The Covenant With Amalek

כסא אליהו זכור לטוב

Germany - Germania - Magog: The Amalekite dedicated to Israel?

Germany has shockingly been a [if not THE] architect to Israel's inception and the lead driver to Israel's date with destiny towards a Geulah. Much like the Para Adumah makes tumay before tahor, it seems evil is the flavor that will produce the eventual total good: Beis Hamikdash on Zion; Why does Germany choose to keep pushing the envelope?

Germany:
a)Destroys Judaism
b)Leads to State of Israel
c)Builds Nukes in Israel
d)Donates the buses, cabs, money, other infrastructure enterprises
e)Sells state of the art nuke-subs to destroy Iran, solving the aviation issue

f)...Returns to anti-semitism, invoking Amalekite memories, bans Bris Mila, inspires Jews to finally be Jews in Germany, giving Moshe Rabbeinu a tikkun for his sin in not giving milah to his son?! - and if that is not the last step, what is?!


CalgaryHerald.com:

A district judge in Cologne, Germany, recently ruled that ritual circumcision is a crime, violating "the fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity," which outweighs other parental and religious rights.

"This change runs counter to the interests of the child," the court concluded, "who can decide his religious affiliation himself later in life."

Jews and Muslims have traditionally viewed male circumcision in a different light - not as an expression of individual choice, but as a form of initiation into a community. German religious figures from all the Abrahamic faiths criticized the Cologne ruling, with particular outrage expressed by Jewish leaders. Dieter Graumann, head of German Central Council of Jews, called it "outrageous and insensitive" and warned that a general application of the decision would "coldbloodedly force Judaism into illegality."

Though the ban only directly applies in one region of Germany, secular supporters count it a triumph and a precedent. One academic, Holm Putzke, celebrated the rejection of "religiously motivated violence against children."

"The court has," he said, "unlike many politicians, not been deterred by the fear of being criticized as anti-Semitic or anti-religious."

Normally such deterrence would be viewed as a healthy thing, particularly in a country that relatively recently - within living memory - sought to be judenrein, "clean of Jews."

But the fearlessness of modern secularism is a thing to behold. Before the Second World War, there were about 600,000 Jews living in Germany. Today, there are a little over 100,000. This remnant is now informed that their 4,000-year-old ritual of identity - perhaps the oldest Jewish tradition - is a violation of enlightened notions of individual rights.

Jewish sensitivity on this subject is understandable.

Anti-Semitism has always focused not only on Jewish beliefs, but on Jewish bodies. And circumcision has attracted particular attention. The Roman historian Tacitus called it a "base and abominable" practice, by which Jews deliberately chose to "distinguish themselves from other peoples."

The banning of circumcision by the Emperor Hadrian may have helped foment a Jewish revolt in 132 AD. During the Middle Ages, the practice was linked to the blood libel - accusations that Jews used the blood of murdered Christians in circumcision rituals. Josef Stalin banned ritual circumcision along with other Jewish religious practices.

Most of the current opposition to circumcision - found not only in Germany, but in Sweden, Norway, Holland, Finland and the United States - would dispute the charge of anti-Semitism. The arguments they claim are resolutely modern: It is medically harmful (a difficult case in light of the fact that the World Health Organization and UNAIDS recommend the practice as part of effective HIV/AIDS prevention efforts). Along with the Cologne judge, most critics of circumcision also regard it as a violation of individual self-determination, which raises religious liberty issues larger than a single snip.

A strain of modern liberalism contends that only individuals and their rights are real in the legal sense - and there is no other acceptable sense. It is the role of the state to defend individual self-determination against oppressive institutions, including religious institutions. Since circumcision is coerced, it is unjust. The same claim might be made - and has been made - of early religious indoctrination of any kind. Liberalism thus leads to an aggressive form of assimilation to the values of the liberal order.

Many Jews naturally view compulsive, state-sponsored assimilation with suspicion, even if it is described as social liberation. Along with many other religious people, they regard children as members of a community that precedes individual decisions and outlasts them - a community created by a covenant, not a choice.

Circumcision is the outward sign of this spiritual reality.

In the traditional view, religious communities are not only real, but irreplaceable sources of meaning and belonging. They are the ties that free individuals from isolation and ennui - even at the price of a little unremembered pain.

There is a story from Holocaust history about a woman at the Janowska concentration camp who demanded a knife from a guard. Taken by surprise, he complied. The other inmates thought the woman intended suicide.

Instead, she reached down into a bundle of rags and circumcised her infant boy - then prayed aloud for God to receive him back to heaven as a Jew.

If this is the definition of a crime anywhere in the modern world, it is a sad regression from freedom.

Angela Merkel HaMagog-ette

Germany is Magog [Yoma]

thus is either [or both] Obama and Putin Gog?

= War of Gog V' Magog?

Looks that way!

משיח 5772

Read more »

Higgs Boson: To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before!

Finding the Higgs Boson could mean unlocking Physics' door - boldly going where no Man has gone before...

So where is Moshiach - before the World becomes like a bad Star Trek episode that is sponsored by Apple?!


YahooNews.com:

Since its first appearance on the original "Star Trek" series in 1966, the starship Enterprise has become a symbol for space travel. Recently, an anonymous engineerclaimed that an approximation of this iconic ship could be built in the next two decades. But just how close is mankind to zipping through the stars at warp speed? On the website BuildTheEnterprise.org, a self-proclaimed engineer who identifies himself only as "BTE-Dan" suggests that a working facsimile of the iconic ship could be built and launched over the next 20 to 30 years. The ship would require a few modifications, but would look a great deal like Captain Kirk's famous ship.

Built in space, the ship would never visit the surface of any moon or planet, and so would never need to reach the high speeds necessary to escape surface gravity. The engines would be powered by nuclear reactors onboard the ship, and use argon rather than xenon for propellant, saving a few hundred billion dollars in cost. As an added bonus, BTE-Dan notes that argon can be mined from the atmosphere of Mars. Although such a ship would a lack a warp drive (the technology that allows the "Star Trek" version to zip between stars across the galaxy), it could reach the moon in three days and Mars in three months. BTE-Dan suggests it might function as a combination of a space station and a space port, allowing humans to orbit planets and moons within the solar system while using a "universal lander" to travel to and from their surfaces.

Such a spaceship could house 1,000 people within its gravity wheel. [The Top 10 Star Trek Technologies] The entire ship would be more than 3,000 feet (almost 1 kilometer) long, with its central disk making up nearly half its length. According to the website, much of the technology needed to build the ship described is within our grasp, including the rotating gravity wheel, which could be suspended by electromagnets within a vacuum to eliminate mechanical wear and tear. Also easily within reach, he claims, are a 1.5 GWe (gigawatt electrical) nuclear reactor safe to carry in a spacecraft, and composite materials that would save mass, add strength and improve radiation shielding.

