Another Nakba Day has come and gone with its not-unexpected bloody consequences. The Nakba must be the single most successful revanchist propaganda ploy ever – one which dementedly ultra-tolerant Israel has allowed to gain momentum and become a fixed feature of our surreal existence.

Never has a revanchist cause been marketed as effectively. It wasn’t so even in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 when France lost Alsace-Lorraine and seethed with patriotic retributionist ardor to reverse its wartime losses. This furious groundswell was then dubbed revanchism (from revanche, French for revenge).

Revanchism is inextricably tied to irredentism – the often unsavory nationalist agitation whereby one country claims stretches of another’s territory as property belonging to it.

World War II resulted from precisely such a lethal combination of revanchism and irredentism. Hitler strove to avenge Germany’s World War I defeat and (so he claimed initially) take control of territories populated by German-speakers. He insisted that Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was Germania Irredenta (unredeemed Germany) – his “last demand in Europe.”

That border region’s German inhabitants, Hitler persuaded a world all-too-eager to be duped, deserve self-determination. Germans cannot live as a minority anywhere. (Just as Arabs can’t.) Continue reading →

“Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.” – Ludwig Börne (1786-1837)

One of the wittier and more brilliant satirists ever to have come out of Germany, Börne identified with characteristic precision that indispensable preliminary step in Everyman’s quest for solutions to whatever plagues us. “If you seek wisdom,” he advised, “seek the destruction of the illusions you hold as true more than you seek new truths.”

This is counsel that should be heeded here and now by our inveterate hawkers of mega-delusion – Israel’s very own proponents of the two-state solution. Unflaggingly they peddle tattered, intrinsically disorienting delirium. Incredibly they never seem to tire of pulling the wool over their own and our eyes. They present themselves as possessors of singular insight, as harbingers of a greater truth and as wise beyond our plebeian grasp.

They won’t let go of the grand delusion that underlies their self-professed wisdom and purported truth. Their two-state delusion was certainly sweet – simplistically and seductively so. It claimed that all conflicts can be amicably and fairly settled by just dividing up whatever is contested. It touted idealistic goodwill and seemed compellingly rational. But it was from the start delusionary.
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By all formal criteria, Israel is an independent state, a nation among the nations, born of Herzlian aspirations for the normalcy of a people residing on its own sovereign soil, relieved of the complexes of two millennia of statelessness and incomparable sustained defamation-cum-persecution.

But alive within us is the restless anomaly of the Diaspora’s Court Jew, the one who strove to ingratiate himself with the powers-that-be, to become their useful pet, to claim extraordinary influence while basking in the limelight of his people’s tormenters, seeing their point of view, currying their favor, setting himself apart from the Jewish masses and posturing as the possessor of greater wisdom.

The conceit of latter-day Court Jews extends to denying the very existence of the Court Jew syndrome and Diaspora deformities. Contemporary Court Jews, who suck up to world opinion – especially when that opinion unjustly excoriates the Jewish state – definitively prove the frustrated adage that you can take the Jew out of the Diaspora but you cannot always take the Diaspora out of the Jew.
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If a netherworld truly exists, then its most infamous denizen, one Adolf Hitler, must be rubbing his hands in glee. During his lifetime, when he preoccupied the entire world with his war, he never ceased to proclaim hysterically that his paramount aim was annihilating all Jews. Obsessively he reiterated his resolve to cause all nations to unite in recognition of inborn Jewish villainy.

To some extent he already succeeded among his contemporaries. The Allies never sincerely cared about Jews and never fought for them. They protected their own skins. Europe’s Jews were eventually liberated via the much-belated byproduct of Germany’s defeat. The enormity of the Holocaust could have been lessened, but it was nobody’s priority.
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If even chief Oslo culprit Shimon Peres carps about the international community’s double standards, then he must harbor super-gargantuan grievances.

Our president, after all, is a consummate “peacenik” and a timeless icon of political correctness. He is wined and dined and feted by the trendiest global Who’s Who and jet-setter celebs. He is considered the face of Israel which those usually not too well-disposed toward the Jewish state (to say the least) are most able to tolerate.

It’s telling when even Peres waxes indignant. There must be more than run-of-the-mill provocation to elicit uncommon anger from one otherwise prone to ingratiation rather than confrontation. Continue reading →

“The weakening of the regime in Damascus illustrates how Israel squandered an opportunity because of the failure of talks with Syria.”
From Haaretz’s March 28 editorial.

As Haaretz illustrates, those who should rue their foolishness still keep beating the breasts of political opponents. This regardless of the fact that no open-minded observer can deny that all warnings by the “lunatic Right” (the least unkind epithet hurled at us) had come true.

In the wake of the Osloite recklessness, we’ve been inexorably sliding into an abyss of international defamation and physical vulnerability unequaled anywhere.

Incremental concessions haven’t improved our image nor won us popularity and understanding abroad. They merely cost us any residue of legitimacy and burdened us with the onus for more giveaways (because our illegitimacy entitles us to nothing). Continue reading →

Did Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just travel to Moscow or did he also simultaneously go to a latter- day Canossa? Did Bibi obsequiously succumb to an outside power (in the manner of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV who prostrated himself before pope Gregory VII in medieval Canossa)?

Reportedly Netanyahu rushed off to Moscow to plead with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin not to sell Syria advanced rocketry. Previous Israeli and American entreaties failed to dissuade Russia from pressing ahead with the deal or, earlier, from the startup of Iran’s only nuclear plant.

With the Cold War behind us, we might expect a cooperative rather than an audaciously obstructionist Russia. What we witness, however, is too déjà vu for comfort, too eerily reminiscent of the defunct USSR.

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Was Binyamin Netanyahu a Pink Floyd freak in his salad days? Possibly not, but that’s no reason not to lend an ear to the band’s erstwhile lead singer Roger Waters.

It’s not that the aging rocker’s opinions should remotely constitute any yardstick for what’s decent and honorable. If anything, they most definitely shouldn’t. Waters has consistently, almost robotically, espoused every wrongheaded doctrinaire leftist cause since his star first twinkled in the frenzied firmament of psychedelic and “progressive” music.

No modicum of evenhandedness should be expected from this self-important and predictable propagandist for radical politics which a priori demonize Israel. But it may be useful for us, by way of a reality check, to hear what he says to justify his antagonism toward us.

Expounding to Al Jazeera the other day on why he supports the anti-Israel boycott, Waters claimed that Israelis only “pay lip service to the idea that they want to make peace with the Palestinians, and they sort of talk around the possibility of a two-state solution.”

In other words, Israeli peace overtures, proposals and plans are insincere.
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