Israel allows commercial goods into Gaza: The Independent
Gaza border official says Israel has allowed a commercial shipment of shoes and clothes into the blockaded Palestinian territory for the first time since 2007.
Raed Fattouh says 10 truckloads of shoes and clothes entered the Hamas-run strip Sunday. He says many of the goods were damaged after more than two years in storage.
It was the first non-humanitarian shipment of such items, though an Israeli army spokesman says Israel allows such items into Gaza occasionally as part of UN-coordinated aid shipments.
Gaza has been under a strict Israeli and Egyptian blockade since Hamas seized control of the area in 2007. There are shortages of many basic goods and merchants rely on smuggling tunnels under the Egyptian border.
EDITOR: Call for disarmament by Blix
Though not dealing mainly or only with Israel/Palestine, this has an important bearing on the conflict.
A Season for Disarmament: NY Times
Hans Blix, April 4, 2010
STOCKHOLM — The financial crisis and global warming have had the world’s attention in recent years. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s initiative, perhaps the season for nuclear disarmament has finally arrived.
On Thursday, President Obama will meet Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Prague to sign a nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia that will reduce their arsenals by 30 percent.
The new treaty will be received positively. There will be praise for the Obama administration’s attitude toward arms control and disarmament and for Russia’s readiness to join hands with the United States.
Though not achieving the drastic cuts in nuclear arsenals and delivery vehicles that the world is longing for, the U.S.-Russian treaty is important and encouraging. Coming after Bush administration policies that nearly sent the two states into a new Cold War, the new treaty constitutes the resetting of an important button. It preserves arrangements for confidence-building mutual inspections and sets the stage for negotiating more far-reaching cuts.
We should be aware, however, that a next step of deeper reductions will hardly be attainable unless there is agreement on extensive cooperation on missile defense. Russia is deeply suspicious that the missile shield could enable the United States to launch an attack on any target in Russia while itself remaining immune to any such attacks. Further bilateral disarmament will also be impeded if Russia feels that the NATO alliance seeks to encircle it by expanding its military cooperation through membership or otherwise with more states neighboring Russia.
The signing on Thursday will take place one year after President Obama’s presentation in Prague of a detailed program for the revival of global nuclear arms control and disarmament. Later this month he will be the host in Washington of a large summit meeting that will focus on nuclear security. In May, the operation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will be the subject of review at a conference in New York in which nearly all governments in the world will take part. The review that took place in 2005 ended in acrimony and some predicted the end of the treaty.
Through adherence to the nonproliferation treaty that was concluded in 1970, states have committed themselves to stay away from nuclear weapons or to move away from these weapons. If all states had joined and fulfilled their commitments, the treaty would have led by now to a world free of nuclear weapons. This has not happened, of course. The number of nuclear weapons, which peaked at more than 50,000 during the Cold War, is still over 20,000 — most of them in the United States and Russia. The number of states with nuclear weapons has gone from five to nine since 1970.
There is also frustration at the lack of progress on many important items relevant to the treaty. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has not entered into force because the United States, China and a number of other states have not ratified it. The negotiation of a convention prohibiting the production of enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons remains blocked at the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency for strengthened safeguards inspections remains unratified by a large number of states, including Iran.
Some items are bound to attract much attention at the nonproliferation treaty review conference in May. One is that 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the obligation of five nuclear-weapon states under the treaty to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament has not led us anywhere near zero. Another grievance — especially among Arab states — is that Israel has nuclear weapons and has refrained from adhering to the treaty. A third is that the treaty has been violated by several states. Although Iraq and Libya have been brought into compliance, North Korea has not and Iran and perhaps others might be aiming to ignore the treaty.
Hans Blix was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997 and chief U.N. arms inspector for Iraq from 2000 to 2003.
Are Israeli Arabs the new African Americans?: Haaretz
By Tom Segev
On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. They came to demonstrate against discrimination against black people in the United States. The main speaker was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I have a dream,” thundered King, time after time. Among other things he saw in his dream, “… the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
Nearly 47 years after that speech, and 42 years after King was assassinated, there are no longer any laws discriminating against blacks in America. Though most of them still do not enjoy equal opportunity, President Barack Obama is in the White House.