Design challenges BTE-Dan describes himself as a systems and electrical engineer who has spent the past 30 years employed at a Fortune 500 company. He is presently declining interviews. Though the prospect of a real-life Enterprise is appealing, the proposed ship is not without problems. Adam Crowl, an engineer with Icarus Interstellar Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to interstellar exploration, pointed out that a spaceship built with a sufficiently powerful nuclear reactor would need large thermal radiators, ruining the classic Enterprise look. "Engineering physics doesn't respect our aesthetics," he told SPACE.com by email. BTE-Dan's ship is essentially an iconic replica of the famous starship, and may not be practical. "I would love to see 1,000 people go to Mars, but I need convincing that they need to be on the Enterprise to do so," said Crowl. Other engineers said the similarities between BTE-Dan's ship and the Enterprise are only skin-deep. "He wants to build something using foreseeable technology that just looks like the Enterprise," said Marc Millis, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "It's nowhere close to being what the Enterprise is."

Still, the site received so many visits soon after its launch that it crashed, revealing how appealing the idea is to many people. Today's technology Though some aspects of the Enterprise are far out of reach today, many are within our grasp, and some are part of our daily lives. Sliding doors, futuristic in the 1960s, now welcome almost every grocery store visitor, and today's flip-open cellphones resemble Star Trek's tricorders. The touch-screen devices ubiquitous today even look like those used in the 1990s episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." "If you had shown someone an iPad in the 1990s and told them it was 23rd century technology, they would have believed you," Richard Obousy, co-founder and president of Icarus Interstellar Inc., told SPACE.com.

Advances with 3D printers also provide opportunities for voyages through space, allowing the replication of parts while using materials found at the destination. Andreas Hein, an aerospace engineer also with Icarus Interstellar, suggested that it might not be long before such printers make food similar to the way meals were synthesized by replicators on the Enterprise. Additionally, engineers working at NASA's Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory, informally known as Eagleworks, are working on a Q-thruster that bears a striking resemblance to the impulse engines on the Enterprise. Nuclear woes Millis suggested the next step in rocket propulsion will likely include utilizing a nuclear power source, an option that is stymied by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

He acknowledged that the barriers aren't just political ones, as people are nervous about the idea of launching nuclear rockets from Earth's surface, despite the fact that it could be done safely. Obousy agreed that nuclear rockets could provide the necessary thrust, pointing to the large, multibillion-dollar projects around the world seeking ways to unlock fusion as an energy source. Of course, such projects primarily focus on powering homes and cities on Earth, but once unlocked, fusion could be used to travel through the stars. [Gallery: Visions of Future Human Spaceflight] "In terms of propulsion technology, fusion engines are potentially within a generation or two," Obousy said, though he added that sudden technological jumps could accelerate the process. Visiting a planet without being seen may also be not too far out of reach. "We're doing things with meta-materials that'll allow practical cloaking, maybe even invisibility," Crowl said. Gravity presents one of the greatest challenges: The Enterprise of television and the movies lacks a gravity wheel, instead utilizing synthetic gravity. According to Millis, if we could find a way to master gravitational forces, such technology could also be utilized in tractor beams or the ship's propulsion. Warp speed ahead "Star Trek"-like propulsion remains a key problem.

Fans are familiar with the warp drive, which accelerated the ship faster than the speed of light and allowed its crew to zip between stars. Such travel defies our present understanding of physics. "I think this is one of the most important aspects that prevents an Enterprise-type ship in the near future," Hein said. Obousy agreed. "One of the staples of these warp drives is that they require an exotic form of energy that we have not been able to create in the labs, dark energy being the salient example," he said. Dark energy is the unexplained force behind the accelerated expansion of the universe. Scientists don't yet understand what it is, which makes it a challenge to use in propulsion. A warp drive would require an enormous amount of energy. Theoretical calculations using dark energy to move a starship would require more energy than that contained within the planet Jupiter, making it uneconomical.

  In the "Star Trek" universe, the warp drive relied on antimatter. When matter and antimatter annihilate one another, the energy produced is immense. Though such an energy source could conceivably power the ship, it is available only briefly. Crowl pointed out that antimatter technology itself is developing rapidly. Ultra-high intensity lasers may soon allow it to be directly created from energy, and useful amounts may be trapped in the magnetic fields of planets like Earth and Saturn. But, like dark energy, antimatter may prove to be more trouble than it's worth. "Using antimatter right now is very expensive," Millis said. "But that doesn't mean that it always will be." When mankind finally travels to the stars, we may have to forgo warp speed for something else, such as the manipulation of space-time itself. According to Albert Einstein, nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light. But Millis points out that such limits do not necessarily apply to space-time.

Theories in peer-reviewed journals explore the possibility of surrounding a craft with a bubble of space-time that expands and contracts, perhaps allowing it to exceed the speed of light. "It's the difference between moving a pencil across a piece of paper or moving the whole paper," Millis said. [Video: Warp Drives and Worm Holes] Beam me up, Scotty Another potential challenge to recreating the "Star Trek" universe is the system of matter transmission.

The crew often traveled to a planet by transporter, beaming from the Enterprise directly to the surface by way of machines that could scan a body, atom-by-atom, and then recreate it in another place. Recent advances have been made in quantum teleportation, but Obousy and Millis both stressed the difference from "Star Trek"-style travel. In quantum teleportation, "it's not the same photon you started out with, but a replica," said Obousy. Such travel would require enormous precision.

  "If you were going to recreate a human being transported from one place to another, you'd want to make sure everything's in the exact place," he said. Millis suggested that, rather than matter transmission, scientists might one day learn how to utilize very small wormholes for travel. "Of course, if you put mass through it, it might make the wormhole collapse," he noted. Ultimately, the greatest challenge to replicating the Star Trek journeys may not come from the technological front. "One of the things that I really liked about watching [the show] was the very good behavior of the crew," Millis said.

"The prejudices and petty human differences that make up so much of television are pretty much absent. When I think about relative impossibilities, I think it will be easier to make technology for the starship Enterprise than to finally make humans behave that honorably."

Interestingly enough, it is the Higgs that allows for these future realities to happen.
Moshiach becomes all the more imperative ASAP.

Try the Right Way: Torah!!

