Israeli

With matching jackets and radios and a hotline staffed around the clock, members of an Orthodox Jewish citizen patrol group in Northwest Baltimore view themselves as a necessary complement to city police to keep their neighborhood safe. But one member may have recently taken the role too far. On Tuesday, a participant in the Shomrim patrol organization was arrested after allegedly striking a 15-year-old boy and telling him, "You don't belong around here. " Police arrested 23-year-old Eliyahu Eliezer Werdesheim, a former Israeli special forces soldier, and charged him with first-degree assault, reckless endangerment and false imprisonment in a Nov. 19 incident in the 3300 block of Fallstaff Road.

I have a pretty good method for preventing bad people from getting on planes that doesn't require full body scans nor intrusive pat downs. Follow a variant of the Israeli model and interview each passenger. Make each one show their passport and check it against the national passport data base. If the face, the passport photo and the photo on the national database all are similar, and you haven't visited Yemen or Pakistan etc. lately, then you get on the plane. If you don't have a U.S. passport then you get to go through the more intrusive stuff.

About 25 years ago, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. naval intelligence analyst, betrayed his country by providing highly classified information to Israel. Even though Israel was and still is a U.S. ally and is routinely supplied with U.S. intelligence, Mr. Pollard deserved to be severely punished for his actions. However, the punishment should fit the crime. In his case, it does not. After his arrest and indictment by a grand jury, Mr. Pollard agreed to plead guilty to one count of giving classified information to a U.S. ally.

About 75 demonstrators waved Israeli flags at a downtown Baltimore intersection Friday in a show of support for this week's deadly attack by Israeli defense forces trying to prevent an aid flotilla from reaching the impoverished Gaza Strip. The 90-minute rally, organized by Baltimore Zionist District, was held at Pratt and Light streets to raise awareness of what supporters called an act of self-defense by Israel against Hamas, the militant Palestinian movement that controls Gaza.

Early Monday, Israeli navy commandos attacked a flotilla of humanitarian aid destined for the occupied Gaza Strip in international waters. The ships were carrying 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies that are banned from Gaza under Israel's directives, including toys, wheelchairs, athletic equipment and medicines. The multinational aid convoy to Gaza included a former U.S. ambassador, a U.S. Navy veteran and 10 other U.S. citizens. The Memorial Day massacre left nine people dead and dozens more injured.

In your editorial, "A Way Forward for Israel" (June 2), your presentation leaves readers with the impression that it is not clear who initiated the violence aboard the Mavi Marmara. In fact footage released by Israel clearly shows passengers on the boat brutally beating Israeli soldiers the moment they dropped into its deck from hovering helicopters. There is no alternative footage of unprovoked Israeli fire. All the hard evidence indicates that the violence began at the hands of the so called "peace activists."

JERUSALEM - Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinians were killed in an exchange of fire along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip on Friday after an Israeli army patrol spotted Palestinians planting explosives along the border, the army said. The Israeli deaths were the first military casualties since shortly after Israel completed a three-week military offensive in the Gaza Strip in January 2009 that aimed to stop the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel. Two other soldiers were wounded in Friday's incident.

The Hamas government in Gaza backtracked Saturday on its apology earlier in the week in which it expressed regret for harming Israeli civilians in rocket attacks. The apology had signaled a rare deviation from Hamas' violent ideology, and the subsequent zigzag reflects the Islamic militants' conflicting objectives. Hamas, which seized Gaza by force in 2007, is trying to reach out to the West in hopes of winning recognition and getting Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza. However, Hamas is also reluctant to discard its violent ideology for fear of losing credibility at home.

L ong live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!" That declaration of the immortal Soviet filmmaker Dziga-Vertov also sums up the attitude of Israeli documentary-maker Dan Geva, who has come to Baltimore as a Schusterman Visiting Artist. The Schusterman program aims to connect Israeli artists of all kinds to universities and museums, and through these institutions to a larger American audience. The articulate and aesthetically adventurous Geva, who believes, with Dziga-Vertov, in the power of documentary images to shatter complacent presumptions, is an apt candidate for making the program's dream come true.

Israel will not be complicit in a second Holocaust. If Iran or any other nation that has called for the destruction of Israel is about to acquire nuclear weapons, the Israelis will attempt to destroy that nation's uranium-enrichment facilities. In June 1981, Israel launched a successful air attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor, and in 2007 it bombed a Syrian factory suspected of producing plutonium warheads. But Americans should be aware that when Iran becomes the next target, it will be a blow to the U.S. economic recovery.