I made a tough decision today. But sometimes you have to bite the bullet.

MS Internet Explorer has been annoying me for a variety of reasons as of late. While I like its interface, its performance was awful. I decided to switch to Explorer 8 Beta to see if it worked better, but it most definitely did not, so I switched back to IE7 and that's when the freezing started.

What causes it, I don't know, but some part of the IE8 uninstall screwed things up, so IE7 now freezes on a regular basis.

I didn't want to move to Firefox, because while FF seems to perform better, it's interface was annoying.

But today I downloaded FireFox 3. The visual improvements are minor, but those minor improvements are significant for the overall experience.

My Bookmarks didn't migrate well, but I'll eventually fix that manually.

In the meantime we'll see how this migration goes.

So how many of you realized that a whole bunch of Israeli companies are on strike right now?

While everyone talks about the upcoming exchange of live terrorists and mass murderers in exchange for the bodies of our kidnapped soldiers isn't it time we changed the focus of the discussion?

For 2 years we've known nothing about our kidnapped soldiers and they are presumed dead.

If these are to be the rules of the game, then this should be the rule for all.

It's time that we stopped letting terrorists have visitors, be they family or the Red Cross. In fact no "signs of life" should be released at all regarding their condition. Perhaps going as far as denying we even have them.

If our soldiers are returned dead, then so should the terrorists we are exchanging for them, even if they are alive now.

And if we don't have enough terrorists to exchange, then a Sayeret Matkal unit should be sent in to retrieve some high ranking ones.

It's about time that Israel acknowledged and accepted that we must play by the rules of the neighborhood surrounding us.

Otherwise this cycle of Kidnap and Release will never end.

“We don’t expect 100% success, just 100% effort.”

Remember that line? We used to hear it a lot when Arafat was around. The government used to excuse the attacks coming from PA occupied territory with that line.

In hindsight, except for the most diehard leftwing fanatics, we all know now (what the Right knew even then), was that Arafat and the PA were behind those attacks, outsourcing them to “splinter groups” and the like in order to maintain a not so credible deniability.

So while the Israeli government purposely lied to itself (and to the People of Israel), Arafat was handing envelopes of cash (sound familiar) to his surrogate terrorists and their families who were "keeping up the struggle".

And the Israeli government has to support that fiction. The entire legitimacy of their “Peace Process” demanded it of them. And Arafat knew that oh so well.

And now we’re back there yet again.

The government needs to maintain the fiction of the latest truce so that it doesn’t need to commit to the military option.

While Hamas has no plans to really stop the attack on Israel – that is its raison d’être, after all.

So one side of Hamas’s mouth says that the Kassam attacks are bad for the Palestinians at this specific moment and they should stop, the other side of the same mouth says that Hamas has no intention of being the Israeli police force and stopping the "independent" rocket launches.

And so the rockets continue to fall, and so Israel continues to not respond.

Shimon Peres may not want to learn from history, but even the Israelis with the shortest of memories must remember that we in this same exact game not so long before.

Save us from ourselves.

Postscript: Israel is actually transferring funds to Hamas in Gaza. Israel claims it is transferring funds to the PA in Gaza, but there is not PA in Gaza, only Hamas. Another useful fiction.

I still haven’t weighed in recently on the conversion issue.

But there has been some discussions lately about the Messianics, and if they should be allowed entry and citizenship as Jews or not.

Interesting problem.

There is no question that the Jewish citizens of Israel must be protected from their propaganda and missionizing.

I think one of the primary flaws of the Law of Return was that it didn’t properly answer the issue it was trying to address.

The mistake was in not creating two tiers for entry into Israel.

1) Automatic Citizenship based on Halachically defined Jewishness
2) Automatic Refugee Entry for those persecuted because of a Jewish familial connection.

It wouldn’t resolve the Messianics question, but I suspect it would have changed the demographics of who was let in, and who ended up staying from the former USSR. Certainly the neo-Nazis with their questionably Jewish relative in their history wouldn’t be walking around the Holy Land today if the law was properly written. And we wouldn't have supposedly Jewish IDF soldiers asking to swear in on New Testaments.

There is nothing like the People of Israel!

Israeli scientists have created a vaccination against the skin cancer "melanoma".

Melanoma is a relatively rare cancer, but it is the leading skin cancer that causes death.

The vaccine, developed by Prof. Tamar Peretz and Dr. Michal Lotem at the Oncology Institute of the Hadassa Medical Center in Jerusalem, helps prevent the recurrence of the cancer and increase the chances of survival for current victims.

That's two major medical announcements in the space of week from Israel.

Keep them coming fellows.

Yossi Shwartz is a man with nothing.

Once he was a farmer in Gush Katif (Gan Or). Yossi had a home, had land, had a job, and had employees. And then the Israeli government ripped it all away.

And now he finds himself in an even stranger situation.

A few months after the Expulsion, Yossi found himself sued by 17 of his former Arab employees. They are demanding severance pay from him.

Now while Yossi might agree that his former employees deserve severance pay, he doesn’t feel he is the right address for his former employees. After all, he wasn’t the one that shut down his farm and fired his employees. That was a decision and act of the Israeli government, and just like they still owe him fair value for what they destroyed perhaps they owe the same to his workers.

So Yossi went to Minhelet Sela (The Expulsion Authority) and demanded they provide him with legal counsel to defend himself. They of course refused. Their official response is that as an employer he was responsible for setting aside money for severance pay and he should pay them from that. (Note that he still hasn’t received from Minhelet Sela what is due to him by law).

Eventually he found his way to the organization “Ezri” which was able to provide him money for legal counsel in the form of the lawyer Neil Samulet.

