You see what happens, Hamas . . .

“Don’t be silly,” I reassure Itzik, as we sip on our sachlabs on Rothschild, early last Thursday evening. “Nothing will happen in Tel Aviv.”

It might as well be the cue for the siren.

There are a surreal couple of seconds, during which the occupants of adjacent tables exchange puzzled, yet pregnant, glances: “Is it . . . ? What now . . . ?”

I jump up, as if stabbed with a shot of adrenaline. The dogs bark. We dart inside the café, my spanking new Galaxy S II abandoned alongside the sachlab. Clive Dunn has only been gone a week, and I have already forgotten his famous advice (though discovering that it is true, no one “like[s] it up ’em”). It is the first time I have experienced a siren not marking the commencement of Shabbat or a Holocaust/Remembrance Day.

We all huddle together at the rear of the café. A 60-something female hears my accent and, as if encouraging a boy to consummate his transition to manhood, asks me if it is my “first time”. I nod sheepishly. She imparts advice that I am in no state to listen to.

A distant boom. Perhaps two. And, within half an hour, I am home, packed, and on Highway 1 . . . on my way to the capital. I am ‘caught’ by my neighbours in the act of attempting to wheel my bag quietly out of the building. “I am not escaping,” I protest. “I have a fortieth birthday party in Jerusalem!” And it is true. But I don’t expect them to believe me. And I don’t think they do.

I tease Itzik – a Tel Aviv real estate agent who has continually belittled my second home in Jerusalem – from the car, telling him that he won’t be getting a key (‘forcing’ the coward into having to stay, instead, with his father in Petach Tikva).

And Itzik is the first to call me, gloating, the following early evening, within seconds of the siren sounding in the capital. I have darted into the stairwell, where the neighbours are quickly gathering, before shooting back in for my flatmates. My Orthodox neighbour overcomes her fear of Stuey and Dexxy, whom, until now, she has refused to even pass on the stairs. “Shit,” I exclaim, in an attempt to lighten the tension, “I left the back window open.” But the attempt at humour is lost.

I meet an American woman on Saturday who is considering taking refuge in London. Who am I to judge? I still do. And I delete an old law school friend from Facebook after he publishes this photo (right) with the caption: “Address this, Mark Regev . . .”

In fact, the next time I hear a Palestinian talk about ‘his’ olive tree, I will make it my job to find said plant, uproot it, and stick it up his . . . well, in a place that it will get no light. These people attach no value to human life, never mind olive trees.

Make no mistake, when Hamas talks about an “end to the Occupation” (which, in principle, I am also in favour of ending), it is talking about an end to Israel. And, if it was up to me, I would bring those fuckers [complaints, please, to John Fisher – he doesn’t approve of the asterisk] to their knees before even agreeing to listen to talk about a ceasefire.

There is a wonderful feeling of togetherness here at present. I had been putting the finishing touches to a blog critical of Israelis. But I can’t publish it now. These are special people. And they are giving their all for our People . . . and – if the world would only open its eyes – for the values that civilised people everywhere hold dear.

To the residents of the south, we should have empathised more fully with your sacrifice and suffering, and with the intolerable circumstances under which you have had to live this past decade. To former Defence Minister Amir Peretz, respect for promoting – when few believed in it (or you) – Iron Dome. And to the soldiers awaiting your orders on the edge of Gaza, though it looks unlikely now that you will receive them, chazak ve’ematz.

Once again, however, I leave the last words to the great – though oft misunderstood – Walter Sobchak . . .

CLICK HERE

Hamas would have done well to heed the lesson of Mr. Sobchak – as, from now on, would Iran and even Egypt (which, respectively, have supplied and allowed unhindered passage of the missiles used to attack us) – though I sincerely hope that the IDF has been picking its targets rather more calmly and prudently!

[See also Airstrike on Gaza: Israel’s Right of Self-Defence, F*ck you, too and Days of Awe, Heroes and Whores . . . sadly, all still as relevant today as they were nearly four years ago.]

Corrie verdict: A crushing blow for human rights

Last week was a singularly horrid one for all of us who know that it is our universal, inalienable right to kneel in front of armoured bulldozers without getting our new keffiyehs (they are so cool!) dirty.

And my heart wept for Craig and Cindy Corrie on Tuesday after the Haifa District Court ruled that their 23-year old daughter, Rachel – and not the IDF – was responsible for her own death under the tracks of of a Caterpillar D9 in Gaza in March 2003.

