Sweden is beautiful – home to beautiful blonde, blue-eyed Nordic types who spare no effort to stress just how beautiful they are. Claiming a superior streamlined aesthetic, the beautiful people export beautiful designs – as in IKEA and H&M brands. Likewise resplendent in smug moral self-satisfaction, they idolize their own idealized virtue and spare no effort to convert the rest of the world to their more august standards and unadulterated perceptions of goodness. Continue reading →

Two traumas shocked this country’s Jews at the tail end of sizzling August. Both were defining watersheds but they occurred 76 years apart. The time lapse alone appears to rule out any correlation between the two. Yet, as is almost invariably the case here, the past is never irrelevant to the present and seemingly distant history is ever interconnected with what took place just a chronological microsecond ago. Continue reading →

Anyone familiar with the Arabian Nights tales knows they depict a reality comprised of layer upon shadowy layer, one concealed behind another. Cloaked schemers abound, each exploiting another schemer, each duping someone for secret ends. Life is an interminable complex of nefarious conspiracies in which it’s best not to trust anyone but suspect everyone. Continue reading →

If anyone can lay claim to consummate mastery of the thriving art of history-forging, it’s the Jordanians. Their entire state, nationhood and very identity are counterfeit. Had the international community not been sympathetically predisposed to lap up the lie, Jordan obviously couldn’t pull it off. Its wholesale fabrication hinges on a world that contentedly collaborates in hoodwinking itself. Continue reading →

Dear President Obama,

Your objection to Jews remodeling an inconsequential erstwhile Jerusalem hotel has become the talk of the country here. Everyone knows of your keen involvement in the paltriest details of our everyday existence. Nothing is too remote, trivial or petty for you. So long as it’s in Israel, you make it your business. To resort to a somewhat archaic American idiom, bully for you! Continue reading →

Once upon not too many decades ago – before globalized media crassness took over and when Israelis were way more erudite – folks around here freely quoted such literati as German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller. It wasn’t considered elitist or esoteric. So when the Palmah was disbanded and its altruists felt they were used and then ungratefully discarded, they resorted to Schiller’s comment in his 1783 play Fiesco: “The Moor has done his work, the Moor may go.” Continue reading →

Those little neglected news stories that rarely make front-page headlines and never receive airtime are often the most telling of all. It’s through them that deliberately suppressed fundamental truths occasionally surface. It’s there that big lies are sometimes, albeit inadvertently, exposed. Continue reading →

Sometime at the very start of 1982 I attended a function at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, which would have been entirely forgettable except that rarely was I since as nauseated as then. I came away revolted by the spectacle of my Israeli colleagues eagerly milling around ambassador Sam Lewis, seeking his attention and trying to outdo each other in heaping mockery and contempt on their own prime minister. Brutal jokes at Menachem Begin’s expense came fast and furious. Lewis visibly appreciated them and laughed condescendingly. Continue reading →

The only thing I ever admired about Michael Jackson was his doll collection. He had a hoard of vintage 1930s-era composition Shirley Temples that I shamelessly envy. Otherwise, I confess to being underwhelmed.

That probably marks me as hopelessly out of sync with most of humanity – to judge by the media-hyped hysteria about the self-inflicted demise of yet another showbiz oddball. So sorry to be a killjoy at a time of an obvious international mourning fest. Continue reading →

When I grew up, got to meet and even strike up a friendship with my childhood idol Dosh (the late Kariel Gardosh), I asked him which, to his mind, was his most enduring political caricature. For that, he replied, we need to return to December 1956, approximately a month after the Sinai Campaign and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Dosh noticed that while the international community was seething about Israel’s feisty self-defense, it wasn’t overly perturbed about the human rights and self-determination brazenly crushed beneath heavy military armor right in Central Europe. Continue reading →