Years ago, when peace with Egypt was new and relatively warmer, I was plenty angry with my paper for forcing me to file my copy from Cairo by telex rather than phone. I was sent there on a news assignment way back when among the broad lower strata of Egyptian society (as distinct from the razor-thin so-called intelligentsia) peace with Israel hadn’t yet been thoroughly delegitimized. Continue reading →

Happy days – the Israeli movie Waltz with Bashir is raking in the tributes. Having done us proud and won the Golden Globe, it’s now a prime Oscar contender. Already under its belt is the Israel Film Academy’s Ophir. It was singled out as the best animation feature by LA’s film critics and was an unexpected box office hit in its recent theatrical release in America. Continue reading →

The Six Day War’s second most popular hit (directly behind “Jerusalem of Gold”) was a song addressing Sharm e-Sheikh as a longed-for lover. The lyrics were inane, but the sentiment obviously struck a chord: “We have returned to you for a second time Sharm e-Sheikh; you were in our hearts always… Oh Sharm e-Sheikh, we’ve come back to you again!” Continue reading →

Nobody ever said it better than English Jacobean poet John Donne in his Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” therefore “any man’s death diminishes me.”

It’s all the more so when the departed man was as much of a unique and rare relic, alas, as was Tsafrir Ronen. Continue reading →

As an inveterate doll collector, I still vividly remember the cloying supposed look-alikes of Jackie Kennedy and dynasty-princess Caroline, spawned for quick profit during those long-gone Camelot halcyon days. For months I’ve been suspecting that neo-Camelot Barack Obama counterparts are already being sculpted and readied for production. Malia’s and Sasha’s crude likenesses will soon appear in vinyl or low-grade porcelain, I kept prophesying to anyone who reluctantly lent me a tired ear. Continue reading →

While conducting an exasperating search through my overladen bookshelves for a tauntingly elusive something or other, I came across a yellowing 1996 clipping. It featured an analysis I wrote all those years ago about the then-just-concluded rounds of party primaries ahead of that year’s election. If ever a reminder were needed about how “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” this was it. Continue reading →

News flash: Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit has announced his intention to somehow strip absconded former Knesset Member Azmi Bishara of Israeli citizenship.

It’s high time, but then again, there’s no time like election time to appear to be doing the belated right thing.

This, however, in no way guarantees that the right thing will indeed be done. Bishara can safely count on the Zionists’ highest court to rise to his defense despite the likelihood of offending plebeian concepts of fairness. Israeli judges habitually dismiss the clueless masses as too dense to fathom legal intricacies mandated by the greater good – as defined by superior sophisticated souls. Continue reading →

The yearnings of vintage doll aficionados in Israel are rarely requited. Trying to acquire the genuine article in this country is generally an exercise in frustration. Idealistic pioneers and haggard refugees left future generations no heirlooms and objects that in their day were extravagant or frivolous. Playthings were especially dispensable. Imports were uncommon, often shoddy and few survive. Continue reading →

Ever since the Vietnam misadventure, a postmodern revolution had been looming in America. Barack Obama’s tour de force is its clincher. American campuses have been mass-producing smug, politically correct poseurs and slogan-spouting groupthink conformists for decades. Converging circumstances enabled the postmodernists who indoctrinate America’s younger minds to conquer its highest political bastions as well. Continue reading →

I’ve got a terrible confession to make – I don’t want to go to heaven. It’s not that I don’t relish rewards in the afterlife. It’s just that if Pope Pius XII is there, especially if exalted to saintly status by courtesy of his current Vatican successor, then in the immortal words of Huck Finn: “I can’t see no advantage in going where” the former Eugenio Pacelli purportedly went. Like Huck, I’d rather be where Tom Sawyer ends up, because with Tom there’s never any pious pretension of infallibility. Continue reading →