“Revenge is a dish that is best eaten cold” is a saying attributed to Stalin. I don’t know if he really said that. All the possible witnesses were executed long ago. Anyhow, a taste for delayed revenge is not an Israeli trait. Israelis are more impulsive. More immediate. They don’t plan. They improvise. In this …
Continue reading “Cold Revenge”
Avigdor Lieberman has a restless nature. From time to time he has to do something, anything. As Minister of Foreign Affairs he should be doing something about, well, foreign affairs. Trouble is, Israel’s foreign affairs are managed by others. The most important sector of our foreign affairs concerns the relationship with the United States. Indeed, …
Continue reading “Master of Mischief”
“I have three answers,” the Jew told the rabbi when his neighbor sued him for not returning a borrowed jar. “First, I never borrowed a jar from him. Second, the jar was broken. Third, I returned it to him long ago.” Avigdor Lieberman’s Peace Plan shows a similar kind of logic. Peace Plan? Lieberman? Oh, …
Continue reading “Interim Forever!”
“A disaster!” the courtiers of the king of Hanover cried. “Seven renowned professors at Göttingen University have published a declaration of protest against you!” That was 173 years ago. The king had suspended the liberal constitution enacted by his predecessor. “So what?” the king replied. “Tarts, dancers, and professors I can always buy.” This story …
Continue reading “Who’s Laughing?”
Which is the real Netanyahu? Bibi the weakling, the invertebrate, who always gives in to pressure, who zigzags to the left and to the right, depending whether the pressure comes from the U.S. or from his coalition partners?The tricky Likud chief, who is afraid that Avigdor Ivett Lieberman might succeed in pushing him toward the …
Continue reading “His Father’s Boy”
The business is registered in the name of Binyamin Netanyahu. But the reality is different. Netanyahu has never been more than a slick patent-medicine salesman. That is a type that appears frequently in American Westerns and sells an elixir that is good for everything: against the flu and against tuberculosis, against heart attacks and against …
Continue reading “The Liebarak”
I tried to resist the temptation to tell the same classical Jewish joke a second time, but circumstances delivered a plausible excuse. Almost every Jew knows the sentence "Kill a Turk and rest." The whole story goes like this: In Czarist Russia, a Jewish boy is called up for the war against the Turks. His …
Continue reading “‘Kill Another Turk…’”
Deny it and go straight to jail, says Uri Avnery
JERUSALEM — How genuine is Israel’s new leadership about peace when the Prime Minister says that he will go a long way towards striving for a settlement with the Palestinians, but purposefully omits to endorse an independent Palestinian state; and, when his foreign minister warns, "If you want peace, prepare for war," a blunt statement …
Continue reading “All Unclear Over Israeli Policy”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in Tuesday — just one day later his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, set off a firestorm by saying he judged Israel was no longer bound by agreements reached at the late-2007 peace conference convened by the U.S. in Annapolis, Maryland. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit was one …
Continue reading “Obama’s Lieberman Problem” 
