LETTER FROM JERUSALEM: The Return To Jerusalem
By Arlynn Nellhaus

I applaud when my plane touches down in Israel.

The post-Zionists give me a look of disdain, as if to say, "What a yokel."

I don't care.

I'm always overjoyed to be back. On Tuesday, it was after six weeks in the U.S.

I had flown from New York to Phoenix at noon on Sunday for a checkup by an eye surgeon. At noon on Monday, I got back on a plane to begin an 18-hour journey to Israel. It was late Tuesday afternoon, Israeli time, when we landed.

I clapped loudly. I was that happy. But then, after more than two days in a cocoon, I got the news. And somehow, it never changes.

The day I arrived, Palestinian terrorists had set off bombs in two parts of Jerusalem. One Palestinian blew himself up in his attempt to kill children and adults on a bus.

In these bombings, while dozens were injured, by sheer luck, only one of the intended victims was seriously hurt.

And these happened the day after a 10-month baby girl was murdered by a Palestinian sniper's gunfire. He had aimed his gun into a playground.

His first shot grazed a 3-year-old girl. But among the two or three that followed, he won a direct hit on the infant, Shalhevet Pass. The bullet hit her head.

And today, the day after I returned, two young teenage boys, on the way to their school where they study agriculture and religion, were blown up.

My friends voice their anguish and depression over the events. The IDF blew up the house from which the sniper shot. It seems to most people little enough.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians, who started the violence in September, are crying for protection. In some circles, that makes sense: Start a fight, and if your victim hits back, holler, "Help. He's a bully."

Some people fall for it. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is the latest. Until his recent pronouncements on the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, I respected him as a man of grace, tact and wisdom. His speech at the Arab Summit calls for a reappraisal.

In Amman on Tuesday, he charged that Israel's "collective punishment" had fed Palestinian anger and despair.

Reuters reported Annan saying that the world has every right to criticize Israel for occupying Arab land and for its "excessively harsh response" to the Palestinian uprising.

Many countries supported collective punishment of Iraq 10 years ago, but it was called by a more polite name, "Sanctions." And in this case, in every survey, most Palestinians support violence against Israel.

Israel's "excessively harsh response" includes warning the Palestinians beforehand and then bombing empty buildings.

I wonder to what "Arab land" Israel occupies that Annan refers. More than 95 percent of Palestinians have lived in their own territory under the Palestinian Authority for several years.

But with Yasser Arafat running their lives, they have good reason to be depressed. He has done precious little for them. He has spent nothing on refugee camps, for example, while your and my tax money goes to the UN to help those pitiful pawns.

Could Annan really be so ignorant of the true situation here or did he jettison integrity to please his Arab audience?

Was he in a position to make any kind of response to Syrian President Bashar Assad's flat-head comment that Israel was "worse than the Nazis?" Would he if he could have?

Assad charged that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was elected by "the street." He meant that as an insult to electors in a democratic country.

I suppose he thinks American presidents too are voted on (but not elected in this recent round) by "the street." But he can't say so if he wants to cotton up to Uncle Sam.

In his view, apparently, it's better for a president to be elected as he was – by being picked by his father and having no opponent while his people know there would be a quick trip to oblivion for them if they voiced an objection.

Young Assad studied medicine in England. Americans, at least, tend hold the fantasy that exposure to the Western, democratic world rubs off on Arab potentates. They could dump that one with the tooth fairy.

Another show of make-believe at the Arab summit was Arafat, making no comment about the bombings in Israel the day before, but stating that the Palestinian people "reject violence."

He meant violence against them. He certainly didn't mean against Israelis, 10-months-old and up.

Israelis will be using a picture of little Shalhevet to spread information internationally about what is happening here. They are reluctant to do so, but feel they must.

Unfortunately for Israel's side, a cameraman wasn't conveniently on the spot when she was killed the way one was when 12-year-old Mohammed Al Dura was killed during a Palestinian clash with Israeli military forces.

That short, horrifying event, shown around the world and over and over on TV, was a Las Vegas jackpot to Arafat. How he wrung sympathy for that.

But Mohammed's drop-dead beautiful mother said on TV that her son had gone out to fight Israelis. He sought violence and found it. Still the world blamed the IDF. Israel, at first, accepted that blame.

But the IDF reconstructed that event and studied even the angles of dust kicked up by the shooting. Their conclusion was that all indications showed that Mohammed was killed not by the IDF in front of him, but by Palestinian gunmen behind him.

Palestinian gunmen were behind the youngsters throwing rocks and conveniently not photographed.

Indeed, Mohammed's father, wounded in that event, said his son was shot in the back. The way he fell, too – forward, indicates that the impact wasn't from in front of him, but from behind him.

But never mind facts or even doubt. At worst, if the IDF truly was responsible, it was an accident.

Unlike Shalhevet's case, there was no sniper gazing through a telescopic lens at little children at play. And when he found a baby in his sights, pulling the trigger.

Six weeks away and not much has changed. More deaths, more Arab fantasy, more international condemnation of Israel for violence it didn't begin. Welcome home.

Arlynn Nellhaus is a former Denver Post reporter now based in Jerusalem, and the author of Into the Heart of Jerusalem, and a freqent contributor to The Idler.