Pope Paul VI at Meggido in 1964: He made sure the name Israel would never escape his lips. President Zalman Shazar stands to his right.

The Vatican’s recognition of a Palestinian state (which despite its popularity abroad does not in fact exist) shows that the Holy See can be awfully speedy when it so suits it – even headlong and precipitate.

This is quite a departure from our Jewish experience with the Catholic hierarchy. With isolated exceptions, Jews have consistently encountered an entrenched severity, even hardheartedness – and that’s putting it very mildly.

With impetuous haste the Vatican rushed to recognize a state that so far consists of only radical Muslim bands distinguished only by their brands of zealotry. This is in stark contrast to the excruciating tardiness, indeed the unconcealed reluctance by the same church to recognize Israel.

The Vatican’s ill-will lasted decades after the Jewish state was born, after it survived genocidal attacks by seven Arab armies only three years post-Holocaust, after it successfully absorbed millions of Jewish refugees and after it created a functioning democracy second to none, along with all the institutions of civil society.

Despite Israel’s exemplary attributes of sovereignty, the Vatican remained sour, begrudging and glacially aloof – and that again is resorting to understatement.

So whereas a Palestinian state is recognized prematurely – before actual self-determination – it took the Vatican a whopping 45-and-a-half years after the fact to bring itself to officially recognize Jewish self-determination. Egypt – Israel’s bitter foe for decades – beat the Vatican by 14 years. Continue reading →

Ayelet Shaked: Scathing scorn was heaped on her – whether in the Paritzky or Rozin idiom

Another Mideastern spring is in full swing (as distinct from the sadistically ongoing Arab Spring, not long ago confidently proclaimed by the never-erring enlightened ones as the hope of all democracies everywhere).

Springtime in our setting is notoriously unstable and in the lowly Coastal Plain some steamy nights already cause us to toss and turn when we ought to be chilling. In particularly wearisome instances our restlessness is aggravated by agitated replays of the day’s news when we ought to escape to cozy dreamland.

Thus on a recent nocturnal occasion, while my insomnia imperceptibly morphed into nightmare, new Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked rudely disturbed my peace by jumping off a pinup calendar in a dingy auto repair shop someplace in darkest Israel.

The garage featured the expected cast of unsavory characters – sweaty workaday letches who drooled, whooped and whistled as Ayelet nimbly and tauntingly rushed out of their macho milieu to join a chorus line of Third Reich beauties. With these fetching Fräuleins, Daughter of Israel Ayelet – a founding member of the Jewish Home faction – ecstatically raised her arm in the obligatory Nazi salute.

I bolted upright in dread. Who planted did these sleazy images in my subconscious? Continue reading →

Nakba instigator Husseini giving the Heil Hitler salute to Bosnian Muslim volunteers to the notorious Waffen SS (the Hanzar SS Division) in November, 1943 [Jerusalem Post Archives]

     The Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, 2012 

The above is what we Israelis, as this volatile region’s most relentlessly delegitimized group, must keep uppermost in mind every mid-May.

Whereas we celebrate our state’s Independence Day according to the Hebrew calendar, the Gregorian anniversary, May 15, is annually commemorated by Arabs as a day of lamentation for the Nakba. It’s the catastrophe according to their loaded terminology, which renascent Jewish sovereignty supposedly inflicted on the supposedly indigenous people of this land – the Palestinians.

The notion that Israel was born in sin is delegitimization in the most extreme sense. Continue reading →

Brigadier General Hossein Salami: “They will not even be permitted to inspect the most normal military site in their dreams.”

Who says history has no sense of humor? Just as US President Barack Obama seeks to hide away the salami slices shaved off his deal with Iran, an Iranian named Salami exposes an extra-thick and very telling slice.

Without much ado, the Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, gave the lie to one of Obama’s most significant contentions about the deal that America’s Commander in Chief is cooking up with the nuke-craving ayatollah regime.

Significantly, Salami didn’t whisper off the record. He didn’t speculate about hearsay in a back room. He didn’t impart hints given to conflicting interpretations. Salami said his piece openly on state TV. He announced out loud that, contrary to American claims, there would be no foreign inspections of Iranian military sites. Period. End of. No quibbling.  Continue reading →