New York is starting to feel like Brezhnev's Moscow

What a sad place New York City has become. A vibrant, disputatious town with a worldwide reputation for loud voices and strongly expressed opinions is tip-toeing around in whispers. Grief over the casualties of the twin towers massacre is not the reason (those wounds are slowly healing), but a stifling conformity which muzzles public discourse on US foreign policy, the war on terrorism and Israel.

"If people knew I held these views, I wouldn't be able to stay in this job," an old college friend confided as I passed through the city for a few days last week. He was appointed by the Bush administration to a top Federal position (not connected to foreign policy) some months ago. His subversive views on the Middle East, if uttered in Europe, would raise no eyebrows: Ariel Sharon has no vision or strategy; his tactics on the West Bank are counter-productive; the American media are failing to report adequately on the suffering of innocent Palestinians in cities ransacked by Israeli troops.

Another friend, a liberal rabbi, was about to set off on a regular visit to Israel. She contrasted the usual furious public arguments which she expected to find there to the behind-the-hand mutterings of New Yorkers. "Over here Sharon and Netanyahu have managed to turn the issue of terrorism, which was provoked by Israeli behaviour on the West Bank, into an existential question of the survival of the Israeli state. Debate becomes disloyalty," she complained.
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thanks to Liberal Arts Mafia

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Israel Pursues Focused Attacks
In Killing of West Bank Intelligence Agents, a Pattern Resumes

"This is Ashraf," he said, according to Abu Zalata's recollection. "I have just killed two of your people, and we are now going to withdraw. You [expletives] can come and get the bodies. We will be back and kill more of you."

With that, the Israeli soldiers left, having accomplished another of the tightly focused attacks, usually carried out by special units operating in small numbers. They have become, in effect, a target-by-target continuation of the month-long Operation Protective Shield, allowing soldiers to arrest or kill Palestinian militants accused of involvement in attacks or planned attacks on Israelis.

According to Israeli reports, the attacks are often mounted on the basis of information squeezed out of Palestinians taken into custody during the broad campaign that began March 29 and ended officially with the pullout from Bethlehem last Friday.

On Tuesday night, for instance, as Israeli forces killed the two intelligence agents here, other Israeli soldiers arrested a dozen Palestinians in Dura, a few miles to the south, and an official of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in the city of Hebron, adjacent to Halhoul. A dozen other arrests were reported around the West Bank.

The operations have been relatively easy to carry out, because the Israeli army, in pulling out from Palestinian city centers and refugee camps, did not go very far.
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