The suspicion raised is that this is a trial balloon (perhaps run and financed by Israeli left-wing organizations?) to see if all the former Arab employees can start suing the former Gush Katif farmers.

The lawyer case’s is simply that the workers must sue the State not Yossi.

The case went to court and the court agreed that the Yossi is not the party that is responsible to pay their severance pay (though Yossi still had to pay, with Ezri's help, the tens of thousands of his legal defense fees).

These same Gaza Arabs are now trying to get at Yossi in another court, clearly implying that there is some serious local left-wing assistance going on here, specifically targeting the Gush Katif farmer, as they know the system so well and specifically didn't go after the government instead.


It was also recently exposed that the Israeli government property assessors received explicit orders on how much to evaluate the homes in Gush Katif. The first 100 homes were accessed properly, and when the senior government officials saw that the actual value of the homes in Gush Katif were easily hundreds of shekels higher than what they had planned for, they gave orders that all homes were to be accessed at a lower fixed rate - which is the way it was done from then on.

Hattip: Basheva and Makor Rishon

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I have always found the concept of prayer to be an extremely difficult one.

What does it do? What is it for? Who is it for? Does it work? And if it works, what does that actually mean that it worked? And does God actually need our prayers?

(I’m not going to try to begin answering any of these questions in this post.)

Obviously there are different kinds of prayers.

The most common are prayers of thanks and prayers of supplication.

Another kind is a little more subtle, it involves keeping pre-Destruction rituals in our collective memory (Karbanos), and of course there is the kind that is there to remind us what our collective (and personal) mission in this world is (Aleinu).

Yet even with the prayers of supplication, what is the goal? What are you praying for if the situation seems hopeless? A miracle? Yet miracles don’t seem to openly happen every day. Yet we continue to pray.

And what happens if the prayer goes unanswered?

In Jewish thought, there seems to be no such thing as an unanswered prayer.

A prayer may not be immediately answered, answered the way you wanted, or answered at all, but prayers seems to be something fungible. They are saved up and if not applied to this case they are applied to something else.

Western Wall Prayers is offering to be your agent for 40 days of prayer at the Kotel. As I mentioned on Jameel’s site, my wife is a very big believer in 40 days of prayer (and if fact she prayed for 40 days before she met me, and then prayed again for 40 days (quite a few times, in fact) for us to get engaged).

I haven’t actually found the source for the 40 days, but I believe I found the source for praying at the Kotel.

Psalm 20 is a very interesting psalm dealing with prayers of supplication.

But one particular lines seems to answer part of the mystery.

Tehillim 20:3 : “May He dispatch your help from the Sanctuary and support you from Zion.”

Thus the origin of praying at the Kotel (the closest we can normally get to Har HaBayit) the Dispatch Center of the blessings as indicated by the line.

I’m still looking for the origins of repeating the request for 40 days, so if anyone thinks they have a good answer I’d like to hear it.

In the meantime, if you have some special prayer for God (such as finding a spouse, improved financial situation, health, etc.) that you’d like prayed for you at the Kotel for 40 days, then you should contact Western Wall Prayers.

(And if you need someone to say Kaddish every day for someone that passed away, they offer that service too).

Before I say anything further, I want to make something clear, I am not condoning this behavior, I am not promoting this behavior, I am not recommending this behavior. I am merely pointing out that certain creative financial activities will soon be possible that weren’t possible before, and some people are going to take advantage of it.

Very soon there will be a new tax law in Israel for Olim who made Aliyah after January 1, 2008, unless someone stops it in its tracks (which doesn't seem likely at the moment).

The new law exempts the Olim, not just from paying taxes on ALL foreign (non Israeli) income (passive and active), but the law does not even require the new Oleh to even REPORT this income!!!

This creates some interesting possibilities in creative accounting.

For instance the Oleh can work for a US company they set up and own. The company can have a contract with an Israeli company for services. The Israeli company can pay the US company. They US company pays the Oleh everything as salary. Since the Oleh is living in Israel, up to a significantly large enough amount of salary/revenue is exempt from US taxes (except perhaps Social Security on the salary), and due to the new law he would be exempt from all Israeli taxes on his US salary . I'm not an accountant, but it might make more sense for him to take the salary as dividends and then avoid the Social Security entirely.

The more creative Oleh is going to perhaps discover even more interesting and profitable ideas, which to be honest, I’m not going to even dare to post here.

And finally, the extremely creative Oleh is going to soon realize that his new best friend will be an extremely creative Israeli.

I’d like to thank Nefesh B’Nefesh for sharing this information.

What a shame I already made Aliyah.

For years, Egypt has been looking for ways to bypass the armistice peace treaty and brings it troops across the Sinai and amass them directly on Israel's border.

It looks like they’ve managed to do it one better.

This corrupt, idiotic Israeli government is talking about bring a “multinational Arab force” into Gaza, based on the recommendations of the Egyptians.

This translates into massive Egyptian troops stationed within the Land of Israel, their wildest dreams come true.

If that doesn’t sound so bad to you, then consider that every major training exercise the Egyptian army undertakes (with US supplied weaponry) is pretty much with an unnamed enemy that happens to have the same GPS locations as the State of Israel. Unlike Israel, they’re prepared to fight on that front.

But let’s forget for a moment about stationing Syrian or Lebanonese (read Hezbollah) troops on two fronts. Just imagine how much this is going to restrict, if not eliminate, Israel’s ability to respond. The IDF simply couldn’t take the chance of hitting a Jordanian soldier.

All I can say is that this shows Olmert really cares. He simply doesn’t want the enemy Arab armies to have to traipse across the desert to reach our borders. He’s inviting them inside.