Yigal Tumarkin’s portrait of his friend Amos Oz, entitled “Oz in a mask of Oz.”

Meretz’s grand guru Amos Oz has told us that, being “a man of words,” he carefully considers his every utterance and its possible nuances. This was his practice, the novelist attests, ahead of his recent 75^th birthday gala where he berated “Hebrew neo-Nazis.”

No inadvertent slip of the tongue, it was Oz’s premeditated refinement of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s infamous “Judeo-Nazis” denigration. That bilious barb against Israeli soldiers – also calculated and never retracted – cost Leibowitz his Israel Prize in 1993 (when then-premier Yitzhak Rabin threatened to boycott the ceremony).

But Oz doesn’t stand to lose by his provocation. Quite the contrary, the Neo-Nazi defamation can do him nothing but a whole lot of good.

If anything, it has given a major boost to his tireless campaign to at long last win the Nobel Prize for literature. Oz, already the darling of literati and glitterati in Germany – the Nazis’ original homeland – can only win hearts and minds in Israel-bashing Europe if he seems to join Europe’s crusade against his compatriots.

The more he dissociates himself from the Israeli majority and the greater the zest with which he whacks it, the more Oz appears to cleanse himself of our Jewish sins. The more assiduously he cleanses himself, the more Oz gets to bask in the ambiance of European approval. He’s generously showered with accolades from latter-day Judeophobes parading as righteous critics of villainous Israeli policies. Continue reading →

David Ben-Gurion signs the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. Moshe Sharett is on the right

Our Justice Minister and chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni, has just served notice on a far-from-enthralled nation that, regardless of what we may believe, she is somehow the boss. She put herself in charge of our collective conscience. She is the ultimate arbitrator of what’s proper and what’s not.

And in that capacity she denounced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s intention to enshrine in law Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people. We might of course expect that she’d cheer Netanyahu’s initiative. After all, she enthusiastically extolled the 2005 Disengagement as ensuring the Jewishness of Israel. She never retracted her words, not even when unilateral retreat proved an unmitigated disaster.

But the residue of Livni’s fast fading political prospects doesn’t reside on the Jewish national side of the ideological divide. She, therefore, woos the few voters who maybe might, irrespective of her record, still stick by her. Continue reading →

Lord Caradon: “We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the ’67 line.”

On the eve of our Independence Day, an ultra-antagonistic independence – one that manifestly threatens to replace ours – is fast gaining ground.  Many Israelis are appalled to see the Ramallah and Gaza splinters officially welcomed in UN-affiliated forums as the State of Palestine. However, given relentless global trends, this travesty was all but inevitable.

“Palestinian independence” had already been declared in Algiers on November 15, 1988 and within mere months the utterly fictional entity was recognized by 134 of the UN’s 193 then-members. All this transpired before Oslo proved how a previously bad situation could be made disastrously worse.

By now, of course, few abroad challenge the popular axiom that a Palestinian state had existed in this country from time immemorial and that it was cruelly overrun in an act of unprovoked aggression by Israel on June 5, 1967.

Even since, it’s alleged, the state of Palestine had been under occupation. In other words, Israel had violently extinguished Palestine’s flourishing sovereignty. This is today’s self-evident, universally worshiped gospel. No substantiation thereof is necessary and any deviation therefrom is sacrilege. Continue reading →

Ben-Gurion’s original text as discovered with numerous blue-pencil erasures and stamped: “Passed and Corrected by Censor.”

Strangely, to gauge the depth of the family of nations’ predisposition against the family of Israel, we should embark on a detour to faraway Guyana, or as it was once known – British Guiana. The forgotten “New Balfour Declaration,” that earmarked that crown colony as an alternative to the Jewish National Home in this country, is particularly relevant on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It encapsulated all the “goodwill” that the family of nations could once muster toward the beleaguered Jewish people. Things are still no better.

Yesteryear’s Guiana unexpectedly contextualizes the ongoing unique bias towards the Jewish state today and its depiction as an outlaw occupier (even in tiny stretches of its own homeland, directly contiguous to its own miniature independent domain).

Indeed, the bias that preceded the very founding of the Jewish state pretty much foreshadowed the antagonism it would arouse decades later.

That antagonism doesn’t derive from aversion to Israel’s supposed strength (i.e. our so far insufferably successful self defense). It fulminated most shamefully when the Jewish people couldn’t conceivably have been more helpless – on the eve of the Holocaust. Worse yet – this antagonism wasn’t merely rife in the Third Reich. It also thrived among the democracies, even if in a sinisterly duplicitous guise. Continue reading →

Eliyahu Hakim(l) and Eliyahu Beit-Zuri(r): “We are the accusers at this trial.”

What has become known as Kerry’s “poof” speech is precisely what Israel was afraid of – being blamed for the predictable flop of Kerry’s delusional project.

Kerry can postfactum posture self-righteously and smugly deny having blamed Israel but that’s precisely what he did when he enumerated Israel’s supposed sins one by one. He then dramatically paused for a studied special effect – replete with expressive hand gestures – before resorting to really sophisticated phrasing: “Poof, that was sort of the moment.” The suggested cause and effect was unquestionable. No belated pedantic quibbles can erase Kerry’s intentional, even vindictive, anti-Israel smear.

