melchett mike’s Christmas Message to Channel 4

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Christmas C4 speech sparks row

You shortsighted c*nts.

(Sorry, girls . . . but, sometimes, no other word will do.)

Oy Vey . . . Advanced Excuses for the Committed Commitment Phobe

I had brunch, on Friday, with Bob.

Bob is not his real name, but when I told the person who I really had brunch with that I would be publishing the contents of our discussion on melchett mike, he got rather hot under the collar and insisted that I withhold it (Bob, a fellow Brit, suffers from the conceit that he is sufficiently well-known to be identified by his [not uncommon] first name alone, and that people hang on his every word).

After repeatedly, and annoyingly, informing me that I should have bought Dollars instead of leaving savings in Pounds – based, you understand, not on the fact that he actually knew that Sterling was about to devalue by over 25 percent against the Greenback, but merely on the fact that it did – this prophet of hindsight then enquired as to whether I know of any available women for him.

Resisting the urge to dish out similarly useless advice (that, in spite of not having known her, he should have married Amy Winehouse while she was still a nice North West London Jewish girl and before she became rich and famous), I asked Bob what he was looking for. They mustn’t be fat, came the knee-jerk response, or have bad skin. And no one over 36 (in age, of course, not cup size).

Despite being in his early forties, Bob explained that he would like a younger woman due to the increased incidence of Down’s syndrome in babies born to older mothers. Bob took exception to my view that he was being overly fussy; but “ridiculous” would have been a more apt description – Bob hasn’t had a serious girlfriend for God knows how long, but is eliminating potential candidates because the probability of a Down’s birth for a 40-year old increases to one in one hundred . I am certain he wouldn’t bet on a horse at such long odds.

On reflection, though, who was I to judge Bob? On my walk home, I started to recall some of the more outlandish, Seinfeldesque reasons that I have found (created?) for ending (sometimes not even starting) relationships, with women attractive in most other ways. Excluding references to “southerly conditions” (melchett mike is still, just about, a “family” blog), they have included:

• a woman who laughed too easily;
• another who owned an offensive puffer jacket;
• an American who could spend entire dinner parties with her head resting on my shoulder, without contributing a single word to the conversation; and
• an Israeli who insisted on licking her knife (an especially English prohibition which my father campaigned to have enshrined as the Eleventh Commandment) in fancy restaurants, and who – on the same principle (that of annoying me) – refused to ever cross roads (even in the deserted, early hours) on the red “Do not walk” sign.

Most unforgettable, however, was the North West London Jewish woman who, at the very height of passion, used to exclaim (or, rather, kvetch) “Oy vey, you bastard”. I couldn’t have been more turned-off if my Polish grandmother had walked in on us, and enquired whether I wanted a slice of carrot on my gefilte fish. (I initially took it as a compliment to my supreme virility . . . until that is, some weeks later, a friend reported back with the exact same story.)

The problem for us forty-somethings is that as soon as we start explaining why we terminated a relationship, we automatically get that knowing “Yes, but you are a commitment phobe” look. Does that mean forty-somethings can’t have legitimate reasons for ending things? Call me shallow, but I had to stop seeing a woman recently, after a couple of very pleasant dates, due to an unduly hairy upper lip. I mean no man wants to risk a furry or, worse still, bristly snog. And there is no way of communicating such a thing to a woman (and keeping your front teeth), especially so early in proceedings. (Girls, put yourselves in our shoes – if you don’t like your man with a moustache, would his dying it blonde really help?)

I would like to believe that my excuses were more legitimate than Bob’s, relating to a state of affairs or something that had already happened, as opposed to something that, in all probability, never will. Also, unlike Bob, I am fully aware that most were exactly that (i.e., excuses), and am working on it.

The bottom line for both me and Bob, however, is the same – when you have hit your forties, you are less able to rely on intuition, and spend far too much time dissecting and analysing every tiny characteristic of a potential partner.

The flip side, however, of the view (shared by my dear mother) that I now have to take whatever I can get is that, if I have waited this long, what would be the sense in rushing into something? Although, if any readers know of the perfect woman, I am open to suggestions . . . and not that fussy.

Jonathan (“Jonny”) Isaacson z”l, 1958-1979

Today is the Yahrzeit (Jewish anniversary of death) of my late brother, and only sibling, Jonathan.

“Jonny” (as most people knew him) took his own life at the age of just 21. He would have been 50 last May.

We Jews, on a Yahrzeit, light a 24-hour candle and recite Kaddish (the memorial prayer), but – whilst I observe such traditions – they leave me rather cold. And, with the inexorable passing of time, memories of Jonny – who left us in December 1979 – have, inevitably, become fainter. So, I thought it would be nice to have a permanent e-memorial for him here . . .

