freeze-frame from the surveillance footage: the “victim” clearly breaks his fall.

Trying to get inside Jennifer Rene Psaki’s head is one heck of an intellectual challenge. The pearls of wisdom that habitually escape the lips of this US State Department spokeswoman are often no less than stupefying, so it must be edifying to get a handle on what inspires them.

Each time the comely redhead mounts the rostrum to deliver another of her deadpan briefings, Israeli hearts skip a few beats. Will she merely be chillingly aloof? Will she school-marmishly disapprove of our perceived misconduct? Will she actually go the whole hog and scold us for being the reprobates she serially suggests that we are?

She is the gauge of just how disliked we are. Our tendentious, left-dominated, agenda-driven media has turned Psaki into the adjudicator of our international standing. If she isn’t pleased, we are in obvious trouble. Her pronouncements open our news broadcasts and star on our front pages.

Thus we quaked the other day, awaiting her judgmental input following the deaths of two Arabs in Bitunia (near Ramallah) on May 15. They took part in irredentist disturbances to decry Israel’s Independence anniversary as a catastrophe – Nakba – their loaded characterization of our existence. Continue reading →

Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg: “politics should stop at the water’s edge.”

The Israeli penchant for dismissing official authority and embarking on freelance diplomatic endeavors could presumably be dismissed as an almost endearing eccentricity. The problem is that it’s anything but endearing. It triggers real disasters.

The hubris to flout the authority of any government – no matter who heads it – exclusively emboldens leftwing players. They range from relatively unknown individuals (though they’re always well-connected to the real clout-bearers) all the way to top-ranking ministers who, fired up by their own chutzpah, set out to hijack history-making prerogatives.

Soon-to-retire President Shimon Peres still does it in his ostensibly ceremonial role of president. But he already behaved badly as foreign minister to both prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

The latest to dabble in unauthorized diplomacy is Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. She recently conferred with Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas in London, despite the government’s decision (which she supported) to freeze contact with him for his kiss-and-make-up with Jihadist Hamas.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reported to be displeased with this rendezvous (by way of significant understatement). Continue reading →

Yigal Tumarkin’s portrait of his friend Amos Oz, entitled “Oz in a mask of Oz.”

Meretz’s grand guru Amos Oz has told us that, being “a man of words,” he carefully considers his every utterance and its possible nuances. This was his practice, the novelist attests, ahead of his recent 75^th birthday gala where he berated “Hebrew neo-Nazis.”

No inadvertent slip of the tongue, it was Oz’s premeditated refinement of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s infamous “Judeo-Nazis” denigration. That bilious barb against Israeli soldiers – also calculated and never retracted – cost Leibowitz his Israel Prize in 1993 (when then-premier Yitzhak Rabin threatened to boycott the ceremony).

But Oz doesn’t stand to lose by his provocation. Quite the contrary, the Neo-Nazi defamation can do him nothing but a whole lot of good.

If anything, it has given a major boost to his tireless campaign to at long last win the Nobel Prize for literature. Oz, already the darling of literati and glitterati in Germany – the Nazis’ original homeland – can only win hearts and minds in Israel-bashing Europe if he seems to join Europe’s crusade against his compatriots.

The more he dissociates himself from the Israeli majority and the greater the zest with which he whacks it, the more Oz appears to cleanse himself of our Jewish sins. The more assiduously he cleanses himself, the more Oz gets to bask in the ambiance of European approval. He’s generously showered with accolades from latter-day Judeophobes parading as righteous critics of villainous Israeli policies. Continue reading →

David Ben-Gurion signs the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. Moshe Sharett is on the right

Our Justice Minister and chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni, has just served notice on a far-from-enthralled nation that, regardless of what we may believe, she is somehow the boss. She put herself in charge of our collective conscience. She is the ultimate arbitrator of what’s proper and what’s not.

And in that capacity she denounced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s intention to enshrine in law Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people. We might of course expect that she’d cheer Netanyahu’s initiative. After all, she enthusiastically extolled the 2005 Disengagement as ensuring the Jewishness of Israel. She never retracted her words, not even when unilateral retreat proved an unmitigated disaster.

But the residue of Livni’s fast fading political prospects doesn’t reside on the Jewish national side of the ideological divide. She, therefore, woos the few voters who maybe might, irrespective of her record, still stick by her. Continue reading →

Lord Caradon: “We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the ’67 line.”

On the eve of our Independence Day, an ultra-antagonistic independence – one that manifestly threatens to replace ours – is fast gaining ground.  Many Israelis are appalled to see the Ramallah and Gaza splinters officially welcomed in UN-affiliated forums as the State of Palestine. However, given relentless global trends, this travesty was all but inevitable.

“Palestinian independence” had already been declared in Algiers on November 15, 1988 and within mere months the utterly fictional entity was recognized by 134 of the UN’s 193 then-members. All this transpired before Oslo proved how a previously bad situation could be made disastrously worse.

By now, of course, few abroad challenge the popular axiom that a Palestinian state had existed in this country from time immemorial and that it was cruelly overrun in an act of unprovoked aggression by Israel on June 5, 1967.

Even since, it’s alleged, the state of Palestine had been under occupation. In other words, Israel had violently extinguished Palestine’s flourishing sovereignty. This is today’s self-evident, universally worshiped gospel. No substantiation thereof is necessary and any deviation therefrom is sacrilege. Continue reading →