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 →

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 →