In one of his most important poems, “The Hollow Men” (1925), T.S. Eliot speculates on how the currently living are perceived by the departed – “those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom.” He reckoned corporeal mortals are remembered “if at all – not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.” Continue reading →

Poor Tzipi Livni – the burden of ministerial office can weigh heavy. It involves obligations that produce not a little unease. For instance, among the last follies ascribed to Ariel Sharon, just before his catastrophic stroke, was a promise to Vladimir Putin to hand over the Russian Compound’s famed Sergei Building (the sumptuous “Sergei Imperial Guest House”). It’s smack-dab in the very heart of Jerusalem – in the western part thereof, the one that lies within the Green Line, the one that ostensibly Israel may be allowed to keep after it relinquishes all it liberated in its 1967 war of self-defense (including Judaism’s Holiest of Holies). Continue reading →

Insightful Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman died in February 1989, more than four years before Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin and their underhanded crew clandestinely negotiated the Oslo Accords and then dropped them on the heads of all unsuspecting Israelis, including their prime minister. Continue reading →