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King always stressed that his dream was anchored deeply in the American dream. Replacing the word “Negro,” which King and Americans in general still used then, with the words “Israeli Arab,” could also anchor this dream in the Israeli dream.
The first Zionists believed in equality “the son of the Arab, the son of Nazareth and my son” (as Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote), and promoted the thesis that the settlement and development of the land would be to the benefit of all its inhabitants, Jews and Arabs.
The Zionist movement made a commitment to equality and tolerance. One of its founders, the writer Ahad Ha’am, condemned the oppression of Arab workers by the first Jewish farmers who settled the land at the end of the 19th century. In “Altneuland,” Theodor Herzl’s dream novel, there is a fanatical rabbi called Dr. Geier (“Geier” means “vulture” in German), who claims the land of Israel belongs only to the Jews. He founds a party that demands the denial of the right to vote to Arabs. Geier speaks in the language of the anti-Semitic leader Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and a contemporary of Herzl, who became one of Hitler’s sources of inspiration. In Herzl’s dream, Geier is defeated in the elections and European liberalism is victorious.
However, the ideological and political effort the Zionists invested in defining the Jews as a nation did not lead them to recognize the national identity of the Palestinians as well. Some of them saw the Arabs as biblical figures: That is how they were envisioned in the dreams of the fathers of the Jewish nation. Most of them believed Arab culture was barbaric and inferior, as well as the Arabs’ national identity. They expected the Arabs to acknowledge the Jewish ownership of the land, and to trust in their liberal and religious fairness.
Boris Schatz, the artist who founded the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, envisioned the Jews transferring the golden Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount to some other hill, as “a memento of gratitude to the Arabs, our good neighbors, for having preserved our holy places with great care.”
The dream of establishing an outpost of European culture in the Land of Israel and the declared intention of instituting equal rights in the state helped the Zionist movement win international support, such as in the form of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government committed itself to the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Israel’s Declaration of Independence, in 1948, also promised that the state would be based on foundations of liberty, justice and peace, “as envisioned by the prophets of Israel,” and that there would be “complete equality of social and political rights to all … inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
The general principles of the Declaration of Independence resemble those of the American Declaration, from 1776, the foundation document of the American dream, which Martin Luther King also quoted.
A re-reading of the dreams King set forth in his speech reflects a speaker who was living in a society that nurtured discrimination and especially segregation between the races. It is easy to forget he was speaking in the second half of the 20th century.
“There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied,” said King, “as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.” His dream that one day his four little children, and other “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls” also sounds like it comes from a far earlier era.
Military government
The situation of the Arabs in Israel in 1963 was also very difficult. Nearly all of them lived under the rule of military government, which imposed restrictions on mobility and other draconian regulations that were arbitrarily, insensitively and sometimes maliciously enforced.
One of the main purposes of the military government imposed on the Arabs was to make it easier to expropriate their lands. Most of them were allowed to vote and to stand for election, but the various government authorities, including the Prime Minister’s Office, the Shin Bet security service, the Israel Defense Forces, the Histadrut labor federation and the political parties effectively denied them the right to free political organization. And they suffered discrimination in many other areas, too.
King’s speech advanced the values of the 1960s, echoes of which were also heard in Israel, where the military government was abolished in stages in the period before and after the Six-Day War. The mechanisms of oppression concentrated thereafter on the Arabs in the territories. However, what King said about unfulfilled promises remains true today with respect to the Arabs of Israel.
From the perspective of the blacks, said King, the declarations of freedom and equality at the basis of the American dream are like a check that has been returned from the bank due to insufficient funds. “But we refuse to believe,” he declared, “that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check.”
The State of Israel has also deposited quite a lot of promissory notes among its Arab citizens, and many of them have not yet been cashed.
