Prima facie there should be nowhere more unlikely for communist icon Rosa Luxemburg’s ghost to haunt than Israel. For inveterate ideological internationalists like Rosa, Zionism was anathema.

Though rifle-butted to death in 1919 by German nationalists and reviled as a Jew (with her revolutionary doctrines falsely ascribed to all Jews), Rosa’s antipathy to Jewish causes was a near-boastful expression of alienation from her own Jewish roots. Continue reading →

Existential threats against the Mideast’s besieged Jewish enclave have hardly been catastrophically aggravated due to Avigdor Lieberman’s exit from the crudely-concocted Ministry for Strategic Affairs. Lieberman’s contribution to the battle against Iranian nukes won’t be missed. His departure from the shady coalition will be as lamented as his entry into it was understood in the first place. He debased himself by facilitating Ehud Olmert’s political survival and scored no popularity points by bailing out. Continue reading →

As part of last week’s provincial, sycophantic and syrupy welcome for George Bush – orchestrated with every shameless kitschy contrivance – some inspired stage-manager had a young girl offer red roses and cloyingly sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow to the big boss, who had come down from the White House to boost his own sagging prestige and that of his flunky fawning protege, Ehud Olmert. Continue reading →

George Bush’s tall ambitions for a short visit to one of the world hottest hotspots tell more about his America than they do about objective reality here. There are no equivalents in superpower annals for American idealistic naivete coupled incongruously with realpolitik cynicism – as selfish, coercive and amoral as any elaborate machinations contrived by Nineteenth Century European potentates. Continue reading →

‘Tis the season for media reviews of the just-bygone year. This is when commendations and demerits are handed out by supercilious news-purveyors. But they never subject their own performance to retrospective scrutiny. They never focus on those deliberately neglected items, which they relegated in brief to the lower margins of inside pages. Continue reading →