It was an outrageous injustice, and sets a horrible precedent. Whatever next . . . environmental activists running across the M1 to protest motorway widening – rather than drivers not looking out for them – having to shoulder the blame for getting splattered across it?!

“This was a bad day not only for our family, but a bad day for human rights, for humanity, for the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel,” announced Mrs. Corrie after the verdict.

How right you are, Mrs. C. And you and your husband should be congratulated for your objective concern for the plight of the poor, defenceless Palestinians against the mighty Israelis – the result, no doubt, of a deep understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as opposed to any prejudice or suspicion on your part regarding the rich, powerful Jew – even though it led to your own daughter’s horrible, needless death.

Objectivity: the Corries in Rafah, January 2006

Rachel was a fine American. Okay, she burnt the flag (who hasn’t?!) But, in writing of the natural rights of man, Hobbes, Locke and Paine surely could not have had in mind any act more noble than the “shielding” of Islamofascist rocket squads and suicide bombers by interfering foreigners who couldn’t find useful work placements during college (see also Time for the Hurndalls to stop their sniping) and who had always heard that Arabs . . . well, everyone really, are nicer than Jews.

Rachel Corrie burning a mock US flag in Rafah, a month before her death

And we’re still fond of you, Moz!

I knew you were something different, Moz, as soon as I – not-so-sweet sixteen, in November 1983 – saw you for the first time, swinging those gladioli on Top of the Pops.

And I can still hear my mother mimicking the “uh-huh-hos” blaring from my bedroom after I had raced back from Our Price, Brent Cross, with my The Smiths cassette.

I was in your audience in Tel Aviv, yesterday evening.

And at a time that most of the world is kicking us in the nadgers – the IOC refusing a minute’s silence for the 11 Israelis murdered in Munich and spineless muppets like Marc Almond cancelling gigs here, for fear of offending Islamofascist anti-Semites and their Israel-only bashing apologists – I thank you, Moz, for standing by us.

Unlike Leonard Cohen (who felt he had to ‘justify’ his concert here by turning it into a peace circus) and Dylan (who couldn’t bring himself to share a single word with his audience), you were with us heart and soul.

And seeing you parade and drape yourself in kachol ve’lavan means more to us (or, at least, to me) than you can imagine . . . I mean, I know it doesn’t make you Theodor Herzl; but sadly, in these dark days, merely not being ashamed to be associated with Israel is, in itself, huge.

Indeed, I will even pardon you for not performing the greatest song of all time!

Todah, Moz . . . you are our light that never goes out.

Morrissey in Tel Aviv, yesterday evening

[For more photos and videos of yesterday's gig, click here.]

Israel, boycott the Olympics!

The Israeli Olympic squad should withdraw from the London Games, starting next Friday.

Seeing as the International Olympic Committee is clearly more concerned about upsetting Islamofascist anti-Semites than marking, with a minute’s silence, the memory of the 11 innocent Israelis slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games, we have no place there.

As for the “personal moment” to be held by the London Games Chairman, Lord Coe (right), he can stick it up his pompous posterior. I always preferred Steve Ovett.

The absence of Israeli athletes would hardly be a blow to the credibility of these Olympics, as the US and Soviet Bloc boycotts were to Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984.

But we Jews are far better at guilt than games – never demonstrated more conclusively, or hilariously, than in this Hasmonean Boys Sports Day video (I particularly enjoyed the ‘efforts’ of the high jumpers, over a bar that my grandmother would have walked over, first long jumper and the relay baton handoff) – and an Israeli withdrawal at this late stage would send out an extremely potent message.

Of course it would be horrible for those athletes whose dreams, and years of training, would come to nowt – they would have to be recognized, and compensated, by the State for their great personal sacrifice – but Israel must do what is right: Jewish blood is not cheap, and to participate in the London Olympics, after the IOC’s shameful gutlessness,  would be a disrespect to the 11 martyrs and their families.

I, for one, will not be watching these Games. And should Islamic terror rear its diabolic head during their course, I trust that the IOC and that tosser Coe . . . apologies, Lord Coe will be consistent and refrain from public condemnation and/or commemoration of its victims.

[For a 15-minute memorial service, followed by a minute’s silence, go to www.minuteformunich.org at 10.45 (UK time) next Friday morning.]

Grooming in the Green: Just imagine it

A gang of nine Jewish males from Golders Green – eight English-born and one Israeli – has been convicted of grooming underage non-Jewish girls for sex, the vulnerable teenagers having been lavished with salt beef sandwiches (on rye) and latkes, and plied with Palwin No. 10, at kosher restaurants across North-West London.

