“The weakening of the regime in Damascus illustrates how Israel squandered an opportunity because of the failure of talks with Syria.”
From Haaretz’s March 28 editorial.

As Haaretz illustrates, those who should rue their foolishness still keep beating the breasts of political opponents. This regardless of the fact that no open-minded observer can deny that all warnings by the “lunatic Right” (the least unkind epithet hurled at us) had come true.

In the wake of the Osloite recklessness, we’ve been inexorably sliding into an abyss of international defamation and physical vulnerability unequaled anywhere.

Incremental concessions haven’t improved our image nor won us popularity and understanding abroad. They merely cost us any residue of legitimacy and burdened us with the onus for more giveaways (because our illegitimacy entitles us to nothing). Continue reading →

Did Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just travel to Moscow or did he also simultaneously go to a latter- day Canossa? Did Bibi obsequiously succumb to an outside power (in the manner of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV who prostrated himself before pope Gregory VII in medieval Canossa)?

Reportedly Netanyahu rushed off to Moscow to plead with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin not to sell Syria advanced rocketry. Previous Israeli and American entreaties failed to dissuade Russia from pressing ahead with the deal or, earlier, from the startup of Iran’s only nuclear plant.

With the Cold War behind us, we might expect a cooperative rather than an audaciously obstructionist Russia. What we witness, however, is too déjà vu for comfort, too eerily reminiscent of the defunct USSR.

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Was Binyamin Netanyahu a Pink Floyd freak in his salad days? Possibly not, but that’s no reason not to lend an ear to the band’s erstwhile lead singer Roger Waters.

It’s not that the aging rocker’s opinions should remotely constitute any yardstick for what’s decent and honorable. If anything, they most definitely shouldn’t. Waters has consistently, almost robotically, espoused every wrongheaded doctrinaire leftist cause since his star first twinkled in the frenzied firmament of psychedelic and “progressive” music.

No modicum of evenhandedness should be expected from this self-important and predictable propagandist for radical politics which a priori demonize Israel. But it may be useful for us, by way of a reality check, to hear what he says to justify his antagonism toward us.

Expounding to Al Jazeera the other day on why he supports the anti-Israel boycott, Waters claimed that Israelis only “pay lip service to the idea that they want to make peace with the Palestinians, and they sort of talk around the possibility of a two-state solution.”

In other words, Israeli peace overtures, proposals and plans are insincere.
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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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