knickers in a twist about PJTV sending Joe Wurzelbacher here to get an everyman’s perspective on what’s going on in Israel?

It’s that old false construct again of blogging/citizen journalism vs. professional journalism. It’s not an either/or situation. No one is suggesting Joe is going to try to replace Christiane Amanpour, Ethan Bronner, or Caroline Glick. He’s just going to offer a different perspective, a different point of view, which is what people turn to blogs and Pajamas for. It’s an alternative, not a replacement.

I, for one, am totally curious as to how Joe is going to react to what he sees here and what questions he is going to ask the folks he interviews. And I say that as a card-carrying Columbia Journalism school graduate and lifetime member of the MSM until I crossed over to the Dark Side….

I don’t think it’s incongruous to support Israel’s effort to bring quiet and normality to its citizens and still be filled with sadness over the toll being taken on the residents of Gaza, especially the children, who didn’t ask to be born into their situation. Many of my journalist friends who know the Gaza AP reporter have sent his heartbreaking first-person article around. And Ron Kampeas at the JTA discusses it here.

Ibrahim Barzak is one of the best reporters I know.

We got to know each other back in 1992, when he was about 16; I had just started with AP, and he had inherited his father’s correspondency. Hikmet Barzak, who married late in life, had died after reporting Gaza for the AP since the 1950s. Ibrahim would call in reporting starting, “This is Hikmet’s house,” still deferring to his beloved dad.

It took a few conversations, shaking his hand and seeing his broad, shy grin on one of his visits to Jerusalem, before he felt comfortable enough to start calls, “This is Ibrahim.” It was wonderful watching him learn, being one of a large staff who guided him through the idioms of wire-news-ese. He called once a day and ran through a detailed list of Gaza wounded; most were light wounds, and never made copy, but I never interrupted him: I was in awe of his thoroughness, imagining him at the hospital recording each injury.

He is an assiduous, just the facts reporter. He never raises his voice and always asks the tough questions. He has risked his life more than once for his job, and more than once for pissing off the Palestinian powers that be.

And he is dogged. Supervising the Jerusalem night desk, I asked him once to return to Rafah, where fratricidal fighting was taking place in 1999. The free-for-all shooting had tapered down, Ibrahim was on his way home – and then, with nightfall it resumed with a vengeance. In the calmest of tones, Ibrahim said: “Ron, I will go back, but I will die.” I told him to continue home.

So I bristle – I bristle hard- when some moron who thinks he is making some kind of case for Israel writes about how Palestinian reporters are implacably biased (and I wonder whether these fools realize how hard those accusations make it for Israelis and Jews who are reporting in the region.)

I’m Facebook friends with Ibrahim, and what stuns me under the circumstances is his continued affection for pop culture (the AP office in Gaza, back in the day, was plastered with photos of Princess Diana) – he keeps joining fan clubs – and his fierce focus on his little sons, now living with his wife at his in-laws. Ibrahim, his home in shards, is living in the little AP office (I wonder if the Diana posters are still there).

This haunts me:

My brother took a picture of the room where my boys, 2-year-old Hikmet and 6-month-old Ahmed, once slept. Their toys were broken, shrapnel had punched through the closet and the bedroom wall had collapsed. I don’t know if we will ever go back.

The Israeli army issued a video of the bombing of the Hamas compound, which it posted on YouTube. I can see my home being destroyed, and I watch it obsessively.

So read this, by the best reporter in Gaza, and see how hard this war is on Gazans.

It never hurts to know.

No, it doesn’t. And we must know.

The Israeli basketball team, mind you, included a lot of African-American imported players from the U.S. I can’t imagine what they were thinking. “All I wanted was a career in the NBA! How did I end up in Turkey with angry people throwing shoes at me?”

This video is going to make a lot of Israelis think twice before planning their next vacation. Turkey is normally our most popular vacation spot….

First, Jeffrey Goldberg:

We’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people. 

then, Christopher Hitchens:

Palestine is a common home for several religious and national groups, but Hamas dogmatically insists that the whole territory is instead an exclusively Muslim part of a future Islamic empire. At a time when democratic and reformist trends are observable in the region, from Lebanon to the Gulf, Hamas’ leadership is physically and economically a part of the clientele of two of the area’s worst dictatorships. (Should you ever be in need of a free laugh, look up those Western “intellectuals” who believe that a vote for an Islamist party and an Islamic state is a way to vote against corruption! They have not lately studied Iran and Saudi Arabia.) Gaza could have been a prefiguration of a future self-determined Palestinian state. Instead, it has been hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood and made into a place of repression for its inhabitants and aggression for its neighbors.

And for a thorough and intelligent argument against the Gaza operation, there’s Lisa Goldman and her ‘epic post.’ I don’t agree with everything she says, but she says it very well.

“They started it”; “but they’re terrorists”; and “it’s worse in Darfur” are not, in my opinion, intelligent responses. I do not live in Darfur. I am a voting, tax-paying citizen of Israel, so this is where I have the moral obligation to speak out when I see something that is wrong.

Yes, Hamas is a bunch of fanatic thugs. I remember that they threw Fateh people off of multi-story buildings during the July 2007 coup. I know that they use civilians as human shields. I do understand that Israel has got itself caught in a struggle between Iran, which is funding Hamas, and the Arab states, which hate Hamas and fear Iran. And yes, Hamas could stop the war if they would just cease firing the rockets. But they will not do that. So it is up to us: we have it in our power to stop the killing. We can stop the war. And we should stop it, immediately. For their sake and for ours.

Because it is undermining our morality. Because it is costing us hundreds of millions of shekels. Because it is a shocking waste of life, money and goodwill from moderate Arabs. Because if we plan to live in this neighbourhood called the Middle East for the long term, we need to find a modus vivendi with our neighbours. We needn’t love one another. We just need to stop killing each other. And to those who say one cannot negotiate with a terror organization that refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist, my response is – perhaps you are right; but have you tried?

Color me naive, but I believe we have to have tried – not publicly, but quietly, via Egypt, the US, the EU and other go-betweens. I don’t think any Israeli government sees putting soldiers in harm’s way as anything but a last resort. I join many of Lisa’s commenters in asking, “what was the alternative?”

I packed a box with the kids today – it was in response to a letter that was sent to both of their classes. One of the families at the school has a member in a Golani unit, and has the opportunity to pass them care packages. We were told that they are living on combat rations and would like cookies, candy, chips and other munchies to sustain them during their long hours of waiting on the border to go into Gaza.

So we bought them their goodies, and my kids put letters in the box for the soldiers. My ten-year-old daughter wrote:

Dear Soldiers!

I home you succeed in the war against Hamas and succeed in bringing peace to the country. I watch the news and think about how good it would be if there weren’t any wars.

Good luck!

Naomi Sommer