One can just imagine the response of the BBC and Guardian etc ”PC Brigade”, springing to the defence of Anglo-Jewry, protesting that the crimes had nothing whatsoever to do with race or religion . . .

Yeh, right!! We’d have a modern-day blood libel on our hands! And we wouldn’t even get to Nick Griffin. We wouldn’t need to, with . . .

• A now happily (for us) retired former MP and Mayor of London accessing his impressive stash of Zionist/Jewish/Israeli – they are, after all, interchangeable – stereotypes to “make sense” of the case;
• A weekend magazine feature on the ultra-Orthodox Jewish male’s attitude towards The Shiksa, with, among the interviewees, perhaps, a Haaretz ‘journalist’ who once saw some charedim kerb crawling in the Diamond Exchange district (as he was exiting a strip club);
• A Saddam-saluting Jock, foaming at the mouth, claiming the guilty verdicts should surprise no one, seeing as Diaspora Jewish males merely follow the example set for them by the IDF, with their war crimes against the poor, peace-loving Palestinians;
• A half-page Guardian ad taken out by an assortment of self-loathing writers, actors and other luvvies (vying, perhaps, to become the UK’s new Number One Self-Hating Jew), pledging to have circumcision reversals (foreskin regrafts) to distance themselves from a religion that “allows” such crimes; and
• The dishonourable (and dishonest) Member for Manchester Gorton once again cynically exploiting the memory of his poor late grandmother (see here), telling the House of Commons that “she did not die at the hands of the Nazis for Jews to do a thing like this.”
  

  Who needs the BNP?

But a gang of nine Muslim men – eight Pakistani and one Afghan – grooming, abusing, assaulting and/or raping up to 47 (that is forty-seven) vulnerable girls in Rochdale, every single one of whom was white, has, we are being told (though not, thankfully, by the only UK newspaper to consistently tell it as it is), nothing to do with Islam or its followers, or with its or their attitude towards females and, especially, non-Muslim females.

Nothing whatsoever.

[Related posts: World Trade Center set for suicide bomber memorial and The lesson of 9/11: Don't dare upset the Muslims.]

From Jew-obsession to the mechanics of murder

“The Muslim faith has nothing to do with the insane acts of this man.”

So opined the French President, last week, following the latest acts of cold-blooded murder by a hate-filled Muslim, including once again – almost a year to the day since the Itamar infanticide – of three Jewish children, this time aged 3, 6 and 8.

“Nothing to do with”? Are you sure, Mr. Sarkozy?

How much Islamofascist terror must we endure before we stop having to listen to such PC bollocks, and before we stop putting ever so delicate Muslim sensibilities before the hard truth? When, instead, is the Muslim community and its hate-inciting imams going to be told to put their murderous, bloodthirsty house in order?

Respect, my arse: Ken & George

And, while telling things as they are, it is not only Muslims who are to blame for such atrocities. Much of the Islamofascist’s fuel, and the climate in which he is allowed, even encouraged, to operate, is provided by the Israel-only bashers – the George Galloways, Ken Livingtones, Jenny Tonges, even the sad, bitter nothings like Gert Meyers (see previous link), of this world – who, by relentlessly demonizing and attempting to delegitimize the Jewish state with their hateful, hypocritical agenda (while remaining largely silent, for most recent instance, about the slaughter in Syria), provide fertile ground for the murder of Jews.

Don’t even dream, however, of calling the Israel-only basher an anti-Semite. He, of course, has nothing against Jews (some of his best friends . . .), merely opposing Israel, which –  by pure coincidence only – just happens to be the Jewish state. Neither is it by virtue of their conflict with the Jews that the Israel-only basher gives the Palestinians his sole, undivided attention (to the exclusion of Syrians, Kurds, Iranians, Coptic Christians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Equatorial Guineans, Zimbabweans, Burmese, Tibetans, North Koreans, Cubans): it is just that the Palestinians are, intrinsically, far lovelier and cuddlier than every other persecuted people.

Having lunch in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market, a couple of weeks ago, I struck up conversation with a nice non-Jewish couple from Colorado, visiting Israel for the first time. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” said Jim, while we were still on our soup, “but why do so many people hate the Jews? I just don’t understand it.” I went through the list – jealousy and Jesus being the only reasons that seemed to make any sense (and, then, not much) – before concluding with my own view, that it is just part and parcel of, though a sickness in, the human condition.

