All hail the peacemakers 19
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is our prime minister for life.
So it seems. So he evidently believes.
Not only believes. He acts accordingly. To make sure, he has done the two necessary things: (a) eliminate every possible competitor, and (b) surround himself with male and female nincompoops, no one of whom could be considered by anyone a plausible successor. Indeed, the idea that any of this lot could ever become prime minister sends shudders down our spines.
So we are stuck with him for life (at least). Time to face this prospect.
HE IS not the worst. No one ever is. For every bad leader, there is a worse one. (Except Adolf Hitler, perhaps.)
So let us look first at the positive sides of his rule. There are some. (Yes, indeed.)
BY NOW EVERY ISRAELI has seen the TV clip several times - showing a 14-year old Arab girl being shot dead near the central market of Jewish Jerusalem.
The story is well known: two sisters, 14 and 16 years old, have decided to attack Israelis. The clip, taken by a security camera, shows one of them, clad in traditional Arab garb, jumping around on the sidewalk, brandishing a pair of scissors.
The whole thing looks almost like a dance. She is jumping around aimlessly, waving the scissors, threatening no one in particular. Then a soldier aims a pistol at her and shoots her. He runs to the girl and kills her while she is lying helplessly on the ground. The other girl is grievously wounded.
TWO WEEKS ago, Benedict Anderson died. Or, as we say in Hebrew, "went to his world".
WHEN THE State of Israel was founded, the new foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, did something that seemed quite natural. He sold his private apartment.
In his new function, he was accorded an official residence. A modest one, needless to say.
Sharett thought that it was unseemly for a public official to retain a private apartment when he was living at the public expense.
He did not keep the money he received for his private apartment. Rather, he donated it to several human rights associations – the very same that are now under fierce government attack and labeled "leftists", a label only slightly less negative than "treasonous".
THE ISRAELI Ministry of Education has struck a book from students' reading lists.
Big deal. Happens every day in Russia, China and Iran.
But this was not a revolutionary work by a fire-eating rebel. It is a gentle novel by an appreciated female author, Dorit Rabinyan.
Her cardinal sin was the plot: a love story between a Jewish girl and an Arab boy. They meet on American soil.
The Ministry shuddered. What? A kosher daughter of Israel with an Arab Goy? Unthinkable. Like a love story between a white woman and a black man in the Atlanta of Gone with the Wind. Or between a Jewess and a pure Aryan in Hitler's Germany.
IN ANY list of Israel's 100 most important women, Ilana Dayan would occupy a prominent position.
Dayan (no relation to the late general with the eye patch) is the host of one of the most prestigious television programs. While Israeli TV in general is slowly sinking into a morass of stupid "reality" entertainment, her program, named "Uvdah" ("Fact"), stands out as a beacon of responsible investigative journalism, of the kind my late weekly news magazine was known for.
AS IS well-known, Israel is a "Jewish and democratic state".
That is its official designation.
Well…
AS FOR Jewish, it's a new kind of Jewishness, a mutation.
For 2000 years or so, Jews were known to be wise, clever, peace-loving, humane, progressive, liberal, even socialist.
Today, when you hear these attributes, the State of Israel is not the first name that springs to mind. Far from it.
As for "democratic", that was more or less true from the foundation of the state in 1948 until the Six-day War of 1967, when Israel unfortunately conquered the West Bank, the Gaza strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan. And, of course, the Sinai peninsula which was later returned to Egypt.
HAMELIN, a small town in Germany (not so far from where I was born), was infested with rats.
SO NOW we have another anti-Semite. Mazal Tov ("good luck") as we say in Hebrew.
His name is Ban Ki-moon, and he is the Secretary General of the UN. In practice, the highest international official, a kind of World Prime Minister.
He has dared to criticize the Israeli government, as well as the Palestinian Authority, for sabotaging the peace process, and thereby making Israeli-Palestinian peace almost impossible. He emphasized that there is a world-wide consensus about the "Two-state Solution" being the only possible one.
SO NOW we have another anti-Semite. Mazal Tov ("good luck") as we say in Hebrew.
His name is Ban Ki-moon, and he is the Secretary General of the UN. In practice, the highest international official, a kind of World Prime Minister.
He has dared to criticize the Israeli government, as well as the Palestinian Authority, for sabotaging the peace process, and thereby making Israeli-Palestinian peace almost impossible. He emphasized that there is a world-wide consensus about the "Two-state Solution" being the only possible one.
Which leaves me wondering if you are applauding Ban Ki-Moon or criticizing him. If everybody else understands where you are coming from then don't go to the trouble for me. I already know what the outcome of any peace attempts will be.
IT IS not easy to be an Arab in Israel.
It is not easy to be a woman in Arab society.
It is not easy to be an Arab in Israeli politics.
And even less easy to be an Arab woman in the Knesset.
Haneen Zuabi is all these together. Perhaps because of this she wears a perpetual smile – the smile of somebody who has won, after all.
RIGHT AFTER the foundation of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: "You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it!"
"I wish that Israel shall be Jewish, democratic and encompass all the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan," Ben-Gurion replied.
"That is too much even for me!" God exclaimed. "But I will grant you two of the three. You can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel in a part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will not be Jewish or a Jewish Israel in all of the country that will not be democratic."
God has not changed his mind.