King was a man whom the enlightened world loved to love. His “I have a dream speech” became a constitutive document in the struggle for equality among people everywhere. In Jerusalem there is a street named for him, and Yehiel Mohar wrote a poem entitled “I have a dream.” In Hebrew it rhymes, but the words are rather thin:
“I have a dream / and it is more real than any reality / and it is very ancient and also new / The day will come / brighter than the sun and sweeter than honey / I have a dream.”
The poem goes on like this for two more stanzas and at the end it becomes clear that in contrast to King’s very daring speech, Mohar’s most political line only promises “a song of peace” that will arise from here. There isn’t a single word about oppression and equality.
The similarity between the struggle of America’s blacks and that of Israel’s Arabs is expressed in the contents of their respective dreams: a state of all its citizens. The blacks in America had, and still have, a basis for being optimistic. That is the main difference between them and the Arabs of Israel.
There was an abundance of hope and faith in a better future in King’s speech, as expressed in the old Negro spiritual from which he quoted: “Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
King made a point of warning his people not to act violently but rather to keep the faith in “a symphony of brotherhood,” as he said. We are all “God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics,” and someday, all will be able “to join hands and sing.” Today no doubt he would have added “Muslims” as well.
Over the years, America has knocked down many walls of separation, discrimination and racism. According to a survey published in Haaretz last month, one out of every two Jewish young people in Israel believes Arabs should not have rights equal to those of Jews. About 56 percent of them believe it is not necessary for Arabs to be allowed to be elected to the Knesset.
At the opening of the first session of the First Knesset, in 1949, there were three Arabs among the 120 members. Tawfik Toubi, an Arab communist born in Haifa and the last surviving member of that Knesset, warned: “Denying democracy and freedom to a national minority leads to the denial of democracy and freedom to all the country’s inhabitants. It is impossible to portion out democracy and freedom.”
For many years it seemed as though such discrimination was indeed possible: Jews enjoyed basic democratic rights that were denied to Arabs. The abundance of manifestations of racism against Jews, such as Sephardim, immigrants from Ethiopia and others, has deepened the sense that Toubi was right, as was Martin Luther King, Jr.
Private imports allowed into Gaza: BBC
Israel is under increasing pressure to ease or lift the blockade
Israel has allowed 10 trucks of clothes and shoes for Palestinian traders into the Gaza Strip for the first time since Hamas took over the territory in 2007.
Food, medicines and fuel are allowed into the territory, but aid agencies say there are serious shortages.
But this is the first time commercial, privately-owned imports have been allowed into the strip.
Israel is under pressure to lift the blockade, which the UN and EU have described as collective punishment.
Egypt also helps maintain the blockade. Its border with Gaza, which has a crossing point for people, is closed most of the time.
Gazan importers said Sunday’s shipment was not enough to replenish stocks and called on Israel to release more goods held at its ports since 2007.
“Some of it even smells bad. I can say half of the merchandise is still good, but the other half is damaged. I fear I may not be able to recoup my outlay,” Ziad Barbakh told the Reuters news agency
‘Tightened blockade’
Israel imposed a tightened blockade after the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in Gaza in 2007.
Conditions were made much worse by the destruction caused by the three-week Israeli offensive in Gaza at the end of 2008.
Palestinian and international human rights group estimate that about 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the conflict.
Aid agencies say there are acute shortages, in particular, of building materials.
The Israeli government says it remains committed to humanitarian supplies of food, medicine and power. But a spokesman said that sanctions would remain in place as long as Hamas is committed to destroying Israel and allows rockets to be fired from Gaza.
Top Egypt official: Israel-Hamas tensions could lead to another Gaza war: Haaretz
A senior Egyptian official said Egypt is concerned that the recent escalation of tensions on the Gaza border could lead to another Israeli invasion, the London-based Arabic language newspaper A-Shark al-Awsat reported on Monday.
The official said Egypt was reaching out to both Israel and Palestinian factions in an effort to prevent the tensions from escalating any further.
At the end of last month, two IDF soldiers were killed near the border with Gaza while pursuing a group of Palestinian militants trying to plant explosives near the border fence. Two other soldiers were injured in the incident, and two Gaza militants were killed.