In the week that saw John Demjanjuk go to meet his diabolical maker – the very same, no doubt, as of his fellow auto mechanic Mohammed Merah – I couldn’t help but wonder whether the millions spent on attempting to bring an incontinent Ukrainian peasant to justice would not have been better earmarked for more effectively countering the deadly lies of the Israel-only bashers, and for providing proper security for Jewish communities around the world.

Toulouse victims z"l: (clockwise) Rabbi Yonatan Sandler (30), sons Gavriel (3) and Aryeh (6), Miriam Monsonego (8)

Watering the beasts: a lesson in comparative religion

Striding down Shderot Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Boulevard) last week, running late for an appointment in south Jaffa, Stuey and Dexxy, starting to wilt under the midday sun, were desperately trying to pull me off the tarmacked sidewalk and under the shade of each and every tree.

The sight of Stuey (always so full of beans), in particular, actually tiring is a rare one. So, passing a plant/flower centre, I popped in to request some H2O for my hairy flatmates. A nursery employee was instructed to pour some brownish water out of a large black flower bucket into a tan plant-pot tray.

Then, as I was enjoying the  sound of the canines quenching their thirst (always so strangely enjoyable), the centre’s Arab owner volunteered:

“Our religion tells us to give water to dogs, but not to rear them.”

My first thought: “Why the hell is he telling me this?” After all, I hadn’t asked him about the place of dogs in Islam.

My second – a reaction, perhaps, to all the shit that has gone down since 9/11 – was to inform him that I couldn’t give a f*ck about what his religion does or doesn’t “tell” him.

But, while I often fantasize about a Monty Brogan-style outburst, I, yet again, settled just for thinking:

“And my religion tells me: to build buildings, not to fly passenger planes into them; that women, though different, are equal, and certainly not some subspecies that should be forced to wander around like cloth-covered Daleks; to teach our children the right way; to treat animals humanely; to respect the environment; and to obey the laws of the land.”

Mr. Flower Man’s one sentence had summed up for me the huge gulf that exists between us.

Not that I haven’t, since moving to Jaffa (a month and a half ago), already been made fully aware of that: Cries of “Allahu Akbar!” emanate from the loudspeakers of local mosques five times a day, including at 5 in the morning (though to his credit, and my relief, the ‘chazan’ at my local is surprisingly melodic).

All this with Jaffa now estimated to be three-quarters Jewish. And, while you can argue the toss about inequalities of bargaining power, those Jews have purchased their homes, not – according to the much-loved narrative of the Israel-only basher – driven out the former owners, forced to flee only with that iconic key.

So, Mr. Flower Man, if you wish to win me over to your religion, it won’t be through its approach to our furry friends (much less to humans).

No. Apart from those 72 virgins (I would settle for just two, these days . . . though twins, please, if poss!), far more likely to Islamize me in these troubling times would be the old proverb:

“If you can’t beat us, join us.”

To all readers of melchett mike, a happy, healthy, and always humane, 5772. (And, if you haven’t done so yet, kindly visit
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Better a manyak than a sheep: some historical perspective re the “situation”

Can things possibly get any worse?

Viciously turned on by our only true friend in the region. The Palestinians on the verge of the unilateral declaration of statehood. Our own country divided and seemingly rudderless. And all of this under the spectre of the growing nuclear threat from Iran, with – perhaps most gallingly of all – not a word from the Israel-only bashers about the continuing human rights violations there, in Syria, and across the Arab and Muslim world . . .

Which might go some way to explaining why, as thousands streamed up Tel Aviv’s Ben Zion Boulevard towards the social justice rally, a fortnight ago, I – not untypically (I have always been a little davka) – walked alone in the opposite direction, to (the Dizengoff Centre and) the latest Woody Allen movie. After all, only an idiot, it seemed to me, would care about the rising cost of cottage cheese when we are in such an existential mess. (Joining the protest also seemed rather incongruous at a time that I was patting myself furiously on the back – you see, there are other things I do furiously! – for selling my Melchett home of 12 years, two blocks from Rothschild, just days before the tents went up.)

Then, Friday week ago, our Ambassador was forced to flee the new benevolent democracy next door (confirming my fears, expressed here just a week earlier), followed – on the Sunday, the tenth anniversary of 9/11 – by a Sky News studio guest summing up the decade since with “And there still isn’t a Palestinian state”: It was the Jews, of course, not Islamofascist knuckle draggers, who were really responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people on that horrible day.