Read more »

Shem's Long Sought Blessing

Noahidenations.com

               Parashas Balak: The Tents of Shem

                   Rabbi David P. Katz

In the Parsha of this week, “Balak” one of the Torah’s biggest secrets is alluded to, in a famous expression offered by the wicked prophet Bilaam. Amidst the Blessings he offers to the Jewish People, Bilaam peculiarly states the following in Bamidbar 24:5: “How goodly are your tents, O’ Jacob, your dwelling places O’ Israel.” The simple answer to define the nature of this Blessing that Bilaam offers is that these tents and dwelling places refer to the places of warship among the Jewish People, as well is any aspect of congregation amongst 10 Men. [Sanhedrin 105b]

The Synagogue and the House of Study have been the two institutions in a firm setting largely since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. Once the Roman exile was fully launched and operative upon Israel and the Land of Israel, the Jewish People would need to congregate in a wandering exile to remain a cohesive nation. The Synagogue and House of Study [shul = synagogue; beis midrash = house of study] would function as the heart of the society, essentially making Jewish life possible while being surrounded in a foreign land. Thus Bilaam had the perfect Blessing readied in his mouth by Hashem: How goodly are “these” O’ Jacob! In a way Bilaam is saying, “Israel! Do you know what is good?! Your places of worship are Good – cling to those!” And so over time [2000 years roughly] the Jews either get the message or they don’t; and the exile continues in this fashion. The only point being that Bilaam prophesied a tremendous Truth: exile may be long, but by the vehicle of worship the Redemption will come! – because it is the Torah and knowledge through these two institutions [i.e. the fruit of exile and purpose of being in this condition] will produce the solution to Israel, an eternal merit of Torah – for the World.

One irony of Bilaam is that there is a concept of a Blessing and a curse being the same degree. In Purim the Jewish people have to get so drunk [as a commandment] so as to not know the difference between cursed is Haman [the arch enemy to the Jewish People] and Blessed is Mordechai [the Purim redemptive figure]. The numerical value of both of these expressions is the same “502” [which happens to be the same as: simple faith – the pre-requisite when solving complex contradictions] thus the difference is hard to imagine because they essentially say the same thing! Yet on Purim one is expected by simple faith to resolve the paradox, as one is aided by the spirituality of the day within intoxication. The Purim premise is the reality of wine: when the wine comes in, the secret comes out. Bilaam  is essentially a secret of the same proportion, only we aren’t drunk to figure it out! The simple faith must be earned, and in this way the Final Redemption can commence, as opposed to a partial redemption as it was in Purim, one that led to further exile. The Final Redemption is just that: final, without a return to Exile, rather it will usher in Shabbat without a return to a proverbial work week. For what was just explained through Purim, we can now begin to understand Bilaam and his Blessing/Curse paradox.

How Goodly “is your worship” O’ Jacob – murmurs Bilaam, yet what is his deeper message? The shul and the beis midrash are not only places of congregation and worship, but the breeding ground that cultivates one’s simple faith. The very concept of refuge into such an establishment is the epitome of simple faith, for simple logic would not assume a “book” [the Torah] would serve as armor in a potentially savage extended era of exile. This is exactly what Bilaam saw, the Jewish paradox! The one place that you need to turn to, is also the last place you would want to turn to. This “last place to turn to” is twofold in a double entendre: it is the seat of refuge, i.e. the last, and also it is the last place to turn to – of a sarcastic flavor! The point of the latter is that through exile and a return to the Land before the Redemption, the places of worship will begin to decline of this goodly element, and thus the very refuge that we seek has been overtaken by the depths of the exile itself! If the places of worship are under such a predicament, how would one be expected to ascertain if it was a curse or blessing from Bilaam? One would then be in doubt, and ultimately leave the scene altogether, thus making Bilaam all the more so successful! One would need simple faith just to go to shul and the beis midrash in the End of Days! If we knew however why these vehicles of worship are goodly, perhaps we could find a simple solution to simple faith!

The shul and the beis midrash are goodly as we have stated, and who does Bilaam list in context of these establishments – Jacob! Jacob was called a “Wholesome Man dwelling in Tents.” [Genesis 25:27] The numerical value of “Wholesome Man” works out to be the same as “Faith”, thus Jacob showed to be of a particular Simple Faith, as the word for wholesome can double as “Simple” in meaning. [Passover Hagadah as per the simple son] Tradition says that these tents of Jacob referred to places of studying the Torah not in one tent, but two tents. [Rashi Genesis 25:27] Rashi also lets us in on the secret to the entire construct of Jacob’s life, such that it’s the essence of Bilaam’s Blessing /[curse] and extends into the seat of the Final Redemption: In whose tents to Jacob dwell? Shem and Ever states Rashi!

Here we have the final piece of the puzzle: Bilaam recognizes the Blessing and the curse of the Jewish People that extends into the End of Days, and it is the Goodliness of Jacob, representative of his Simple Faith: The Tent [/Academy of Torah] of Shem and Ever – they are Goodly! We now have three questions concerning this scenario: A) Why is this a Blessing? B) Why is this a curse? C) Why is this Goodly? The resolution is the reality of Shem and Ever as being the essence of Jacob, the Jewish Survival and Torah, and the Final Redemption!

Shem and Ever are a Blessing because it is their Torah that began the story, fashioned the Jewish People and will serve to redeem in the End of Days as it is said of Shem as One of the Four Craftsmen of Redemption:…”The Righteous Priest” [Sukkah 52b; Rashi identifies him as Shem son of Noah].

This is a curse for one large reason: by the time the End of Days come, there will be opposition to Shem and Ever as the People will have been so far removed the True Torah that Shem and Ever [and even Jacob ironically] will be nearly forgotten! Thus these goodly institutions will slowly decay and loose integrity of anything that resembles Shem and Ever [and even Jacob]. Thus Bilaam has given an “evil eye” on Jacob’s Goodness in a mocking fashion: there will be a divorce between the shul/beis midrash and Shem and Ever; this effect will neutralize and paralyze worship in the time of the End.

However, the good news is: These are Goodly! This is the infrastructure that dates back to Shem and Ever personally! They were the fathers of Torah and Yeshiva, and Bilaam by the pressure of God upon his prophecy is forced to acknowledge the ultimate simple answer that we can connect to by Simple Faith, the same Simple Faith that Jacob used to learn from Shem and Ever: How Goodly are your Tents and Congregations O’ Jacob! Bilaam by prophesying as such admits the truth of Redemption, Torah, etc: Shem and Ever’s Torah Lives! The resolution between the Blessing and the Curse of Bilaam is simple: by the power of our forefather’s forefathers the World will witness the Redemption and the Torah of Unity amongst Jews and Noahides especially, for the salvation of the future was seeded  many eons ago by Shem and Ever, forefathers to the Jewish People and the Noahide Nations as well! How Goodly are your Tents O’Jacob – to which Noah himself prophesied to his son Shem: “They will dwell in the Tents of Shem” – and he was right, we all will. You can even ask Bilaam, as ironically he was the one person that didn’t outright curse Shem and Ever, rather it was the the contrary: he only Blessed them – as they should be.

