Egypt’s Anwar Sadat was outspoken enough to state the obvious after the Camp David Accord was sealed: “I got the whole Sinai, but all poor Menachem [Begin] got was a piece of paper.”

Sadat’s uncommonly candid quip encapsulates the inbuilt imbalance of the Mideastern equation. In every set of negotiations, it’s Israel which is required to sacrifice real assets – strategic as well as the core of its historical heartland. Moreover these assets – small, apart from the ceded Sinai, and hardly the immense empire that prevalent propaganda portrays – were all acquired as the result of a defensive war forced upon it by genocidal enemies in 1967.

These enemies’ heirs, seeking explicitly to weaken Israel as it persists in its self-preservation struggle, are at the very most expected to supply a piece of paper – and even that doesn’t come easily. They are blunt enough not to as much as promise to accept our legitimacy in their vicinity. That, despite the fact that no real risks are demanded of them, nothing tangible, nothing which cannot be undone by a capricious and erratic regime.

If recent upheavals in the Arab world show us anything, it’s that all the regimes which surround our lone democracy are volatile and essentially untrustworthy. Why should we literally risk our lives and the future survival here of our children for pieces of paper issued by despots who might not be around tomorrow and whose veracity cannot be taken for granted? No population anywhere would inflict such perils upon itself, were it encircled by neighbors like ours with their proven records of mass murder and mendacity. Yet this is precisely what other democracies, facing nothing like what we face, exhort us to do – regardless of the mayhem in Arab streets and the demonstrated unreliability of Arab potentates.

No bother. No skin off their safe noses. Only ours.
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Nothing in our regional setting is what it was. No premise which underpinned assorted assumptions, under which we labored for decades, was left unscathed by the tempest raging around us. This is time for the most extreme caution and the most exhaustive reevaluation of everything we believed and took for granted.

But the box of conventional thinking has become a comfort object, in the best case a psychological security blanket for those disinclined to face unfamiliar situations and uncertain prospects. It may be the easiest fallback option for those incapable of original reassessments. Charlatans are in an unconscionable category all of their own because they evidently don’t misread reality but knowingly hawk the worn and useless, thereby putting the country at risk for their own fleeting advantage.

Things are bad enough without attributing malicious motives to the host of retired generals, cocky military types and prolific know-it-alls who obsessively dictate this country’s agenda and persistently belittle all that should profoundly alarm us. That still doesn’t make them any less dangerous.

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Bothersome and bewildering as our existence often is, there is always a steady anchor of shallow wisdom to which we can cling for comfort and reassurance. During the confounding Egyptian commotion, it was soothing to behold the light and truth emblazoned so superficially across cyberspace by the astute likes of Lindsay Lohan.

And so twittered the starlet, inter alia embroiled in a whole slew of new legal entanglements: “Congratulations to the people of Egypt. Your voices were heard and you proved that peaceful demonstrations are possible and effective… I pray Egypt maintains it’s [sic] treaty with Israel and sets the trend for its neighbors to create peace with Israel and the entire region.”

Totally! Doesn’t that just prove that there’s more to airhead icons than meets the eye? Duh! No way all those Muslim Brothers who proliferate in the land of long-bygone pharaohs can fail to follow the irresistible teachings from la-la land.
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By definition, opinion-molders determine what we focus on. Whatever doesn’t serve their agenda will be defined as nothing we need bother our inferior uninformed minds about. We’re not to dwell on anything untoward in the fortunes of protagonists who’re either favored by advocacy journalists or who aren’t in the way of bias-disseminators. If it doesn’t pay to get on someone’s case, odds are our outrage won’t be drummed up.

That’s why a deadly hush greeted the announcement that the police has at long last concluded its lethargic-cum-reluctant decade-long investigation into alleged bribery charges in the Cyril Kern and Martin Schlaff cases.

Oh hum. Who cares? After all, Gilad Sharon’s name isn’t Avigdor Lieberman.

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“We make our fortunes and then we call them fate.”

                                 – Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli’s sardonic wisdom remains valid despite all of history’s convolutions and revolutions since his day. Nothing is propelled by blind destiny, because it’s foretold, inscribed on some astrological chart and preordaining consequences that cannot be averted.

