To hear our officialdom’s mouthpieces, the Yom Kippur riots in Acre didn’t highlight a humiliating failure by the country’s law enforcement authorities. No contrition was aroused by the fact that a lone police car straggled passively behind hundreds of Arabs (many having arrived by organized bus transport, with their faces concealed and wielding axes) rampaging through a Jewish neighborhood in the small hours of the holiest day of the Jewish year. Continue reading →

Acre’s recent woes didn’t unexpectedly spring forth on Yom Kippur when an Arab driver saw fit to race though a still and silent Jewish neighborhood at 1 a.m. of the most solemn date on its calendar, with earsplitting music blaring from his car amplifiers. Likewise the trigger wasn’t the ensuing onslaught by ax-wielding Arabs on Jewish streets. Continue reading →

Israel’s a weird place. We relish extremes. During our socialist phase – under the pre-state and early-state hegemony of Mapai (yesteryear’s acronym for the Israel Labor Party) – we voluntarily were the USSR’s ideological quasi-outpost, albeit a democratic-cum-erratic one. Young Israel was tied to Mother Russia by sentimental bonds, yet was quite unwilling to endure communist hardships. Continue reading →

‘Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you what you are,” wrote Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. But this bit of folksy wisdom is older than the author of Don Quixote. He merely resorted to and repeated what was in wide circulation before him and what continues ubiquitously after him. Rare indeed is the mother anywhere who in one language or another – in an array of nuances on the theme – hasn’t sternly lectured her offspring and intoned that “you are known by the company you keep.” Continue reading →

The days preceding Yom Kippur are devoted to soul-searching and apologies. I have loads to atone for, like irresistible meanness to the two Ehuds, Tzipi and their assorted expedient sidekicks and agenda-pushing boosters. But, as incoming mail indicates, I’ve also offended (albeit unintentionally and without malice) some readers. So I’ll hereby seek to explain, by way of making amends. Continue reading →

In one of his most important poems, “The Hollow Men” (1925), T.S. Eliot speculates on how the currently living are perceived by the departed – “those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom.” He reckoned corporeal mortals are remembered “if at all – not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.” Continue reading →

Poor Tzipi Livni – the burden of ministerial office can weigh heavy. It involves obligations that produce not a little unease. For instance, among the last follies ascribed to Ariel Sharon, just before his catastrophic stroke, was a promise to Vladimir Putin to hand over the Russian Compound’s famed Sergei Building (the sumptuous “Sergei Imperial Guest House”). It’s smack-dab in the very heart of Jerusalem – in the western part thereof, the one that lies within the Green Line, the one that ostensibly Israel may be allowed to keep after it relinquishes all it liberated in its 1967 war of self-defense (including Judaism’s Holiest of Holies). Continue reading →

Insightful Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman died in February 1989, more than four years before Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin and their underhanded crew clandestinely negotiated the Oslo Accords and then dropped them on the heads of all unsuspecting Israelis, including their prime minister. Continue reading →

The Jewish state has already had several trial runs. The most noteworthy was in mythical Chelm, which was governed by its own inimitable system of logic.

So is New Chelm – aka Israel.

The original Chelm’s town fathers, for example, were intent on deploying a formidable security force to daunt evildoers like the pesky burglar who prowled the narrow alleys after dark. The burly constable they employed soon apprehended the miscreant and forced him to stand in the corner until all inspection rounds were completed. Continue reading →

I am convinced from the depth of my heart and to the best of my understanding that this disengagement will strengthen Israel in its hold of the areas essential to our existence and will earn us the blessings and esteem of those near and far, will lessen hate, will break boycotts and blockades and will move us forward on the road to peace with the Palestinians and the rest of our neighbors.

– Ariel Sharon, October 25, 2004 Continue reading →