Happy days: on Jonny's lap (circa 1968)

My parents adopted Jonny, as a three-week old baby, following eight childless years (I was a ‘mistake’, though thankfully not an unwelcome one, arriving on the scene some nine years later). Naturally, they loved Jonny as their own, and his adoption was never an issue for him – as he used to tell his friends, “My mother is the one who clothed and fed me.”

Jonny was, by all accounts, a lovely child, and – being the first grandchild on my mother’s side of the family – adored by all. Our grandfather, who was loathe to leave his East End menswear business for anything less than a funeral (and, even then, only in the most immediate family), once even took him to New York City on the QE2.

By the time of his Barmitzvah, however, Jonny’s behavior had become rather erratic, and he was soon playing truant from school. He had started taking drugs, and – Jonny being Jonny – not by halves. He, later, even stole a substantial amount of cash from our grandfather, in order to fund a trip (in both senses of the word) to South America.

Even if Jonny had a hereditary predisposition to it, medical research would now strongly indicate that his “schizophrenia” (that was the label given) was triggered by such early teenage consumption. Following a BBC documentary on the subject, while I was back in the UK in 2005, I determined with my then girlfriend that I would attempt to make contact with Jonny’s old school friends, in order to find out more about his life than the little I had managed to glean from my parents (and, likely, more than what they even knew).

Some three days later, in one of those weird twists of fate, I bumped into one of those friends, Ron, who had been living in Israel for nearly thirty years, but was visiting London following the death of his father. We were both moved, having not seen each other since I was a kid, and he related how, following the previous evening’s Shiva (mourning gathering), he and the two others – there were four in their group at Hasmonean Grammar School – had drunk a toast to Jonny.

I attended the Shiva on the following evening, where the three school mates related things about Jonny that I had simply never heard. My parents, having suffered terribly through Jonny’s teenage years, did not, naturally, have wonderful memories of the period. But now, from a thoroughly different perspective, I felt like I had discovered a new brother. Jonny’s charisma was such, they said, that a hush would descend when he spoke or entered a room. And it was apparent that (however foolhardily at the time) they had all looked up to Jonny for experimenting with everything, and to an extent, more than they had dared.

Awareness of drug abuse was very different in the early to mid-Seventies, and my parents, understandably, had no idea how to handle the situation (the only person who did was my then septuagenarian “Polish” grandmother). Another of Jonny’s school clique, Pete, recalls being in our home one Hannuka, and Jonny coming down to the family candle-lighting clutching a large lump of cannabis.

Jonny soon started frequenting a squat in Hampstead, where he became acquainted with Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious (in October 1978, a friend of Jonny’s who happened to be in New York City rather naively attempted to visit Vicious in his Manhattan police station cell, following his arrest for the murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen). Having Jonny as my big brother – and being exposed, even as a young child, to the music of, inter alia, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and The Allman Brothers Band – meant that I could never get into the insipid crap enjoyed by my contemporaries. And I am eternally grateful to Jonny for that.

My parents considered that some time spent in Israel might help Jonny. Ever resourceful, however, he soon found his way to Kibbutz Gezer, which was by all accounts, in the mid-Seventies, precisely the kind of hippie hangout where they did not want him to be.

According to Dave, the other member of the gang of four, “Johnny was clear in his mind that he was following the correct course and wanted people around to share with him what he was experiencing.” With the cash stolen from our grandfather, Jonny offered to buy his pals tickets to Colombia (though this was one step too far for them).

“Jonny chose the destination,” Dave remembers, “by taking a large map of South America, blindfolding himself, and sticking a pin down at random. It landed on a place called Cochabamba in Colombia. Consequently, our adopted squat cat was given that name and Jonny was on a plane out there.”

Pete recollects that, “on arrival in Bogota, Jonny tried to buy drugs off an undercover policeman and, as a result, spent a night in jail and was deported the next day” (though not, Dave adds, before Jonny’s travelling companions had to stump up 500 US Dollars in cash to obtain his release, “which in those days . . .”)

Pete recalls trying to “save” Jonny, at some point following his return from South America, but finding him, by that stage, “too far gone” (they played squash, but Jonny was seemingly oblivious to the ball). Jonny spent his last few years horribly drugged-up (only, this time, legally), in a psychiatric hospital in South London.

