Londoners sheltering underground during the blitz: an attacked nation doesn’t worry about the welfare of those striving to annihilate it

Imagine Josef Goebbels invited to speak his mind on the BBC, smack dab during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. Sounds absurd?

Sure, but only in the context of normal nations. No sane Briton would have tolerated the notion of the BBC broadcasting German propaganda to Londoners as they ran for shelter from German bombs.

Abetting Nazi belligerence would have been a nonstarter even under the guise of a detached reporter’s interview, part of an evenhanded approach, a sporting consideration for the aggressor’s point of view.

But not so in Israel. Here we operate in an alternative universe.  Nothing that would be unthinkable anywhere else is out of bounds for our broadcasters.

While Protective Edge raged, they kept us tuned to nonstop nattering, most of it superfluous, speculative and narcissist. But in many prattle panels, there was an Arab-Israeli MK or a hotshot from some Arab “anti-racism” group (since in this country only Jews are accused of racism and never Arabs, the term is used as a loaded  euphemism for anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist and/or anti-Israel).

The rules of our deranged game oblige media hosts to treat Goebbels’s latter-day torchbearers with courteous deference, or – put less diplomatically – with obsequiousness. Continue reading →

But the Jew on the train objects: “It’s all the fault of bicycles.”

With so much going on, it was no wonder that the reaction by Hebronites to a Gazan rocket that crashed in their midst went right under our radar. We had way bigger concerns and still do but the incident is nevertheless instructive – very much so. It can actually account for why no peace is possible. It  firmly confirms that our logic and that of our neighbors operate on different wavelengths – an underlying and enduring fact of life that makes a meeting of the minds highly unlikely.

But to put the overlooked Hebron episode into context it might be best to start off with Alter Druyanov.

His name, alas, means absolutely nothing to the vast majority of Israelis today. Sic transit Gloria mundi. The output of this literary mover and shaker in newborn Tel Aviv is familiar only to nostalgia buffs and compulsive hoarders of esoterica. But in Druyanov’s anthology of Jewish jokes hides an unassuming little tale that is still sadly all-too-relevant to our scene.

Adhering to yesteryear’s time-tried format, a Jew rides the train and sharing the same compartment is a non-Jew – a Russian in some versions and a German in others.  The non-Jewish traveler cogitates out loud that “all the wars, bloodshed, wretchedness and ill-will on earth are caused by Jews.” But the Jew across from him objects: “It’s all the fault of bicycles.”

“Bicycles?” thunders the bewildered Russian/German, “Why? How come bicycles?”

In calm, measured tones his interlocutor inquires: “How come Jews?” Continue reading →

Jubilant murderers sprung in the Schalit swap – it was a foregone conclusion that they’d murder again

The bamboozlers who gave us Oslo and its deformed derivative Disengagement have never expressed the slightest contrition and never begged the nation’s forgiveness – not even now when Gazan rockets threaten Israel’s heartland. The same goes for their craven accomplices, who ran with the pack and derided nonconformist compatriots who dared protest. But while the promoters of folly bask in self-proclaimed infallibility, they’re uncannily quick to blame others for their sins.

This is hypocrisy most foul and it’s not limited to territorial surrenders and the chimera of attaining peace and acceptance by rewarding belligerence.

Take, for example, the inflammatory issue of swap deals with terrorists and how it’s tied to the abduction and execution of three innocent boys on their way home from school. To hear our talking heads and swaggering former security chiefs, this heartrending saga started with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s 2011 decision to trade 1,027 duly convicted Hamas murderers and mass-murder masterminds for hostage Gilad Schalit, a.k.a. “the child of us all.”

It’s as if precedents weren’t already set and as if the Schalit kidnapping wasn’t in itself the result of previous cowardly surrenders to extortion. Worse yet is the fact that the very ones who spearheaded the campaign to do the deal with Hamas now pin the blame for what they actively advocated on the man they had anyway always viscerally opposed. He was to blame when he didn’t want to do the deal and he’s to blame for having done the deal. Continue reading →

Israeli Arabs are rioting not because they value human lives so highly but because they hate so intensely

Directly below is an op-ed I wrote in 1990, right after the murder in Rishon Lezion of seven Arab itinerant laborers by Ami Popper (who’s still doing life and who unlike homicidal Arabs hasn’t been released to ransom hostages or to win a presumed peace-partner’s goodwill).

Have a read:

Listening to the mournful tones and tunes on Israel Radio in the wake of the Rishon Lezion murder of Arab workers, I have a very heretical confession to make: I am not guilty! I feel no shame whatever! I’ve never taken the life of any creature larger than an insect.

I am not unlike millions of Americans who didn’t beat their personal breasts when a gunman recently mowed down diners at a hamburger joint or when another fired his weapon in a schoolyard. If my memory doesn’t fail me, those incidents made no waves in the U.N. Security Council. Neither did the Ras Burka massacre in Sinai and the slaughter only a few months back of Israeli tourists in Egypt.

They are all gone with the wind. Dead and forgotten – as are the bus passengers overturned into a ravine between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; Ofra Moses, her unborn baby and her five-year-old son, Tal; Rachel Weiss and her three tots; or the two oldsters stabbed on a Jerusalem bus stop bench by a hero of the glorious intifada.

The stabbing of Ein Kerem restaurant owner Ya’acov Shalom, only a few hours after the Rishon bloodshed, failed to so much as flick our public eyelash. We were too busy mourning the Arab victims of a madman to devote much attention to the Jewish victim of a cold, calculated execution, an act of deliberate hate.
Continue reading →

Sky’s Kay Burley and Tim Marshall: there was nothing remotely kind or caring about their banter

We Jews are famous for overthinking, for analysis-paralysis, for hair-splitting ourselves to distraction. We can complicate the simple, mind-bogglingly confound common-sense and convolute the straightforward like no one else. No other nation reacts like us. Period.

We’re the only ones who can come up with inanities like the notion that inaction signifies strength. We’re the only ones for whom combating implacable foes isn’t knee-jerk. Only we strain to guess how other nations will judge our responses to insufferable provocation. We are the only nation threatened with genocide but only we seek to win the world’s love and end up losing it by also trying to stay alive. We are the only ones whose survival prospects must be counterbalanced by our craving for international approval.

Human evolution has produced no one like us. And for all our pains to be liberal and likable we are despised and demonized.

Predictably, on the day Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel were laid to their eternal rest, our talking heads spent hours of air time dissecting the dilemma of whether we should do something now about the enemies who bay for the blood of all of us – not just for that of the three youngsters they stalked, snatched, and slaughtered. Continue reading →