A Daily Analysis
By Marc Schulman

February 17, 2008 Gaza and Sederot

Israel engaged in another small scale attack on Gaza today. Today, like the other attacks, the purpose was to keep Hamas and its allies off guard. Israel killed four Palestinian terrorists and took 50 in for questioning. The Palestinians responded with rocket fire on Sderot and Ashquelon. Just another day in a low intensity war with Gaza.

Unbelievably, Prime Minister Olmert announced today that the money has been allocated to reinforce all the homes within 4 kilometers of Gaza. The unbelievable part is that he had announced the plan a year ago. Itís not exactly clear why in a year of budget surplus for a whole year money could not be found. I guess it was being saved to fund Shas' projects in case he needed there support to maintain the coalition.

Representatives from the Hezbollah traveled to Iran to plan the response to the Mughiniyahís assassination. The threat to retaliate has become part of the political discourse in Lebanon. Sunni and Christian leaders have been decreeing the threat by Nasrallah, stating that it will drag Lebanon into another war that it does not need or want. Nasrallah is now in a bind since he promised retaliation within days. The thinking in Israel is that it will happen abroad and that is where the highest level of alert exists.

There was a strange item on the news today. Ministser of Education Tamir is attempting to impose the study of Arabic on the Haredi schools. Itís a rather strange idea, since she has not been successful in imposing anything beyond the minimum of science and math. It would seem much more important to teach them history, writing skills, maybe English or how about Chinese, then to teach the Haredim Arabic. Unless we are trying to give the Neturi Karta the skills to live in the Palestinian state, which they seem to want so badly, itís seems like poor exercise of the limited ability to effect the Haredi schools.