IDF: Less Qassams since pullout
In 2005, there was a significant drop of 55 percent in the number of Israelis murdered in terrorist attacks compared to last year, IDF statistics show. This year, 52 Israelis were killed, compared to 118 in 2004. Five suicide bombings were carried out this year, compared to 14 in the previous year, YNET reported. The senior officer who presented these statistics summing up the year said that the Islamic Jihad is responsible for almost half of the terrorist attacks this year, and has significantly increased its attempts to carry out terror attacks in Israel, compared to drops in attempts by Hamas. The officer said the statistics reflected the IDF and Shin Bet's war against the terror infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, as well as Hamas' ceasefire and the economic improvement on the Palestinian street. "We are not seeing entire factions of Palestinians getting in line to carry out suicide bombings, as we saw in 2003," said the officer. He added that in 2005, there were 164 incidents involving the firing of mortars and Qassam rockets into Israel, compared to 288 in 2004. The officer said that the IDF would continue to work against the threat. "If there's a need we'll increase operations; for example, we'll notify residents who live in the area used to launch rockets that they must leave within 12 hours, and then we'll carry out massive firing on the area," said the officer. In the last quarter of this year, 78 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza, compared with 304 in the third quarter of the year.
Halutz: Iran could have bomb by 2008
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz said today that Iran was approaching the point where it would have the technological know-how to build nuclear weapons, THE JERUSALEM POST reported. According to Halutz, it is possible that Iran would be able to complete building a bomb as early as 2008 or as far as 2015. Halutz spoke at the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday reiterated his doubt about the Holocaust and called on Muslim nations to take a proactive stand on the Palestinian issue. The president's comments, published Tuesday on Iranian state television's Web site, were the second time in a week that he has expressed doubt about the Nazi destruction of European Jewry during the World War II. Ahmadinejad provoked an international outcry in October when he called Israel a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the map." "If the killing of Jews in Europe is true," the Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying, "and the Zionists are being supported because of this excuse, why should the Palestinian nation pay the price?" The television did not broadcast Ahmadinejad's comments, and the Web site offered no reason. In Israel, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: "The real problem with the repeated statements of the Iranian president is that they correctly represent the mind-set of the Iranian leadership, and they accurately articulate the policies of that extremist regime." The president made the remarks Monday at an Islamic conference in Teheran that was attended by Khaled Mashaal, Hamas's political leader.
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Peretz to meet with American poll guru
World-renowned American pollster Stanley Greenberg, who led former Prime Minister Ehud Barak to an impressive elections win in 1999, will be arriving in Israel to meet with Labor Party Chairman Amir Peretz, YNET reported. The poll guru is expected to arrive in Israel in the coming days in order to look into the possibility of joining forces with Peretz. Should Peretz be able to acquire Greenberg's services, he would be adding a definite asset to his team. The American adviser, who served as the owner of a successful research and consultation institute in Washington, was former American President Bill Clinton's pollster in 1992 and also worked with Presidents Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, as well as with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Greenberg's services were hired by Ehud Barak in September 1997 along with two other American advisers, James Carville and Robert Shrum. Greenberg, in almost every case, has bet on the winning horse and is known as someone who marks the target and decisively advances towards it. In 1999 he had known for certain what was about to materialize on the eve of the elections. According to reports, he and his advisers took an earlier flight back to the United States after realizing that victory was in their pocket.
Economic & High-Tech Briefs
The Israel Economic Mission in New York has launched a new initiative, where Israeli executives working in U.S. technology, pharmaceutical, banking, media, and venture capital companies will open doors and offer advice to other Israeli companies looking to penetrate the U.S. market, GLOBES reported. The first meeting of the executives network with three recently founded companies was described by the participants as a success. Israel Economic Minister to North America Zohar Peri and, Roi Tzur, the Mission's director of high tech business development coordinated the program. The three presenting companies were Svivot Ltd., which develops and markets intelligence inference systems that analyze commonalities between groups for military and police intelligence units; Dynasec Ltd., develops platform that enables organizations to efficiently manage risk, governance and compliancy processes, and Applicure Technologies Ltd., which offers Internet security solutions. The participating Israeli executives were from Comcast Corp., Integrated Device Technology, Merck & Co., SAP , Time Warner Inc., Bank Hapoalim USA, VocalTec Communications Ltd., Giza, GlobalTech Research, and others.
Online Holocaust databases surge
Malka Shaham knew little about how her parents had survived the Holocaust. They didn't talk about it as she was growing up, and she didn't ask many questions. But when she began taking care of her ailing father at her home in the Negev desert during the final years of his life - when he no longer had full control of his words and thoughts - he began speaking of the
Holocaust for the first time. Sometimes the revelations came during nightmares. "In his sleep he was shouting that the Nazis were beating and degrading him," she said.
Shaham, 54, decided to try to find out everything she could about what her parents, David and Frieda Fogel, had endured in Poland during World War II. She found clues in an online database of survivors and victims of the genocide of approximately 6 million Jews, compiled by a professor at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH.
Such databases are becoming increasingly popular as they go online. Children and grandchildren of aging Holocaust survivors try to find long-lost relatives and fill in family history made hazy by missing records, faded memories and the fear of survivors that they will relive the horror by talking about it.
Many victims stopped looking for information in the late 1940s and '50s and tried to put the death camps, forced labor and confinement to ghettos behind them, said Steven Vitto, a researcher for the Registry of Holocaust Survivors at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "But these questions are coming up again," Vitto said.
"Survivors are getting older and starting to talk. Grandchildren are getting interested. They're asking questions they never asked before." The museum has compiled millions of personal records. Some of the documents were supplied by Dan Kazez, the Wittenberg music professor who in 2003 founded the Czestochowa-Radomsko Area Research Group. The group locates, types and indexes records of survivors and victims of the genocide who were in Poland or left the country during the Holocaust. Documents include survivor lists, slave labor lists, ghetto registrations, real estate indexes and census data. And there is obscure information such as a list of ditch diggers, 20 people who left a small Polish village in 1937 and the names of Polish children who arrived in Great Britain. "We have things no one's ever seen," Kazez said. "There are huge quantities of data here. It's mind-boggling." He collects information from state archives in Poland and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. Over the years, 300 volunteer typists have converted records to computer files, including 2,400 digital photographs Kazez took of records at the Cincinnati archives.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem has about 12 million Holocaust-era records, primarily about those who perished. Since the material was put online in November 2004, more than 6 million people from nearly every country in the world have used the database. "We have many stories of people finding relatives they never knew about through the database," said memorial spokesman Zvi Bernhardt. Shaham discovered a list of survivors from Krakow, Poland, including her grandparents and father. She found out that both her father and grandfather were in labor camps and that her father worked as a locksmith. She found their prisoner numbers. However, she couldn't find any labor-camp records for her aunt, doesn't know if she is alive, and is still searching for her. "I cannot explain the excitement which overcomes me when I join fragments of information into my partial mosaic patchwork, knowing that I really have a clear proof to the fact that they were there," said Shaham, whose parents have since died.
(Today's Israel Line was prepared by Hili Sharon at the Consulate General of Israel in New York)