It is great to meet Jonny’s old mates – now a carpenter (Ron), architect (Pete), and company administrator (Dave) – for a curry whenever I am back in London, when we reminisce about him lovingly. Jonny clearly was (and his memory still is) very special to them. Jonny, too, obviously liked his friends “real”, and his choices, at so tender an age, prove him to have been extremely perceptive (Dave still goes to watch Hendon Football Club, and – as anyone who has had the misfortune will testify – it doesn’t get much more “real” than that).

I don’t think Jonny would have liked it too much down here in 2008, and – while there should be no romanticising his tragic demise (“Dad,” he asked towards the end, “why am I like this?”), or its probable cause – he, at least, in his short but eventful life, made an indelible mark on the consciousnesses and memories of those close to him. That is more than can be said for most of us.

Jonny, if you are reading this post Up There (where I am sure “it” is all legal), have one for us. God bless.

Sweet sixteens: (from left) David Rosen, Ron Dombey & Jonny (1974)

[If you happened to come across, or knew, Jonny, I would love to hear from you.]

Israel’s Very Own OJs

They were all born in the mid-1940s.
They all came from modest backgrounds.
They all reached the very pinnacle of their chosen careers.
They all seemingly had everything.
Not one of them has even his pride left.

They are all now in their early 60s.
They have all been accused of serious crimes.
They have all protested their innocence.
They have all alleged persecution.
They have all lost the respect of most right-thinking members of society.

One has been brought to justice. Finally.
Most people want the other two brought to account too.

One has now shown some remorse.
Another has been fighting for his state-funded luxury car and office.
And another is doing his utmost to stay in office, and to thwart his successor.

One was a sportsman and an actor. An entertainer.
Another was President. His country’s head of state.
And another is still Prime Minister. His country’s head of government.

I know which two, to my mind, are deserving of most moral opprobrium.

Parking Shields: Careers for UK Graduates in Tel Aviv

Tel Avivians spend more time looking for car parking spaces than thinking about sex.

Even though this fact never applied to me – and perhaps not feeling comfortable as the exception to the rule – I recently bought a space.

That space (and this one is true) is worth more than my ex girlfriend’s three room apartment in Be’er Sheva. Even though that might have something to do with the trade around my space being neither sex nor narcotics – and the common language being comprehensible to people other than compatriots of Borat – you get the point . . . parking in Tel Aviv is a nightmare.

It is quite common for residents, returning home from work, to spend 30 minutes plus driving round and round in silent (and sometimes not so silent) prayer. The situation is so bad that the Tel Aviv Municipality, not known for its charity or mercy, even allows residents to request the cancellation of up to two parking tickets a year.

The single most irritating thing in this country (and there is stiff competition) is the saving of parking spaces. Imagine suddenly finding a space, after ages of fruitless circling, only to discover that there is some plonker (“My friend is just coming”) standing in it.

I’d love to see them try and pull something like that in South London.

My first instinct is always to run them over. Then reason sets in. And there’s the rub . . . that Jews, even of the Israeli variety, just know that they would have to be bloody unlucky to find one of their brethren willing (and able) to resort to physical violence. Hence, the ridiculously high levels of chutzpah in Israel.

Now here’s a great business idea for the enterprising British graduate . . .

Why volunteer as a “human shield” for Palestinians – Gaza is a horrible place to be after the comforts of university life – when you can live in Tel Aviv, making money saving parking spaces for beleaguered local drivers?

Cash considerations aside, you wouldn’t be helping save the homes of suicide bombers . . . and you’d stand a far better chance standing in the way of a 1989 Fiat Punto than a spanking new Caterpillar bulldozer.

Spineless Cricketers: Murderous Muslims Your Problem Too

England’s cricketers are well-known for their spinelessness on the field. Now they have gained the same reputation for their actions off it.

After getting drubbed five-nil by their Indian hosts in the recent one-day series, the Englishmen returned home early from their tour, following last week’s terror attack on Mumbai. What wonderful guests! They are now apparently awaiting the conclusions of a security report before deciding whether to return for the scheduled two Test matches.

Do England’s cricketers, and their management, really need reminding that it was only three years ago that bombs were going off on London‘s Underground and buses? Islamic terrorism is not a problem affecting only India. The Englishmen should have shown solidarity with their hosts, rather than acting as if what happened had nothing to do with them.

The cancer of Islamic extremism is not going to go away any time soon. It will affect the lives of the children and grandchildren of Kevin Pietersen, England’s cricket captain, no less than those of our own. This cowardly retreat sends out all the wrong messages, not in cricketing terms, but in human ones.

Australia’s cricketers continued with their Ashes tour, in the summer of 2005, after 52 people – as a proportion of the UK population, a far higher number than last week’s fatalities – had been murdered, by four British Muslims, on London’s transport system.

