Love of the Land: Yad Vashem with an air force

Yad Vashem with an air force

Sarah Honig
"Another Tack"
JPost
19 November 09

One of this country's prominent professional talking heads, who also happens to be a longtime friend, opined in all earnestness when we met the other day that "the most pivotal recent political development" was Tom Friedman's op-ed in The New York Times (November 7) entitled "Call White House, ask for Barack." The broadcaster positively glowed and gloated. From his ultra-leftist standpoint this was a devastating blow to Binyamin Netanyahu and he lustily savored the triumph.

I had to confess my abysmal failure to be wowed. I gave Friedman's supposedly seminal column less than passing attention and couldn't see what the hoopla was about. Friedman is a veteran Jewish Israel-basher, whose career was constructed on his "personal crisis" of disillusionment with the Jewish state. Trashing Israel, after all, is his proven stock-in-trade. So what if Friedman figures there's "no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency" to our peace process, "not even a sense of importance anymore"? Big deal. Whoopty-do!

"The Americans are fed up with Bibi. They'll hang him out to dry and ditch the peace process," the media-hotshot retorted with noticeable exasperation.

"What peace process?" I snapped back. "It's a sham. There never was any process to achieve real coexistence, only a pretext to weaken Israel. Some 'useful-fool' Israelis play along for political expedience and others are intimidated to adopt the agenda," I argued. "Please let Washington quit trying to make us more vulnerable. By all means let them leave us alone."

That said, I wasn't optimistic: "It's too good to be true. What have we got to go on? Friedman? Since when does he call the shots?"

My influential colleague was flabbergasted: "Friedman reflects Obama's mood. This is a stern warning for us. At the very least Friedman will sway Obama and then we'll see where that gets us."

I ached to ask which side my famous interlocutor rooted for and whether he gave voice to left-wing wishful thinking, but I controlled myself.

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Love of the Land: Yad Vashem with an air force