Rather than allow the matzav (situation) to get me down, however, I have tried to view it as I always have: in the light of a history that has never been much better than miserable (though, to quote Alvy Singer, “life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable . . . so, when you go through life, you should be thankful that you’re miserable”).

By way of illustration (with the aid of a quick Google search), the following occurred on September 11, 1941, 70 years to the day before last Sunday:

• The Jüdischer  Kulturbund (Cultural Federation of German Jews) was dissolved “for the protection of people and state.” (source)
• All 91 Jewish patients at the Babinski Hospital in Kobierzyn (near Krakow) were moved to the Zofiowka Sanatorium in Otwock (near Warsaw), where some were shot and buried in the garden, with the remainder gassed in Treblinka. (source)
• The following report (presented at the Eichmann trial) was written: “In Kamenets-Podolski [Ukraine], 23,400 Jews were killed by shooting within three days by the Group of the Senior Commander of the SS and the Police.” (source)

Complacent (primarily Diaspora, I believe) Jews who say that such things can never happen again have either never picked up a Jewish history book, or are too egotistical to see themselves as a mere dot in them. The calls from the radio of the Mavi Marmara, I would remind them, were “Go back to Auschwitz” and “Don’t forget 9/11.” They (and you fool yourself if you interpret the word narrowly) just don’t like us. That is the only feasible explanation for the obsession of the Israel-only bashers with Jews to the exclusion of all else.

70 years on from Auschwitz, however, we Jews are believed to be in possession of up to 400 nuclear weapons (source). And, kid yourselves not, the only reason that our Allah-loving enemies don’t attempt to finish off the Germans’ work is not any code of ethics, but the belief that the Jews really may have “second-strike” nuclear submarines.

As Ehud Barak spelt out last week, we Jews just can’t be f*cked with anymore: “They know very well why it’s not worth it for them to use chemical weapons . . . why it doesn’t pay for them to even think of using such weaponry against Israel.” (Haaretz)

Having moved to within three minutes’ walk of Bloomfield Stadium, home to all three Tel Aviv football clubs, I recently purchased a season ticket for Maccabi (who play in yellow; no self-respecting Leeds fan would dare be seen in red). And, at my first game, the guy seated behind me gave a crass course in Hebrew abuse: “Shofet, ya manyak ben zona (Referee, you crazy son of a whore)!” he yelled repeatedly, seemingly oblivious to the young son by his side.

At Israel’s subsequent Euro 2012 qualifier against Greece (also at Bloomfield), there were regular cries of “Milchama (war)!” And while I could understand why my friend, Nick, found them objectionable, I also thought: “How incredible that we Jews, not long ago history’s perennial victims, can finally shout stuff like that!”

If the Arabs are as stupid as some fear, or Ahmadinejad as reckless, there might still be another slaughter (heaven forbid). There will, however, this time, be no sheep. And we will take great numbers of the pathologically Jew-hating bastards down with us.

And that makes me, for one, through all of this bad news, feel a lot, lot better: Yes, it is great, for once, to be the manyak ben zona!

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Why I am not full of the joys of Spring

You will forgive me, I hope, for not jubilantly swinging my misbaha over my head in celebration of the Arab Spring.

Israeli Embassy, Cairo, last Friday

After months of endless “Allahu akbars” (can’t they come up with anything new?) and the exaggerated, mindless firing into the air of automatic weapons, I – unlike many others it would seem, especially the depressingly naive correspondents of the western news media and the ever-Muslim-fawning BBC – am filled not with hope, but with concern . . .

Concern that liberty, democracy and equality, as well as respect for human life, won’t come to these people in a thousand springs.

And the best judges of this are not Ashkenazi, Haaretz-reading liberals – who believe that inventing, dreaming about, and intellectually masturbating over, a false reality makes them, somehow, more worthy human beings – but Jews who grew up in, and subsequently were forced to flee, one of the countries now ‘enjoying’ its Spring.

Sexpot: Ashrawi (on BBC's Breakfast with Frost)

One such, an Egyptian-born relative, would always remark, whenever having to hear Hanan Ashrawi – the Palestinian Christian sexpot – twist and deceive on British television: “If they get their own state, they will cut her hands off.” (And I must confess to having rather enjoyed the image.)

Concern, too, that these people are motivated not by love, or even the longing for a better future, but by hate and the desire to settle old scores.