Go to Shul and Study!

Read more »

Higgs: Doubt It -or- Pushing Geulah?

Higgs? Maybe. Geulah? Probably even more now than ever.

In the year 5500-5600 the wellsprings of Heaven and Earth were opened to the extent of influence of today.

Will the Higgs [aka scientists "finding" God before Kabbalists] push the Geulah envelope? i.e. if gashmius is opened up now - is spirituality sure to follow...Mincha Gedola


Reuters.com:

Scientists at Europe's CERN research center have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world's media near Geneva on Wednesday.

"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe." Two independent studies of data produced by smashing proton particles together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider produced a convergent near-certainty on the existence of the new particle. It is unclear that it is exactly the boson Higgs foresaw, which by bestowing mass on other matter helps explain the way the universe was ordered after the chaos of Big Bang.

But addressing scientists assembled in the CERN auditorium, Heuer posed them a question: "As a layman, I would say I think we have it. Would you agree?" A roar of applause said they did. For some, there was no doubt the Higgs boson is found: "It's the Higgs," said Jim Al-Khalili of Surrey University, a British physicist and popular broadcaster. "The announcement from CERN is even more definitive and clear-cut than most of us expected. "Nobel prizes all round." Higgs, now 83, from Edinburgh University was among six theorists who in the early 1960s proposed the existence of a mechanism by which matter in the universe gained mass.

Higgs himself argued that if there were an invisible field responsible for the process, it must be made up of particles. He and some of the others were at CERN to welcome news of what, to the embarrassment of many scientists, some commentators have labelled the "God particle", for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered universe. Clearly overwhelmed, his eyes welling up, Higgs told the symposium of fellow researchers: "It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime." Scientists see confirmation of his theory as accelerating investigations into the still unexplained "dark matter" they believe pervades the universe and into the possibility of a fourth or more dimensions, or of parallel universes. It may help in resolving contradictions between their model of how the world works at the subatomic level and Einstein's theory of gravity. END OF AN ERA "It is very satisfying," Higgs told Reuters.

"For me personally it's just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago," he said of the achievement of the thousands who labored on the practical experimental work which had, finally, confirmed what he and others had described with mathematics. "I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened," he said of the speed with which they found evidence. "For physics, in one way, it is the end of an era in that it completes the Standard Model," he said of the basic theory physicists currently use to describe what they understand so far of a cosmos built from 12 fundamental particles and four forces. CERN's Large Hadron Collider is the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator.

Two beams of protons are fired in opposite directions around the 27-km (17-mile) looped pipe built under the Swiss-French border before smashing into each other. The collisions, which mimic the moments just after the Big Bang, throw off debris signals picked up by a vast complex of detectors and the data is examined by banks of computers. The two separate CERN teams worked independently through that data, hunting for tiny divergences which might betray the existence of the new boson, a class of particle that includes the photon, associated with light. The class is named in honor of Albert Einstein's Indian collaborator Satyendra Nath Bose. Both teams found strong signals of the new particle at around 125 to 126 gigaelectron volts (GeV) - a unit of mass-energy.

That makes it some 130-140 times heavier than a proton. Scientists struggling to explain the theory have likened Higgs particles to a throng of paparazzi photographers; the greater the "celebrity" of a passing particle, the more the Higgs bosons get in its way and slow it down, imparting it mass; but a particle such as a photon of light is of no interest to the paparazzi and passes through easily - a photon has no mass. Presenting the results, Joe Incandela at CERN showed off two peaks on a graph of debris hitting the detectors, which he said revealed the hitherto unseen presence of the enigmatic particle. "That is what we are sure is the Higgs," a CERN scientist said. LESS THAN ONE IN A MILLION "It's a boson!" headlined Britain's Science and Technology Facilities Council in a statement on the role its researchers had played in the delivery of the "dramatic 5 sigma signal" for the existence of the long-sought particle.

Five sigma, a measure of probability reflecting a less than one in a million chance of a fluke in the data, is a widely accepted standard for scientists to agree the particle exists. "The fact that both our teams have independently come to the same results is very powerful," Oliver Buchmueller, a senior physicist on one of the research teams, told Reuters. "We know it is a new boson. But we still have to prove definitively that it is the one that Higgs predicted." "If I were a betting man, I would bet that it is the Higgs. But we can't say that definitely yet. It is very much a smoking duck that walks and quacks like the Higgs. But we now have to open it up and look inside before we can say that it is indeed the Higgs." Al-Khalili said the researchers' caution was extreme: "Cutting through all the jargon about sigmas and decay channels, the bottom line is that CERN have indeed discovered the Higgs boson," he said.

"In my view, if it looks like the Higgs, smells like the Higgs and is exactly what we expected from the Higgs, then it's the Higgs." UNIVERSAL THEORY The Higgs theory explains how particles clumped together to form stars, planets and life itself. Without the Higgs boson, the universe would have remained a formless soup of particles shooting around at the speed of light, the theory goes. It is the last undiscovered piece of the Standard Model that describes the fundamental make-up of the universe.

The model is for physicists what the theory of evolution is for biologists. What scientists do not yet know from the latest findings is whether the particle they have discovered is the Higgs boson as exactly described by the Standard Model. It could be a variant of the Higgs idea or an entirely new subatomic particle that could force a rethink on the fundamental structure of matter. The last two possibilities are, in scientific terms, even more exciting. Packed audiences of particle physicists, journalists, students and even politicians filled conference rooms in Geneva, London and a major physics conference in Melbourne, Australia, to hear the announcement.

Despite the excitement, physicists cautioned that there was still much to learn: "We have closed one chapter and opened another," said Peter Knight of Britain's Institute of Physics. Paul Nurse, president of Britain's science academy The Royal Society, said: "This is a big day for science and for human achievement ... Today moves us a step closer to a fuller understanding of the very stuff of which the universe is made." Higgs himself called it a great achievement for CERN's collider. Without it, his ideas would remain just a paper theory and he conceded that he personally was never cut out for laboratory experimentation: "I certainly did some lab work as a schoolboy in Bristol," he told Reuters. "I was incompetent."