The situation in Gaza is extremely worrisome to Egypt, the official was reported to have said. He added that it was in Egypt’s best interest for the situation in Gaza to remain stable.
Gaza rulers Hamas have largely held their fire since Israel’s offensive in Gaza last winter, in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
But smaller factions have violated the de facto truce by firing rockets and mortars into neighboring Israeli territory, including one that landed in Israel’s Negev early Monday. No one was hurt in the incident.
Tensions have run high along the Gaza frontier this month and last, with Israel launching repeated air strikes in response to Palestinian rocket attacks.
Israel will retaliate against any attack on its citizens or soldiers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said following the death of the two IDF soldiers in Gaza clashes.
Israel’s Censorship Scandal: The Daily Beast
by Judith Miller
A 23-year-old journalist is under arrest for exposing a secret Israeli assassination plot, and another has fled to London, afraid for his life. Judith Miller talks to insiders who have been gagged by the government about the scandal rocking Tel Aviv, and Israel’s slide toward Iranian-style censorship.
You’ve probably never heard of Anat Kamm. Few people have. But for nearly four months, the 23-year-old Israeli journalist has been under house arrest in Tel Aviv for allegedly stealing and leaking secret Israeli defense ministry documents to a journalist from Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s leading dailies.
Kamm would love to tell her side of the story, her friends and associates tell me. So would her lawyers. So, too, would Dov Alfon, the chief editor of Ha’aretz, a liberal paper, and Uri Blau, the reporter to whom Kamm allegedly leaked the documents she was said to have copied while she was completing her military service.
“In what kind of country does a journalist simply disappear with other journalists and news outlets having no recourse to publish about it?” asked one blogger. “China? Cuba? Vietnam? Iran? North Korea?”
But they cannot talk or write about the espionage case. In an extremely rare action, an Israeli court has ordered the Israeli media not to publish or broadcast a word about Kamm, the allegations against her, or the investigation that has led Blau, the Ha’aretz reporter involved, to flee to London. For almost four months, Blau has been in self-imposed exile there to avoid answering questions about how and from whom he obtained the confidential defense department documents that are said to have resulted in a spate of stories alleging personal and institutional misconduct on the part of the Israeli Defense Forces, the hallowed IDF, and some of its senior officials.
In a nation that prides itself on its vibrant discourse and a free press, this is stunning, depressing news.
What is being called the “Anat Kamm affair” has produced its own anomaly: Since details about the inquiry have begun spilling out into the non-Israeli press, Israelis can only gossip about what the non-Israeli media are reporting. Violating such gag orders in Israel can result in severe financial penalties for Israeli newspapers and magazines and jail for editors and other media executives. At least one publication was temporarily closed several years ago for disregarding a similar court order.
The saga, I am being warned, is complex. Parts of it that have not been disclosed are said to be enormously sensitive. But based on what has been reported by Israeli bloggers, the Jewish Telegraph Agency, two British newspapers, and on Friday, the Associated Press—coupled with what I’m hearing from sources close to the investigation—the case could come to a head on or before April 12, when an appeals court is scheduled to hear an appeal by Israel’s Channel 10 and Ha’aretz of a court ruling in February upholding the gag order.
Here is what has happened so far. In mid-December, Kamm, then a media reporter for Walla, a popular Israeli Internet site on popular culture, was arrested and accused of having passed along secret information aimed at harming national security, a charge whose maximum sentence is life in prison. At the same time, an Israeli court imposed the gag order barring officials in Israel or the normally irrepressible Israeli media from disclosing any details of the case.
The government reportedly alleges that sometime during her two-year compulsory military service ending in June 2007, Kamm copied a vast number of secret documents without authorization—one blogger said as many as a thousand—while working as a clerk in the office of the IDF’s Central Command. She is accused of having given some of this information to Blau, who in turn used it to publish several stories in Ha’aretz accusing the IDF and senior staff of misconduct. She is reported to have denied the charges.
