Some spins can positively perplex. The same Al Jazeera revelations which threw the cardboard regime of PA figurehead Mahmoud Abbas into a total tizzy, instilled boundless joy in the hearts of Israel’s indomitable Left.

Leaks attributing to Abbas a hypothetical inclination to perhaps consider a morsel of a crumb of compromise have served to seriously undermine Ramallah’s Fatah honchos on their own turf, paint them as traitors to the cause of eliminating Israel and elicit from them a panicky flurry of vehement denials.

This, in the eyes of our diehard proponents of an accord with the same said Abbas, is a highly encouraging development.

This, aver they, proves yet again that Abbas is a promising and reliable interlocutor, that he is an earnest, well-intentioned peace partner, willing to relinquish scraps of territory to intransigent Israel.

We could interject at this point and note that Abbas can hardly be said to be ceding what he doesn’t possess and that it’s Israel which possesses what Abbas is so ecstatically extolled for magnanimously “giving up,” should Israel acquiesce to mass suicide. But we won’t pettily harp on fundamentals. Instead, let’s follow the Abbas fan club’s circuitous calculations to their logical end.
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Paraphrasing Hamlet as he contemplated the skull of the late-lamented court jester Yorick, we might muse aloud:

Alas, poor Labor, we knew you well…

Now and then you did positively excel,

But oftentimes you put us through hell.

In all, it was your own fault you fell.

The Labor Party’s demise has been only a matter of time for a long time. It was an eminently avertable atrophy, yet for decades the party mulishly rendered itself incurable. It not only refused to acknowledge the causes of its terminable condition but actually persisted in exacerbating them.

It was one thing if feverish delirium impeded objective self-assessment, but then Labor’s own coup de grace administrator, Ehud Barak, spelled the cause of the party’s fatal decrepitude so unmistakably. Labor, he said as he delivered the decisive deathblow, had veered too far leftward, dabbled in postmodernism, and dallied on the brink of post-Zionism. Continue reading →

In his (pre-presidential) heyday, witty and irrepressible Ezer Weizman once famously quipped that whereas “the eternity of Israel shall not deceive” (I Samuel 15:29), “the Arabs won’t let us down.”

Reckless as it may be to excessively rely on rescue by enemy imprudence, Kadima MK Nachman Shai should certainly be grateful to PA President Mahmoud Abbas for facilitating his own face-saving climb-down.

Earlier this month, Shai was about to head a delegation of opposition politicos on a pilgrimage to Abbas in Ramallah. That PR stunt might have misfired undesirably considering that Abbas has only just reiterated his absolute unwavering insistence on the “right” to inundate Israel with untold millions of hostile Arabs and his equally uncompromising refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Continue reading →

Some time back in the misty shadows of my Junior High days, I read W.W. Jacobs’ classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” – a pretty predictable spine-chiller of 1902 vintage. It opens when the White family’s cozy evening around the hearth is disrupted by a visitor who brings into the idyllic setting a mummified monkey’s paw from India, supernaturally empowered to grant its owner three wishes. The Whites are cautioned not to give in to temptation – but irresistibly they do, with ghastly consequences.

The narrative is preceded by an anonymous quotation: “Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.”

Thus forewarned, I should have known better a number of years thereafter than to wish the area that at the time surrounded Tel-Aviv’s hectic Central Bus Station excised from the cityscape. Continue reading →

It’s probably unrealistic to expect more than a handful of folks with an inordinate capacity for useless information to recall Portia Nelson, the late American lyricist, artist, performer and 20th-century renaissance woman.

Her most widely quoted creation was a 1976 poem “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.” As hippiedom transmogrified into New Age, “Autobiography” became an instant hit with all sorts of self-help and self-discovery groups, emerging as a cultural icon, reprinted in numerous publications and on pretty posters. Continue reading →

One day last week this newspaper’s banner headline wasn’t about pressing news. Prompted by George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, it informed us that the former US president “rejects claim that Israel was behind Iraq war.”

Cause for celebration? Are we vindicated at last?

It’s not that we didn’t know that Israel’s security was hardly uppermost on Bush’s scale of priorities. It’s not that we ever suspected him of going to war for us. Still, it’s nice, perhaps for the sake of keeping the formal record straight, to have Bush’s denial of yet another anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Continue reading →

Even Barack Obama’s midterm electoral humiliation won’t redeem US foreign policy. The problem didn’t begin with the history-deficient mind-set of American students who’ll earn their bachelor’s degrees in 2014. But the intellectual rootlessness of the class of 2014 exacerbates the flaws. Today’s students/tomorrow’s leaders fertilize the soil into which bad seeds are sown by the current Washington elite.

On the simplistic level it was a hoot to read that to the class of 2014 Beethoven is a movie pooch, Michelangelo was a computer virus and Czechoslovakia never existed. For the past 13 years Beloit College’s Mind-Set List by Tom McBride and Ron Nief was a guaranteed source of hilarity, because each year the ignorance quotient it registers seems to climb to unprecedented, more grotesque and inconceivable heights. Continue reading →

Quite incredibly, representatives of Western democracies on UNESCO’s executive delivered a self-destructive blow to their own heritage when demanding that Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron be removed from the inventory of Jewish heritage sites. UNESCO’s resolution redefined them as mosques – as if Muslim from time immemorial. It sought to detach seminal biblical place-names from any Jewish connections.

It’s one thing to willfully subscribe to mind-blowing colossal deception; it’s quite another to shake the foundations beneath one’s own civilization. Continue reading →

Our mainstream media could hardly contain their glee last week when the state attorney flatly rejected pleas to accord Margalit Har-Shefi a retrial. Opinion-molders bristled indignantly at the very suggestion that she might be exonerated. This, they righteously pontificated, would constitute a first step to releasing Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir.

Just 19-years-old at the time, Har-Shefi was arrested post-assassination in 1995 because she was Amir’s classmate and friend. The prosecution alleged she knew of his intentions yet failed to phone the police. Eventually she was tried, convicted and imprisoned for the rarely prosecuted offense of not preventing a crime. Continue reading →

Although we gave the world monotheism, we are a nation obsessively searching for idols. We sculpt some, raise them on pedestals, confer sanctity upon them and declare their worship mandatory. In other idols we seek imperfections, poke at them, dig at the surface and deepen the blemishes so we may be justified in smiting the ghastliness.

We make our obsessions personal, even long after the idols’ mortal models are deceased, long after they are really relevant.

Even Bar Kochba isn’t invulnerable, presumably because his fight for liberty and rebellion against ancient Rome was revered by Zionism’s founding fathers. That renders him permissible prey for zealous post-Zionists. Continue reading →