Higgs 2012 = Geulah 5773?

Read more »

The Fetal Zionist: The Shamir Program II

This is Yitzchak Shamir Part II

As I stated, Shamir instituted into Israel the Pachad of the Yitzchak [Shamir]. If there is to be a terror amongst the Nations emanating from the Land - you can thank Shamir. The Jew is a natural weapon [Tefilah as a weapon; just as Science is knowledge and can be used as a weapon, so too the Jew]; this is the teva of the Jew, especially in the Land.

Conversely, the Erev Rav are a weapon as well, and davka in the Land! The difference is basically as it always is: Kedusha vs. Klippah. Klippah Zionism strikes fear amongst the World; yet this is largely in its impure form and as exploitation [at least from Torah].

Kedusha will have dread amongst the Nations, yet it will retain Kiddush Hashem, Fear of God, and expression of pure Torah. The weapon is meant to be used, while used in Holiness! [ultimately to be expressed with Tefilah, as the Beis Hamikdash is called "Beis Tefilah!"]

With Zionism [along with every flavor of Jew-daism (and Judaism)] we see an example and a hint of what the Torah State will look like. This is an example of Orlah [unripe fruit]. While the Pachad is being expressed, it is not fully ripe, and thus is inherently distorted; yet we can catch a glimpse of one angle of great the Jewish State will be! Let us not forget at the same time, that this is Erev Rav Institution...Kol Sheken Moshiach's State will be Above Awesome as an entity!

The point with Shamir is the following:  as with every yesod of Zionism, they affect the State and linger within the State and are identifiable! Shamir is no different. When we look at what the Arabs say about Israel [esp. from Iran, who is not Arab but representing Malchus of Yishmael], they are describing the Shamirian State of Israel..Thorn in our side, terrorist, militant, ruthless, assassin-like, etc. This claim even makes its way into Israeli society amongst Israeli's! Try going to a Government office, and you will experience the wrath of Yitzchak Shamir..it is an instituted way of Life here. Such is Zionism and its founders: once indoctrinated, it is here, lived and experienced daily. Shamir-ism is protocol and a way of life as it is embedded into the Israeli Psyche of modern day Zion.

The ruthless Israeli [consider every Israeli is Shamir-ized as IDF is mandatory] can even be considered Israel's survival, thanks to Yitzchak Shamir, and such is and will be his legacy. Ultimately Zionism is like a bizzaro Torah Judaism, with forefathers laying down yesodot much like the 7 shepherds, only to the extent as they were kedusha, this is steeped in Klippah, yet an interesting ideology at the very least...simply because: it is a chachmah, in that it works, it functions, and it is meshuchlal!

My last point: Shamir leads to Rabin-ism. The Zohar predicts Geulah as having started in '56.['96]
This is when Rabin [Erev Rav] began actively as policy chasing Land for Peace [namely the arrogance of successful Zionism].

One could suggest that it was Shamir that inspired Israel/Zionism to spawn a new incarnation of Rabin[ism], as he followed the wake of Shamir.  It is as if Shamir set the table, and Rabin was now set with a counter position, one that would dominate into the depths of disaster to real Zionism, as Shamir felt that Rabin would reach even into Shamir's camp: hence, Bibi is plagued with Rabin consciousness. This is a principle in reality, one that we saw with Napoleon and Hitler - it was Napoleon who created the space to produce a Hitler setting. Or even in modern terms: Bush[istics] urged Obama[care]. If that could spell the end of America, Zionism is equally threatened...to the point that perhaps the Zohar could kabbalistically envision this reality from the blueprint within Kabbalah.


ATimes.com:

Israel's quintessential hard man, Yitzhak Shamir, dies quietly at 96 Yitzhak Shamir never lost his stoic, hardline stance against the Palestinians in favor of a "greater Israel", and held a deep antipathy towards the kinds of negotiations with the Palestinians that his longtime rival, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, came to champion. J BROOKS SPECTOR looks back over Shamir's life and career.

Yitzhak Shamir, a man who had emerged from the Stern Gang, the most militant wing of the Irgun, eventually served as Israel's prime minister longer than anyone but the near-legendary David Ben-Gurion. Throughout his career, Shamir was a proponent of a particularly muscular Zionism and expansive settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was born Yitzhak Jazernicki in Poland, but changed his name to Shamir, or "thorn" in Hebrew, after he emigrated to the British mandatory territory of Palestine. (The UK became the mandated authority there following the end of World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.)

Before he emigrated to Palestine on a student visa, ostensibly to enter the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he had studied law at Warsaw University after World War One. But in 1935, when he was 20, he came under the political and philosophical influence of the extreme militant Zionist Zeev Zabotinsky and emigrated to Palestine. The rest of his family remained in Poland and were exterminated by the Nazis during World War Two. Once he was inside Palestine, he joined the underground paramilitary group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which was led by yet another future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin. The Irgun was dedicated to fighting for an independent Jewish state, using militant, violent means against the British. But Shamir felt that even the Irgun was insufficiently activist enough and he moved over to (and later led) the Stern Gang in 1940.

During that period, the British Foreign Office described Shamir as "among the most fanatical terrorist leaders". His group blew up the King David Hotel in 1946 while that structure was serving as the British headquarters in Jerusalem. The explosion killed 88 people, including 15 Jews, and also took the life of the United Nations mediator, the Swedish Count Bernadotte. Many of his friends and colleagues said Shamir's character took shape during his years in the underground when he sent Jewish fighters out to kill British officers, whom he saw as occupiers. Given his pursuit of the intifada (uprising) later, it might well be seen as ironic that the British rulers of the Palestine mandate had also labelled him a terrorist and an assassin. In those Stern Gang years, he appeared in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi.

Years later, Shamir told friends that those were "the best years of my life." To the Jewish public, and even other Jewish underground groups, Shamir's gang was "lacking even a spark of humanity and Jewish conscience", Israel Rokach, the mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944 after Stern Gang gunmen shot three British police officers on the streets of his city. Years later, Shamir insisted it had been more humane to assassinate specific military or political figures than to attack military installations and possibly kill innocent people, as other underground groups did. He argued, "a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history." Some historians argue that he and his group were behind a failed attempt to kill the British high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, and the killing in Cairo of Britain's minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. Asked about these events many years later, Shamir's denials seemed to carry a certain evasive tone, observers noted. During this period, too, the British managed to arrest Shamir twice, including a deportation to Eritrea, but he escaped both times, eventually returning after Israel's declaration of independence in 1948.