Inevitably human hands pull the lever that sets cataclysmic geopolitical events in motion. The human hands that unsettled Egypt, and with it the entire Mideast, are primarily those of the American electorate which elevated Barack Obama to the presidency.

At that pivotal point it should have been clear that the end is near for whatever remnants of delicate equilibrium still endure in this region. Obama ushered in chaos even if he chose Cairo as his venue for the 2009 speech in which he sucked up to Islam. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak significantly absented himself from that milestone sham. He could sense the ill-winds blowing.
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Some spins can positively perplex. The same Al Jazeera revelations which threw the cardboard regime of PA figurehead Mahmoud Abbas into a total tizzy, instilled boundless joy in the hearts of Israel’s indomitable Left.

Leaks attributing to Abbas a hypothetical inclination to perhaps consider a morsel of a crumb of compromise have served to seriously undermine Ramallah’s Fatah honchos on their own turf, paint them as traitors to the cause of eliminating Israel and elicit from them a panicky flurry of vehement denials.

This, in the eyes of our diehard proponents of an accord with the same said Abbas, is a highly encouraging development.

This, aver they, proves yet again that Abbas is a promising and reliable interlocutor, that he is an earnest, well-intentioned peace partner, willing to relinquish scraps of territory to intransigent Israel.

We could interject at this point and note that Abbas can hardly be said to be ceding what he doesn’t possess and that it’s Israel which possesses what Abbas is so ecstatically extolled for magnanimously “giving up,” should Israel acquiesce to mass suicide. But we won’t pettily harp on fundamentals. Instead, let’s follow the Abbas fan club’s circuitous calculations to their logical end.
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Paraphrasing Hamlet as he contemplated the skull of the late-lamented court jester Yorick, we might muse aloud:

Alas, poor Labor, we knew you well…

Now and then you did positively excel,

But oftentimes you put us through hell.

In all, it was your own fault you fell.

The Labor Party’s demise has been only a matter of time for a long time. It was an eminently avertable atrophy, yet for decades the party mulishly rendered itself incurable. It not only refused to acknowledge the causes of its terminable condition but actually persisted in exacerbating them.

It was one thing if feverish delirium impeded objective self-assessment, but then Labor’s own coup de grace administrator, Ehud Barak, spelled the cause of the party’s fatal decrepitude so unmistakably. Labor, he said as he delivered the decisive deathblow, had veered too far leftward, dabbled in postmodernism, and dallied on the brink of post-Zionism. Continue reading →

In his (pre-presidential) heyday, witty and irrepressible Ezer Weizman once famously quipped that whereas “the eternity of Israel shall not deceive” (I Samuel 15:29), “the Arabs won’t let us down.”

Reckless as it may be to excessively rely on rescue by enemy imprudence, Kadima MK Nachman Shai should certainly be grateful to PA President Mahmoud Abbas for facilitating his own face-saving climb-down.

Earlier this month, Shai was about to head a delegation of opposition politicos on a pilgrimage to Abbas in Ramallah. That PR stunt might have misfired undesirably considering that Abbas has only just reiterated his absolute unwavering insistence on the “right” to inundate Israel with untold millions of hostile Arabs and his equally uncompromising refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Continue reading →

Some time back in the misty shadows of my Junior High days, I read W.W. Jacobs’ classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” – a pretty predictable spine-chiller of 1902 vintage. It opens when the White family’s cozy evening around the hearth is disrupted by a visitor who brings into the idyllic setting a mummified monkey’s paw from India, supernaturally empowered to grant its owner three wishes. The Whites are cautioned not to give in to temptation – but irresistibly they do, with ghastly consequences.

The narrative is preceded by an anonymous quotation: “Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.”

Thus forewarned, I should have known better a number of years thereafter than to wish the area that at the time surrounded Tel-Aviv’s hectic Central Bus Station excised from the cityscape. Continue reading →

It’s probably unrealistic to expect more than a handful of folks with an inordinate capacity for useless information to recall Portia Nelson, the late American lyricist, artist, performer and 20th-century renaissance woman.

Her most widely quoted creation was a 1976 poem “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.” As hippiedom transmogrified into New Age, “Autobiography” became an instant hit with all sorts of self-help and self-discovery groups, emerging as a cultural icon, reprinted in numerous publications and on pretty posters. Continue reading →