The ‘new’ (liberated from the yoke of the tyrant Mubarak) Egyptians, outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last Friday (photograph above), were calling not only for the abolition of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty and the expulsion of the Israeli Ambassador:  “Jews, remember the Battle of Khaybar, the Army of Muhammad is already here . . . Oh Zionists, please be patient, there’s an Egyptian digging your grave.” Nice.

I was raised in an environment in which the worst intolerance ever encountered was the occasional less than flattering name for “the other,” usually by an elderly relative, in Yiddish.

Another people, on the other hand, raises many of its young to believe that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs, in a conspiracy to control the world (funny that, I have never known a pig to aspire to anything beyond estate agency), and must be destroyed.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at Palestinian and Arab schoolbooks and newspapers (the cartoon on the right appeared in the widest-circulating Egyptian daily), listen to some of their delightful clerics (here and here), or enjoy their enchanting version of Sesame Street (and I haven’t even touched upon the latest filth spewing forth from Tehran).

So please excuse me if I am not filled with optimism and joy about the fall of Mubarak, Gaddafi, or even, imminently, of that vile weasel Assad.

Mark my words (though I do hope they prove to be wrong): this is not good.

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Whose catastrophe is it anyway?

Driving past the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on Sunday evening, I witnessed the kind of scene which, though no longer new to me, never fails to sicken me anew: on this occasion, a demonstration by around a hundred keffiyeh-wearing Israelis to mark Yawm al-Nakba, or Day of the Catastrophe, on which Palestinians mourn the birth of Israel, in 1948.

Last week, meanwhile, on Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day), this country remembered its 22,867 fallen soldiers and 3,971 victims of Palestinian terror. And immediately following the thought that most of the crusty-leftie protesters looked like they could do with a good bath . . . alright, and the fleeting one, too, of plowing my Focus into the shameless bastards, I couldn’t help but ask myself: “Allah, whose Nakba?!”

I have no inclination to regurgitate here the details of our two Peoples’ claims to this Land. We are, however, two Peoples. And with two claims. And they both have their merits.

But the Palestinian “catastrophe” as I see it, and it predates 1948, is that neither the Palestinians nor their leaders have – conversely to the attitude of the large majority of Israelis towards them – never truly accepted any aspect of the Zionist narrative, or that there is even another party with a legitimate claim to, at least a share of, this Land.

This explains how the ‘moderate’ Palestinian leadership in the West Bank could sign an agreement, two weeks ago, with the Islamofascists in Gaza, the leader of whom had, a mere two days earlier, condemned the killing of Osama “the holy warrior.” And it is why even Israelis (like me) who favour a two-state solution do not believe that the 1967 borders represent the true extent of the vast majority of Palestinians’ claims and aspirations.

The reason that there will never be peace in this Land, therefore, is not our minority of nutters . . . but their majority of them.

Indeed, we Israelis, if we were so inclined, could commemorate our own “catastrophe”: that, in addition to our almost 27,000 fallen soldiers and murdered civilians, we have been cursed with neighbours – Palestinian and Arab – who are, at worst, capable of slaughtering babies in cold blood and, at best, completely backward-looking and incapable of moving on . . . as evidenced by their endlessly self-pitying, all-consuming, fixation with the Nakba and the past.

Israel’s present government has certainly not covered itself in glory: Bibi’s ‘leadership’ has been characterised only by mind-boggling inaction, making the country – at a time when its international image was already at an all-time low – appear completely uninterested in even attempting to resolve this horrible, tragic mess. Indeed, over the last two years, it has almost been as if Israel hasn’t even had a government.

But, even ignoring its appalling crime figures, one only has to roam the streets of Jaffa to witness the Arab aversion to progress: decrepit buildings without communal electricity (cut-off for failure to pay bills) and surrounded by garbage (usually discarded by residents’ children). Then, for contrast, walk a matter of minutes to the beautiful tayelet (beachfront promenade) recently developed by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality through Ajami, one of Jaffa’s most crime-ridden areas.

Of course, the same folk who have always criticised Israel’s supposed neglect of Arab neighbourhoods are now claiming that the tayelet is part of a strategic Judaization, even ethnic cleansing, of them. Though there is no pleasing the Jew/self-hater.

“The Arabs,” Abba Eban famously once said, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” And, whilst some may currently be enjoying a Spring, others – including the Palestinians and their leadership (now, officially, semi-Islamofascist at least) – are still stuck in deepest, darkest Winter.

"Murderers in Uniform," reads the sign at Sunday's demonstration