For the next seven years he worked in law and business, but probably found his true calling in 1955, when he joined Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, where he worked for a decade. After Mossad, he joined the campaign to support the right of Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel. Summarising these parts of his life before entering formal politics, the Jerusalem Post wrote of him that "Captured and deported to Eritrea in 1946, the diminutive, beetle-browed Shamir missed much of the fighting that led to the state's founding two years later. Upon his return, he found himself out of step with the country's left-leaning political leadership of the day. The Mossad spy service provided Shamir a back door to power.

Recruited in 1955, he clambered up Mossad's ranks during shadow wars with Middle East foes and international hunts for Nazi fugitives. He credited a posting in France with lending some refinement to his style - 'the scenery, the way people looked, the food, the wine, Piaf,' he would later say - and prepared him for his 1980 breakthrough as foreign minister for the Likud." Following these formative experiences, Shamir entered politics with Menachem Begin's Herut Party, a predecessor to Likud. He rose through the ranks to become parliamentary speaker, foreign minister and then his first of two tours as prime minister in 1983 when Begin retired.

Shamir's political opponents said his laconic style played into his handling of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut in September 1982, during Israel's war in Lebanon. On September 16, Phalangists - Lebanese Christian militiamen - entered the camps and began killing hundreds of Palestinians while the Israeli Army, largely unaware of the killings, stood guard at the gates. The resulting deaths caused a major international uproar. Much later, Shamir said of the incidents: "You know, in those times of the Lebanese war, every day something happened. And from the first glance of it, it seemed like just another detail of what was going on every day. But after 24 hours, it became clear it was not a normal event." Following the indecisive election of 1984, he formed an unlikely coalition with Shimon Peres of the Labour Party. Their deal was that Peres would be prime minister for the first two years, then Shamir would re-assume the prime ministership.

Shamir was now a key part of a group of right-wing Israeli politicians led by Menachem Begin, who came to power in the 1970s as the more left-wing Labour Party slowly declined, increasingly seen as corrupt and disdainful of the public it wished to lead. Shamir strongly opposed many - if not most - of Peres's policies, especially the stalemated peace process and well as the possibility of land returns or the possibility of a Palestinian state. Instead, he persistently advocated the creation of a "greater Israel", encompassing all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. As prime minister, Shamir therefore promoted continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel had conquered in 1967. As a result, in his time as prime minister, the Jewish population in those occupied territories increased by nearly 30%. He also continued to encourage the immigration of many thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel, an influx that has significantly altered the country's demographic character as well as its political balance. During this second term as prime minister, he first ordered a military solution to the first Palestinian intifada, which had begun in 1987.

By the 1988 election, the uprising in the occupied territories was an ongoing reality and the Israeli electorate was thoroughly split between Labour and Likud in determining which set of policies to support. As a result of the inconclusive electoral results, the two antagonists - Shamir and Peres - formed yet another unwieldy coalition government that survived until 1990, when the Labour party left the government, leaving Shamir with a narrow coalition, but still in the driver's seat. In responding to the intifada, Shamir and his defence minister, Yitzhak Rabin, deployed thousands of Israeli troops throughout the occupied territories to quash the rebellion. The years of violence and death on both sides brought criticism and condemnation from around the world. In May 1991, Shamir ordered the airlift of thousands of Ethiopian Jews in a rescue operation code named Operation Solomon as one of the last efforts to bring historically dispersed Jewish communities to Israel.

Surprisingly, during the first Gulf War that took place in that same year, after Iraq began firing Scud missiles at Israeli cities, Shamir held back from any form of retaliation, presumably in response to serious US pressure to adopt a policy of restraint, with the view that any Israeli attacks would generate major difficulties for the delicate Arab-Western coalition that the George Bush administration had cobbled together against Iraq in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. By not retaliating even as Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv, Shamir gained promises of financial aid from the United States to help with the settlement of all those new Israeli citizens from the Soviet Union. Following the Gulf War and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, nearly a half-million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel.

Shamir sought $10-billion in US-backed loan guarantees to pay for their housing and development projects. But he resisted American demands that none of the money be used for Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. In the fall of 1991, under pressure from Bush and secretary of state James Baker, Shamir agreed to represent Israel at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid, Israel's first summit meeting with the Arab states. There, he was as unyielding as ever, denouncing Syria at one point as having "the dubious honour of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world". However, his reluctant decision to bring Israel into negotiations with its Arab neighbours eventually led the way for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that became a more sustained motif of Israeli foreign policy under his successors. Israeli voters, now increasingly wary of a confrontation with the country's one reliable ally, the US, rejected Shamir in the June 1992 election and he was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin then found himself in that historic handshake with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in the Bill Clinton administration, building a reputation as a peacemaker.

Shamir left office in 1992 amid charges that Likud was becoming too conciliatory toward the Palestinians, despite Shamir's near-legendary reputation as a hardliner against Palestinian aspirations for statehood as well as his refusal to countenance land for peace-style negotiations. Shamir dropped out of Likud's leadership in March 1993. He became a sharp critic of his Likud successor, arguing that Benjamin Netanyahu was being too indecisive in dealing with the Palestinians, in spite of Netanyahu's own reputation as a hardliner. In a statement announcing the death, Israel's current prime minister, Netanyahu, spoke of Shamir's "deep loyalty to Israel". In that statement, Netanyahu said Shamir "was part of a marvellous generation which created the state of Israel and struggled for the Jewish people".

A particularly telling portrait of his personality came in 1988, when, at a meeting of his political party, he sat quietly on a sofa, gazing at the floor as party bigwigs continued to praise him to the rafters. Hearing all this, Shamir remarked: "I like all those people, they're nice people. But this is not my style, not my language. This kind of meeting is the modern picture, but I don't belong to it." One of his advisors, Avi Pazner had said of him, "If he wants something, it may take a long time, but he'll never let go." Another close aide, Yossi Achimeir, said of him: "He heard every whisper, every small movement. His antennae were working all the time."

  Ultimately, "Shamir believed only in Shamir." As a politician, Shamir played his cards very close to his chest, like a good intelligence operative should. Aides like to tell that memos to him routinely were returned without a mark on them. By the time of his death, Yitzhak Shamir was living quietly in a nursing home near Tel Aviv, as he gradually succumbed to Alzheimer's disease.

Pachad Yitzchak Shamir brings Pachad Yitzchak Rabin? If the men themselves were the forerunners is the State next? The state today is a living  Shamir [with its Pachad]...that means that Bibi is sure to bring the other Pachad - of Rabin. Just watch.

Moshiach -בקרב...in the Mochin of the true father of Israel: יצחק אבינו!

