The Israeli diskette, a memory erased

[newyorican]

The dam has burst. An Israeli politician can say anything and everything, in spite of common sense and what he may have said the day before, without raising an eyebrow. Even before now it was not exactly a dam that held back the lies and self-righteousness; it was more like a little knoll. Now even that is gone, after Shaul Mofaz spearheaded the foolish campaign against demolishing the synagogues in Gaza. The rich catalog of political deception has never had such a murky wave as this, which overnight washed out a solid cabinet majority, and at the same time the minimal courtesy toward the Supreme Court, the State's Attorney General, the intelligence of the street - and the sense of shame.

The second wave of tears, as in an earthquake, flowed down the cabinet ministers' cheeks from the eyes of Ovadia Yosef and the other watchmen of the Blessed Be He's commandments. He did not cry for the thousands of dead in New Orleans. Between doling out helpings of coarse invective and inferior curses, he found the time to do the groundwork for the third wave of tears, over the destruction of synagogues by those bastardly Arabs. On the day the synagogues were demolished by Palestinian gangs, the main operators of the conveyor belt of tears - the rabbis of Judea and Samaria - pulled out the document for which they had eagerly waited. "Setting fire to the synagogues by Arab rioters," they wrote in a public statement, "once again proves" - and they went on to enumerate the war of religion and the hatred of Jews and the necessity to connect to the Torah of Israel.

Destruction of the synagogues by the Gazans, which was ordered by Likud and Labor manipulators, immediately found its place amid the worn texts about the helplessness of the Palestinian Authority, as if the entire disengagement from the Gaza Strip had nothing to do with Israel's obvious helplessness to control the Strip.

-snip-

Except that Mofaz and the other merchants of lies came out clean. Israel has learned not to remember anything. In a nation that preaches to the world not to forget what was done to it, memory has been dried up. Not only due to ignorance, but because of Gaza and other huge errors made in its short history, Israel has learned to live a lie. Mofaz and his comrades made cynical use of the Israeli passion for smearing correction fluid on their own acts of past foolishness. This will enable Peres and his partners in the government - excepting Ophir Pines-Paz and Haim Ramon - to play the game of deleting memory from the Israeli diskette and to kiss up to the observers of tradition in their party institutions, and to their religious partners in some sort of future give-and-take over a coalition with them.

link:www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/624547.html|read more...]

[Maple]

1. Thank you, no

Victorian melodrama has never appealed to me.