The story that supposedly triggered the government’s initial interest in the case was an article that Blau published in November 2008 alleging that the IDF had disregarded Israeli law in killing a Palestinian militant in the occupied West Bank in 2007. According to bloggers and the British paper, The Independent, Blau cited defense ministry memos and emails in reporting that the IDF had assassinated a member of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank town of Jenin in apparent violation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling six months earlier outlawing such assassinations if a peaceful arrest was possible. Specifically, Blau’s article cited a confidential defense ministry document from March 2007 which included an order from Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, then Israel’s senior commander in the West Bank, permitting the IDF to shoot three top Islamic Jihad members even if they did not pose a clear and present danger.
Kamm was working at that time in Gen. Naveh’s office.
News of the investigation and the house arrest of an Israeli journalist was initially reported on March 15, when Richard Silverstein, a Seattle-based blogger who runs a Web site called Tikun Olam, or in English “Repairing the World,” disclosed Kamm’s arrest—though not by name. “What kind of country allows its domestic intelligence service to arrest a journalist secretly and maintain her in detention secretly,” Silverstein wrote. “In what kind of country does a journalist simply disappear with other journalists and news outlets having no recourse to publish about it? China? Cuba? Vietnam? Iran? North Korea? Is that what Israel is aiming for? To be no better than countries ruled by despots?”
Avner Cohen, an author of a book on Israel’s nuclear program who is now at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center, said that in earlier gag order cases, the Israeli media had ignored the orders once the banned information was published in the foreign press. Yet in this case, despite such disclosures, the Israeli media remained silent. “The Israeli press’s silence is cowardly,” he said in an interview.
Yedioth Ahranot, Israel’s largest circulation daily, also noted the existence of such a gag order and espionage inquiry, but once again, without mentioning Kamm’s name. Late last week, the story was picked up by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, whose Washington bureau chief Ron Kampeas disclosed some new details, and then by the AP. On Friday, the Independent disclosed that Blau was “hiding in Britain,” fearful that he might also face charges in Israel in connection with the government inquiry. The newspaper reported that Ha’aretz was negotiating with Israeli prosecutors the terms of his return to Israel.
Dov Alfon, the editor-in-chief of Ha’aretz, apologized for not being able to answer my questions about those talks or Blau’s role in the investigation, writing that there is a “total gag order” on the Anat Kamm affair. But he confirmed reports that the newspaper was challenging the gag order in court on April 12th, along with Channel 10. The paper’s decision to support Blau and to challenge the order, he wrote in an email, “speak for themselves.”
In a statement to The Guardian newspaper, Alfon said that the paper would keep Blau in London “as long as needed.” He praised him for having published “dynamite stuff,” adding that Israeli officials were clearly “not satisfied with these kind of revelations” in a major newspaper. “Israel is still a democracy and therefore we intend to continue to publish whatever public interest demands and our reporters can reveal,” he said.
Israel’s policy on targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants has been controversial both within and outside of Israel. Since that story, however, Blau has broken numerous stories involving alleged IDF abuses and corruption among its senior officials, many of which appear to be based on IDF documents and information. In January 2009, for instance, he reported that a secret defense ministry database showed that about 75 percent of the construction in the vast majority of Israeli settlements had been carried out illegally, that is “without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued.” Blau also reported that the IDF database, portions of which he published, showed that the construction of roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas, and even police stations had taken place on private land owned by Palestinians in the West Bank.
Last October, he reported that although Defense Minister Ehud Barak had transferred shares in his consulting company to his daughters when he assumed his present government post and vowed not to conduct business through Ehud Barak Ltd. while in office, over 6.5 million shekels from Israel and abroad—nearly $2 million—had flowed into the company and a subsidiary since then.
Because of the Passover holiday, defense officials could not be reached for comment on these allegations or on the Anat Kamm case. But Blau’s associates note that Ha’aretz had submitted all of his stories to Israeli IDF censors prior to their publication, as Israeli policy requires, and that the censors had blocked none of them.
Nevertheless, Blau’s associates believe that the IDF’s embarrassment over such stories prompted the investigation into his sources, which, in turn, fingered Kamm as the source of at least some of the information.