[The Arizal [Yitzchak Luria] even says (and HE was identified as) "Mashiach" [ben Yosef] "is", simply for being named "Yitzchak" (Shaar HaGilgulim)

Read more »

And God said Let There Be Higgs Already!

It looks like it comes down to the 4th of July [2012]: will Physics celebrate its personal Independence Day?

The God Particle will either be lost or found so it seems.
Like the rest of Geulah News: shlepping along we go!

DailyMail.com:

Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed. Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.

Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland. The management at Cern want the two teams of scientists to reach the 'five sigma' level of certainty with their results - so they are 99.99995 per cent sure - such is the significance of the results. Tom Kibble, 79, the emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has also been invited but is unable to attend. He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.' The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass. Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people. The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons – sub-atomic particles – together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If the physicists’ theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying.

This decay would leave behind a ‘footprint’ that would show up as a bump in their graphs. However, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel - there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles. Now it is thought that two separate teams of scientists, who run independent experiments in secret from each other, have both uncovered evidence of the particle. However, the two groups, CMS and ATLAS, are expected to stop short of confirming its existence.

An Abyss  Called Geulah

If the entire World is now waiting...[which they are]...One must assume that there is something [massive] and worth waiting for - World-Scale! Moshiach 5773?

Read more »

Israeli or Israeli Edomite: Heil Shamir!

Yitzchak Shamir 1915-2012

Yitzchak Shamir has passed.  As it seems that the alter dor is moving on with steady succession [Bibi's father; and a whole slew of 75+ personalities], we have yet even more to learn from Shamir, as a dugmah of what is the real Zionism and Medina.

First and foremost: Shamir was a right-wing secularist terrorist. In fact, that is what I believe to be enough to elaborate his influence onto what would be the future and current State of Israel.

If one were to pick one character from all of Jewish History, to be the figurative "Biah Shlishi"

[as its not enough to be concerned with enemies, money, IDF, etc. - Israel would need to conquer the way of being ("halacha") in the Land. King David said: Go see the workings of God, as he placed desolation in the Land! - that is what Shamir did! Interestingly enough, the real Biah Shlishi will be from the Ko-ach of King david,  to the extent that I feel David's lack was not essential to him, other than his persona would have been better as a Joshua/Moses as opposed from already being in the Land. His draw back would then have been that he would have given Torah over like Moses; he would have been stuck studying! Thus the Jewish People would not have received the Torah like Moses, but they would have gotten into the Land. Thus David and Moses were flawed in opposite realms in this scenario. David needed to enter the Land [as opposed to have already been here], and thus Moshiach ben David will achieve the final Biah!]

...then Yitzchak Avinu would be the mold for Klippah to emulate; Shamir is even named Yitzchak! Why - because Yitzchak is called Pachad Yitzchak. [the dread/terror of Isaac] He was considered the true father of Israel [Talmud Shabbos], he fathered Edom, of which Shamir mastered! Terrorism of the State of Israel, Secularism, and every way to emulate Esau, was instilled in Israeli culture...ty Mr. Shamir! Yitzchak's ashes from the Akeida [he was considered to be shechted, and thus his ashes are presereved before Hashem], are the Torah concept of rememberance..thus is what Shamir did: he made his mark on Zionism.

He knew how to work with Klippah: if Klippah woulod always fear the Jew [like Britain did in Palestine] it would help preserve Israel in every way. [especially secularly] He basically brought the "Edomite Jew" into existance, as Esau was to be Jewish had he achieved his destiny. Shamir emulated such a concept! - through terrorism, secularism, raw behavior, klippah influencer, cold blodded, etc. The State of Israel lives in its Pachad [d'klippah of Yitzchak].

The Mochin of the State of Israel is forever inclined towards Edom, and he is the source of that thinking. Remember, Yitzchak spent his whole life in Israel, thus if you are to acquire the Land [even in Tumah], what better role model than Yitzchak Avinu [in klippah]!

Yitzchak's name means to laugh, and what is a basic ability to generate laughter? to impersonate - people laugh at immitation - Shamir had found his Biah Shlishi in the mold of Yitzchak Avinu. This secular/terrorist - Edomite way of seeing things would permeate the entire Israeli experience between matters of State, all the way to getting a Speeding ticket - as the Medina employs Shamir-ism! If Erev Rav is against Erev Katan, you have a bench mark that will forever challenege the ruling Religious from Shamir's influence.

Welcome to Israel - the State that Yitzchak Shamir helped build.

..."don't read desolation in the Land, but Names in the Land - Tehillim: ..."Shamir means a thorn that stabs and a rock that can cut steel." - Shamir on choosing his name. The Jew is a weapon, all the more so the Erev Rav - hence Moses' bringing  them out of Egypt. The State of Israel caters perfectly to weaponry. Shamir got that, and he sharpens the blade of the weapon called Israel - until the Geulah will come and the Land is cleansed. Shamir brought the charif to Israel; pun semi-intended.

If there is an Armilos in the State of Israel, he is joined with his root, as Edom is programmed into our State, thanks to Yiztchak Shamir.

It should be noted, that Shamir set the tone leading up until Rabin; Rabin's dates in office are hinted at in  the Zohar, when it suggests the Geula began in '56 - Rabin's Land for Peace, as the table was now set since Shamir had left his mark - even upon the Left!


Haaretz.com:

Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister who opposed compromise with the Palestinians in the 1980s and ‘90s, died Saturday at 96. Shamir, a militant against British rule in the prestate period, was the country’s second longest-serving prime minster after David Ben-Gurion.

Israel’s seventh prime minister said in his autobiography he hadn’t groomed himself to become prime minister, maybe because he had worked for the Mossad for 10 years.

Only when Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the cabinet in August 1983 that he could no longer go on did Shamir take over.

Shamir was no young man at the time. “I was 68, two years younger than Begin, who was stepping down due to exhaustion. I wasn’t famous. I didn’t have a broad coalition of supporters or any particular ambition. It had never occurred to me that I could become prime minister.”

Shamir says in his book that when someone proposed that he become prime minister, he was confident he could beat out Likud minister David Levy. But though he could accept “how the others praised me, their exaggerations embarrassed me.”

Shamir said he liked Levy, but didn’t believe he was suitable to lead Likud or head the government. “I didn’t see myself as Begin’s heir, but rather someone who would continue his work,” Shamir said after he became prime minister.

Shamir served as premier from October 1983 to September 1984, and later as head of the second national unity government, from 1986 to 1990. He thenled a right-wing coalition until 1992, when Yitzhak Rabin beat him at the polls.