If anything, Kerry’s cynical performance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee underscores all the reasons for Israel not to make concessions just in order to make a good impression.

So-called honest brokers, like Kerry, and the so-called objective opinions of the international community, are in any case predisposed against the Jewish state. Therefore there’s no point in sacrificing vital interests to please those who won’t be pleased by any Israeli gesture short of signing articles of surrender. Continue reading →

Sir Humphrey: ”why close a hospital just because it has no patients?”

No devotee of Yes Minister, yesteryear’s BBC’s classic, can forget St. Edward’s Hospital – that spanking new cutting edge facility that had no patients or medical personnel. Nonetheless, St. Edward’s hustled and bustled, a veritable hive of activity and creative energy. For 15-months since its much-ballyhooed inauguration, an administrative staff of 500 bureaucrats filled the hospital’s offices, pushed papers and generated red tape.

Sounds exaggerated? A bit over-the-top for real life? Not really. John Kerry’s peace project, for example, replicates the parody’s blueprints with mind-blowing precision. It is for diplomacy what St. Edward’s was for health care – an incredible lot of much-ado about absolutely nothing.

The biggest snag in Kerry’s persistent peace offensive is that it lacks the commonsense basic essentials to even begin to achieve what it was promoted to do. It couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. St Edward’s couldn’t heal the sick because none had been admitted. No doctors or nurses were on hand either. It was a hospital in name only. Continue reading →

Jabotinsky in Acre Prison, 1920: Perfidious Albion knew whom to blame

Something strikingly dramatic happened in this country exactly on this date 94 years ago. Cries of Itbach el-Yahud(slaughter the Jews) filled the air. It was the first coordinated mass-murder offensive launched by infamous Jerusalem Mufti Haj-Amin el-Husseini (who would in time become an avid Nazi collaborator, Hitler’s personal guest in Berlin during WWII and a wanted war-criminal).

Ever since, this land shook fitfully as rounds of massacres and wars followed each other in breathless succession. The past mustn’t be consigned to irrelevance. Unbroken historical continuities contextualize current events. Nothing springs forth from a vacuum. What now transpires began back then.

The pivotal murder-drive of 1920 and its aftermath are vital for understanding why John Kerry’s peace pageant is a flop and why Israel so profoundly displeases him, his boss Barack Obama and their pet-Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. It established the prototype whereby Jews are punished for Arab crimes against Jews. It highlights the pattern of appeasing Arab wrath and of Jews paying – as if Jewish existence is in and of itself a casus belli.

The bias maddeningly came into play already in 1920. It’s the bias that has today burgeoned into the escalating extortion and shameless expectation that Israel release convicted murderers as a matter of course  and injure its own interests to keep its enemies sweet. It’s as if Israel has no valid interests, no rights. This is the postulate of illegitimacy. Continue reading →

Obama’s thinking appears closer to that enunciated by the clout-packing pigs of Orwell’s Animal Farm

Speaking the truth can be a dangerous undertaking. It can expose the speaker to all sort of chastisement. This isn’t only so in any given country’s domestic affairs but very much so in relations between states.

Ours, after all, is a globalized reality. This fact can induce and intensify inordinate hubris in some leaders with pretensions to hold sway over more than their own specified domain. White House occupant and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barak Obama, for instance, often conducts himself as if the American electorate and the Nobel committee had put him in charge of the whole earth.

Had Obama been an unqualified success, his conceit may be suffered but his isn’t and he doesn’t like to hear that he isn’t.

Despite his resplendent liberal credentials, Obama’s concept of liberty is a tad constricted. Everyone – everywhere on the face of this planet and beyond – is perfectly free to go into raptures over him but it’s a whole different opera when not-so-flattering opinions are sounded.

Obama, his appointed sidekicks and salaried mouthpieces resent criticism. Plain and simple. Continue reading →

Tel Aviv, November 29, 1947 – Untenable and implausible though this hodgepodge partition was, Jewish multitudes rejoiced in the streets

It’s a huge relief to realize that US Secretary of State John Kerry doesn’t share the postmodern contempt for history. Or at least so it seems, because when it suits him, Kerry resorts to instructive historical perspectives. Wowed by his superior wisdom, in all its wondrous and infinite manifestations, we’re humbly thankful for the cogent connections he makes.

Just last week he intimated that Israelis have become insufferable nudniks by harping on what evidently cramps his style – that tedious demand that the Arabs recognize the fundamental legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

“It’s a mistake for some people,” he told the House Foreign Relations Committee without naming names, “to be raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a state, and peace, and we’ve obviously made that clear.” Continue reading →

Umm el-Fahm leaders sign declarations of allegiance to Israel on May 20, 1949 after the Lausanne Conference Awarded the Wadi Ara region to Israel

One outrageously insolent remark was remarkably ignored in the hullaballoo generated by US President Barack Obama’s Bibi-bashing interview on the eve of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest White House visit.

Wedged into the presidential malarkey was a new allegation against the Mideast’s sole democracy. Obama accused Israel of no less than continuing to “place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions.”

Huh? Really? What restrictions? And does Obama now also presume to pass judgment on what are indisputably our domestic affairs? Is there no limit to his meddling and hubris? Continue reading →