Kamm, whom friends describe as an energetic reporter with what one called “slightly left-of-center politics,” has reportedly denied all of the charges against her. Associates would not say whether she knew Blau before or after her military service. She worked at Walla, which until recently was owned by Ha’aretz, for which Blau works, before beginning her mandatory military service in July 2005. After completing military service in June 2007, she returned to Walla, this time as a media reporter. She remained there until three weeks ago, when she went on a leave without pay. Several sources told me they had heard that Walla had fired her, but associates say that she was forced to stop her reporting on the media because “suddenly the media were reporting on her.”
Reached by telephone, Eytan Lehman, one of her two attorneys, declined comment on her case, citing, once again, the Israeli court’s gag order.
Israeli censors are notoriously fickle and Israeli courts traditionally responsive to their requests for blocking the dissemination of information that might jeopardize or harm Israeli security. For instance, Israeli newspapers, especially Yedioth Ahranot, have disclosed details of the alleged killing by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, of a senior Hamas operative in Dubai. But they have not been permitted to report that Israel carried out the killing.
Israel, like the United States at the federal level, also has no shield law that protects journalists from being forced to reveal the sources of their stories. But Israeli analysts said they could not recall a precedent for the house arrest of a journalist in connection with the publication of sensitive information. Shortly before the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister in 2003, Israeli prosecutors launched a secret inquiry into who leaked information about a story published by Ha’aretz into alleged illegal payments to Sharon. Israeli prosecutors repeatedly asked Baruch Kra about the source of the story, but Kra refused to reveal that information. The source was eventually identified, however, when Israeli officials obtained a court warrant authorizing their inspection of his telephone records. No one was jailed.
Judith Miller is an author and a Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter for the New York Times. She is now an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to its magazine, City Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
Sparta 2010: Adam Keller
“No eye could have stayed dry at the funeral of Major Eliraz Peretz” said the radio reporter yesterday. All papers devoted their headlines to the bitter mourning of the mother Miriam Peretz for her officer son Eliraz killed three days ago in a Palestinian ambush at the Gaza Strip, and for officer son Uriel killed 12 years ago in a Lebanese ambush in southern Lebanon. Today the newspaper headlines told of the remaining two Peretz brothers, Avihai and Eliasaph, who told the Army Chief of Staff of their determination to continue combat military service also after what happened to Uriel and Eliraz. And the news reports followed up with the grieving mother who encouraged her living sons in this resolution, and of Prime Minister Netanyahu who paid a condolences visit and told her that she is a true heroine,
A very military family is the Peretz family. The men are all committed heart and soul to the Israeli Defense Forces in general and to the Golani Brigade in particular, always in uniform, always going around fighting the Enemy in the north and south and center. In fact, they continue fighting even when not in uniform, going out to settle Judea and Samaria and redeem a bit more of the land which God promised the Jewish People some three thousand years ago. Major Eliraz Peretz built his home at an illegal outpost, simply ignoring the fact that the land belonged to Palestinians from the nearby village. The government of Israel several times promised the U.S. government to evacuate this outpost (that was still in the time of George W. Bush). So they promised. The Judges of the Supreme Court also ordered the government to evacuate the outpost. So they ordered. And now, where can we find a hero who would dare to destroy the home of the hero Eliraz Peretz, who gave his life for his country?
Thousands of years ago, there was in Greece a city-state called Sparta, a city totally dedicated to its army. Its men spent their lives in military training, in between wars, and its women sang songs of praise to the heroes returning from the battlefield and mourned the fallen. Spartan soldiers went to external wars, but especially they were always on the alert for the threat of an uprising by the Helots, the large oppressed population which lived in Sparta itself and which did all the dirty work for their Spartan masters. The Spartans had no time or energy to spare for culture and art, or for philosophy. All this they left to their great enemies, the Athenians. The same for the stupid political system called “democracy”, where so much precious time was wasted in all kinds of debates and arguments instead of being used for training and becoming better soldiers.
Had Sparta still existed today, the Peretz Family would have gotten its honorary citizenship. But how many Israelis truly want to live in the Sparta of 2010?