Shamir’s political career before he became prime minister wasn’t a long one. He joined the Herut movement only in 1970.

Poland, Lehi and the Mossad

Shamir was born in Ruzhany, now in Belarus, in 1915 as Yitzhak Yezernitsky. The small town became part of Poland after World War I. He studied in a school belonging to the Jewish Tarbut network, joined the Zionist Betar movement and began to study law at the University of Warsaw.

When he was 20, he immigrated to Palestine and joined the Irgun two years later. By day he worked in an accountant’s office and at night took part in anti-British activities.

Shamir said “we didn’t take any action blindly or automatically or just for the sake of violence. Our aim was to intimidate rather than to punish ... reprisals were never a cause for celebration. They were simply an existential need.” In 1940, Shamir left the Irgun, following Avraham Stern, and became a leader of the Lehi − which the British called the Stern Gang.

In December 1941 he was arrested and spent time in the Mizra prison near Acre. After escaping in September 1942, he was put in charge of operations. In this role he was responsible for the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, the British minister of state in the Middle East.

As Shamir put it, Moyne “was a senior official in enforcing British policy in Palestine and didn’t for a moment hide his strong opposition to Zionism and his negative feelings toward the Jews.”

In 1946, a year after his first child Yair was born, Shamir was deported by the British to Eritrea; the High Commissioner could deport anyone thought to endanger the peace or the defense of British Mandatory Palestine. Shamir escaped in January 1947.

In 1955, he joined the Mossad, where he filled many roles for 10 years. He never revealed many details about his work there, though in his autobiography he wrote that he was a unit chief under the organization’s leader, Isser Harel. “My service in the Mossad continued for only 10 years, but those years made a deep impression on me and I learned a lot from them,” Shamir said.

Knesset speaker and foreign minister

After entering politics in 1970, Shamir was elected to the Knesset in 1973 and served six terms.

In the ninth Knesset ‏(1977-1980‏), when he was Knesset speaker, he disagreed with the Camp David Accords and abstained during the vote on peace. Shamir later said his wife Shlomit and children Yair and Gilada believed it had been a mistake to accept Begin’s request and serve as speaker.

According to Shamir, the most important event during his term as speaker was the visit by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel in November 1977. In March 1980, a few months after Moshe Dayan resigned from the government, Shamir became a minister for the first time − foreign minister.

When Shamir took over as prime minister, the Israel economy was racked by 400 percent annual inflation. Shamir admitted he had no knowledge of economics. “I knew I wasn’t up to par in [this] area and I had no strong opinions about it,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Finance Minister Yoram Aridor proposed linking the shekel to the dollar, but Shamir feared that this would increase Israel’s dependence on the United States. Aridor resigned.

Two security issues were raging at this time; one was the growing Jewish underground that sought to attack Palestinians as revenge for their actions, including a plan to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The other was the Bus 300 affair, in which Shin Bet security service agents killed two Palestinians after they had been taken into custody after hijacking a bus. President Chaim Herzog pardoned 10 Shin Bet members before trial.

Second term

Ariel Sharon ran against Shamir to lead Likud before the 1984 elections but was badly beaten. The elections ended in a stalemate − 41 seats for Likud and 44 for the left-wing Alignment.

Neither party could form a coalition, and at the urging of Herzog, Shamir and Shimon Peres would take turns as prime minister and second in command − an Israeli invention.

But the lack of trust between the two hampered the national unity government. Shamir claimed that Peres undermined him and held secret negotiations with Jordan’s King Hussein, highlighted by Peres’ signing of the London Agreement in 1987.

“From the first day ... it was clear to me that Peres not only didn’t want but also could not accept the results of the election .... Most of the time he worked behind my back, always ignoring the damage he caused to the government and the coalition. Furthermore, he advanced his cause ... with the same disregard for accepted rules of behavior whether he was prime minister or foreign minister.”

The first intifada

On December 9, 1987, the first intifada broke out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Defense Minister Rabin instructed Israeli soldiers to respond with force, and Shamir supported Rabin’s tough approach.

The stalemate between Likud and Labor remained after the 1988 elections: Likud 40 seats, Labor 39. Despite the animosity between Shamir and Peres, they agreed to establish a unity government, but this time without a rotation. Shamir would be prime minister and Peres foreign and finance minister.

Meanwhile, relations with the United States were cooling off; Secretary of State James Baker was angered by Shamir’s unwillingness to make any kind of compromise with the Palestinians. Baker told a congressional committee that Shamir’s approach prevented any discussion of peace, and famously offered the White House telephone number for when Israel got serious. He called on Israel to give up the idea of a Greater Israel as unrealistic.

Dirty tricks and the Gulf War

The unity government fell apart in March 1990 after what is known as Peres’ “stinking maneuver.” The background to the affair was a deep disagreement between Peres and Shamir about the participation of East Jerusalem Arabs in elections for an autonomous council to be formed in the territories. Shamir opposed the idea, but Peres and Labor ministers supported the Americans.

In Peres’ maneuver, the Labor Party would take part in a no-confidence motion by the opposition parties and in return receive a Knesset majority for establishing agovernment headed by Peres. Shamir fired Peres for “acting to dismantle the unity government and undermine it.”

Two days later, a no-confidence motion was brought to the Knesset. Leaders of the two major parties courted the ultra-Orthodox parties. For the first time in Israel’s history, a government fell in a no-confidence vote. Peres failed to form a government when two ultra-Orthodox delegates withdrew their support. Shamir formed a government that lasted until the 1992 elections.

During the Gulf War that began in January 1991, Iraq fired 39 missiles at Israel. Israelis, especially those in the center of the country, shut themselves into sealed rooms wearing gas masks, but Shamir was not tempted to send the air force to attack Iraq. He won the world’s praise for his restraint.

End of a career

In the 1992 elections, Shamir was severely beaten by Rabin and resigned as Likud leader. He served in the Knesset until 1996, when he retired from all political activity, although he continued to criticize the Oslo Accords and Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies as prime minister.

For a decade after his retirement, he sometimes appeared in the media and expressed disappointment in the excesses of his successors, especially Netanyahu. He called Netanyahu an “angel of destruction” for agreeing to sign the Hebron and Wye agreements. He left Likud and joined a movement led by Benny Begin, Menachem’s son, but was not elected to the Knesset.

After Likud’s failure in the 1999 elections and Netanyahu’s exit, Shamir received a symbolic place on Likud’s Knesset list: 120 − the number of Knesset seats. In 2001 he was awarded the Israel Prize.

King David Hotel Bombing

Read more »