As usual, after a while the government will give in. Which leads us to question, where are the limits of trade union influence? Being a monopoly, they can naturally extort from the government just anything, there being no theoretical limit to their demands.

But the socialist government refuses to take the only step needed to solve the crisis: subject trade unions to the same anti-monopoly laws which govern the rest of the country.

But the conflict points to an important issue: do we really need that much training or weapons? The army did not engage in meaningful combat since 1973. Anti-guerrilla operations in Lebanon and Gaza, police functions in the West Bank are of a completely different order. They do not require the kind of training now offered, or the army size which we now maintain.

Nor do we need new tanks, whose purchase the Chief of Staff also vowed to cut down, retaliation against the government’s pet industries for the budget cuts. In the next war, tanks will be a liability, given the great advance of anti-tank weapons in the past decades.

The details are open to discussion, but counter-intuitively, the budget crunch is a welcome pressure on the army to start adapting itself to new realities of regional battlefields.

The second issue is important as it demonstrates the inability of police to deal with professional crimes with white gloves. Forbidden from planting evidence or applying pressure to suspects, and facing the highest standards of doubt in the courts, the police cannot prove their accusations in cases where robbers have worn masks and gloves. Alternatively, the police can charge them with other offenses, which usually carry lesser sentences.

The low number of indictments also reflects a cozy relationship between police and criminal gangs, one in which control is deemed more important than crackdown.

There is another dimension to the problem. Bank protection is very expensive compared to other police activities. Why should society expend disproportionate resources on protecting banks, which are perfectly capable of arranging their own security?

Well, the talks have been fruitless for decades, but that has nothing to do with any Fatah-Hamas agreement. We negotiated with the Arabs when they had a single government before their rift in Gaza.

Beyond rhetoric, the White House did nothing.

Very few Palestinians in Israeli jails are from Israel proper; most are from the West Bank and Gaza. Their deportation would be of no concern to anyone. Thus the euphemism ‘Palestinian terrorists’ implied that local Arabs are a group.

Which is a good news for Israeli communists—and for the rest of us a dangerous sign of the country sliding into socialism.

The White House condemned Russia’s intransigence, declaring that any further bloodshed will be on the Russians’ hands. Perhaps. But look at the bloodshed the US provoked in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.