PRESIDENT TRUMP. I am still in a state of shock. But I had better get used to it.
This is not just another US election. In my life I have seen many. Some had results I liked, some not.
But this one is entirely different. This is an earthquake that changes the face of the planet.
How did it happen? Why? And why was it so completely unexpected?
IT WAS unexpected because of this pagan worship of the polls.
THE FIRST shock has passed. President-Elect Donald Trump. I am gradually getting used to the sound of these words.
We are entering an era of complete uncertainty. We Israelis and the entire world. From shoe-shine boy to head of state.
Nobody knows.
BUT FIRST we must say goodbye to Barack Obama.
Frankly, I like the guy. There is something noble about him. Upright. Honest. Idealistic.
When the cameras showed him this week sitting together with Donald Trump, the contrast could not have been greater. Obama is the anti-Trump. Trump is the anti-Obama.
And yet....
The first mu`ezzin stood on the roof of the prophet Muhammad's home in Medina, during his exile from Mecca, and called the believers to prayer. He also walked along the streets, doing the same.
When Islam became the established religion, minarets were built. Their original purpose was to ventilate the mosque, letting the hot air out and thus drawing the cooler air in. The mu'ezzin climbed to the top and intoned the 'azzan, the call to prayer. Often a blind man was chosen, so he could not look into the homes below.
The word is closely connected with the biblical and modern Hebrew word "ha'azinu" ("listen").
WHEN MY parents married in Germany, just before World War I, among the gifts was a document attesting that a tree had been planted in their name in Palestine.
My father was an early Zionist. Popular Jewish humor in Germany at that time had it that "a Zionist is a Jew who wants to take money from another Jew in order to settle a third Jew in Palestine." My father certainly was not planning to go to Palestine himself.
Palestine was then a country bereft of ornamental trees. The Arab inhabitants cultivated olive trees, from which they made their scant living, and at that time the citrus trees were introduced. The olive tree is native – already in the Biblical story of Noah's ark, the dove fetches an olive leaf as a sign of life.
A DARK wave is submerging democracies all over the Western world.
It started in Britain, a land we always saw as the mother of democracy, the homeland of a particularly sensible people. It voted in a plebiscite to leave the European Union, that landmark of human progress which arose out of the terrible ruins of World War II.
Why? No particular reason. Just for the heck of it.
AN INCREDIBLE piece of legislation is now being debated in Jerusalem.
The country is busy with a settlement called Amona. There, deep in the occupied territories, a few dozen Jewish families have set up an illegal settlement – illegal even under Israeli law, not to mention international law.
Trouble is, they did not take the trouble to find out who owns the land on which they settled. As it turns out, it actually belongs to private Arab farmers. The Israeli Supreme Court ordered the settlers to evacuate the site.
Excellent piece, thanks for posting it CM
"Boehm's most startling point is that Zionism has anti-Semitic strains, witness its collaboration with Nazis."
DONALD TRUMP has spat in my face.
Not only in my own face, but in the faces of at least half the Israeli population.
He has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman to the job of US ambassador in Israel.
This sounds like a bad joke. But it is brutal reality. It sets a precedent unknown in the annals of international diplomacy.
FIRST OF all, it is bad practice to appoint an ambassador to a country with which he has a deep personal connection. You don't send a Cuban-American Castro-hater to be the US ambassador in Havana. You don't send Kuomintang Chinese from Taiwan to be US ambassador in Beijing
DONALD TRUMP has spat in my face.
Not only in my own face, but in the faces of at least half the Israeli population.
He has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman to the job of US ambassador in Israel.
This sounds like a bad joke. But it is brutal reality. It sets a precedent unknown in the annals of international diplomacy.
FIRST OF all, it is bad practice to appoint an ambassador to a country with which he has a deep personal connection. You don't send a Cuban-American Castro-hater to be the US ambassador in Havana. You don't send Kuomintang Chinese from Taiwan to be US ambassador in Beijing
Inside Story - Egypt pulls plug on UN vote on Israeli settlements
Others brought the same motion and it succeeded as Obama instructed the US to abstain rather than veto.
WHAT REALLY got me was the applause.
There they were sitting at the round table, the representatives of the entire world, applauding their own handiwork, the resolution they had just adopted unanimously. The Security Council, like the Knesset, is not used to applause or any other spontaneous outbursts. And yet they clapped their hands like children who had just received their Christmas gift.
(It was indeed a day before Christmas and the first day of Hanukkah, a coincidence that happens once in decades, since the Christians use the solar calendar and the Jews still use a modified lunar calendar.)
