A glossary of newspeak slogans

It was sweet solace for the soul to learn that some on the entrenched Left still retain a smidgeon of hankering for the Zionist fold. It was comforting to conclude that maybe the more progressive self-appointed guardians of other people’s consciences have noticed, albeit belatedly, that they had strayed too close to the loony fringe. So it was with genuine joy that many of us received the news of initiatives to purportedly back away from postmodern/post-Zionist excesses and return to the patriotic middle ground that was historically the solid power base of this country’s Labor-Left.

We sincerely yearned to applaud the renascent National Left (Smol Leumi), not least because our entire body politic must be able to count on two responsible mainstream mainstay alternatives. It must be able to count on alternatives which place Israeli security and self-preservation above all trendy inclinations and which do not observe our reality through deliberately distortive enemy lenses. Continue reading

Another Tack: We’ve come a long way, Bibi

“There is no precedent of a conflict between nations being brought to finality without direct negotiations. In the conflict between the Arabs and Israel, the issue of direct negotiations goes to the very crux of the matter. Our objective is to achieve peace and coexistence but how will our neighbors ever be able to live with us in peace if they refuse to speak with us?”

The above is a direct quote from an address by prime minister Golda Meir to the Knesset on May 26, 1970, 40 years minus-five-days ago. The insistence on direct talks was cardinal for Israeli leaders before and since the above statement. A succession of foreign emissaries and politicos came and went, but Israel consistently recoiled from the notion of go-betweens and shuttle diplomacy.

The principle of direct talks steadfastly guided even the misguided progenitors of the Oslo folly – until the advent of Binyamin Netanyahu’s current term. Continue reading

Another Tack: The rightful heirs of Palestine

In 1799, just before he failed to conquer Acre, Napoleon Bonaparte penned a momentous letter “to the Jewish nation.” At that point, still confident of military triumph, he perceived himself as the great liberator of history’s most oppressed people – the “Israelites.” They constituted “a unique nation, which, during thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny have deprived of its ancestral lands, but not of its name and national existence!”

When Napoleon aspired to establish a renascent state in Palestine, it was unquestionably to be a Jewish state. He had no doubt whose ancestral land this was, with whom it’s associated and who were the only people who ever made it a distinct sovereign unit. Continue reading

Another Tack: Either way, you’re dead!

We can avoid Iranian nukes by opting for the Auschwitz borders or we can avoid the Auschwitz borders but be bullied by Iranian nukes.

Time to quit quibbling. No pedantic hairsplitting can mitigate the evidence: The Obama administration cynically links Iran to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The premise is simple and chilling. If Israel wants a last-minute, last-ditch, quasi-credible American move to keep Iran from obtaining nukes, it must pay the piper by making hefty concessions to the sham paraded as the Palestinian Authority. Boiled down to its bare essence, the White House diktat means that Israel can maybe extricate itself from existential Iranian threats by submitting itself to existential Iranian-proxy threats. Continue reading