I don’t put this difference down to some brave streak in the Australian national character, but rather to the patronising attitude towards “the Subcontinent”. If such a terror attack had occurred during a tour of Australia or New Zealand, the Englishmen would still be out there. And, if it had happened during an Aussie tour of India, they would have acted no differently than the Poms.

The discomfort of the white “Anglo” on “the Subcontinent” was perhaps best illustrated by English cricket great, Ian Botham, who, after returning home early from a 1984 tour of Pakistan, said it was “the kind of place to send your mother-in-law for a month, all expenses paid”.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be at all surprised by the actions of professional sportsmen, the prime motivation of whom, these days, would appear to be the next fat pay cheque.

It would be so wonderful however if, just for once, they showed the public – the ones who, ultimately, pay their obscene salaries – that they are not completely disconnected from the rest of us mere mortals. England’s cricketers, by staying put and doing what they are being paid so (ridiculously) well to do, would then have been sending a message to the Godless murderers that they, like us, will not cower in the face of Evil.

But, following the spineless retreat of the England cricketers in their hosts’ hours of need, many Indians – even cricket fans – might not welcome them back. And Israelis – knowing better than most the value of moral support at such times (and, also, more than their fair share of tour cancellations) – would understand them.

Tomorrow

I took the day off work today. But I wish I hadn’t. It’s been a disaster. And it’s still not evening . . .

7:05 am: Dexxy and Stuey have slept enough. They decide that I have too. Little bastards.

7:15 am: Take them down for their walk. Huge clogs of soiled toilet paper are still spewing forth, excrementally, from the drain at the side of our building. It seems there cannot be a backside in Greater Tel Aviv left unrepresented.

7:55 am: Sit down for coffee at my “local”. I feel the women at the next table crowding me. Israelis do that. You are at the cash machine, and invariably ‘feel’ the person standing behind you. They have no concept of personal space over here. I pull a face, and feel I’ve made my point.

10:20 am: Moshe “the thieving plumber” (can there be a better example of a tautology?) comes to unblock the drain. He immediately says he’ll need an extra 100 shekels to clean up the toilet paper that has already flowed out of it (he must have thought, when providing his original quote, that we wouldn’t possibly want him removing so worthy a candidate for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art).

10:30 am: Moshe phones from downstairs. The festering cesspit greeting his arrival was obviously insufficient giveaway . . . he’ll need a further 100 shekels, because the blockage is “particularly bad”.

11 am: My induction to the gym. I joined on Friday, after my gay friend, Yossi, told me that I had to get my act together. Buying a new wardrobe and losing my keress [Hebrew for beer belly] was the gist of it. I am not doing the tight sleeveless vest and leather cap thing, so it was the gym or nothing. But I hate the places. The introductory circuit is thoroughly humiliating. As he watches my face get pinker with every pitiful exertion, the instructor downgrades the dumbbells from Macho Black to Girlie Pink. I want to tell Boris to f*ck off back to Uzbekistan. He informs me he’s the Israeli national wrestling champion. I decide not to.

1:30 pm: Head off with Dexx and Stu to MASH, to watch the satellite broadcast of Histon Town (it’s actually a village vs Leeds United, in the 2nd round of the FA Cup (the reason I took the day off).

1:55pm: Receive a text message from the pub’s owner, informing me that – in spite of the game having been advertised on the MASH website – it’s not being shown. When Roy, the most intelligent Tel Aviv White (no distinction in itself), phones to complain (I can become irrational during such conversations), he is informed that it is actually our fault for not having phoned to check yesterday. “Sorry” is not a word in the local consumer industry lexicon.

4 pm: My beloved Leeds United has lost, for the first time in its history, to a team from outside the Football League. And to a goal by a postman. If anybody knows where Histon is, will they please bloody tell me (what I do know is that it has a population of under 4,500, compared to the over 715,000 in Leeds).

4:10 pm: City, my last hope for rescuing the day, go one-nil down to United in the Manchester derby, which I am watching at the home of “Mad” Eddie (see The Tel Aviv Whites). Most Leeds fans would point Indian intelligence officers, searching for evil perpetrators, in the direction of Old Trafford rather than Pakistan.

5:16 pm: Injury time. City still losing. Eddie declares that he’ll let Dexxy and Stuey “do a Monica” on him – the “eat one’s hat” idiom obviously never reached Yorkshire – should City equalise.

5:17 pm: United’s goalkeeper makes a great point-blank save, denying City at the death. My last hope of a smile today vanishes. Eddie, just inches away from becoming “Mad, I Did Not Have Sex With Those Dogs” Eddie, breathes a huge sigh of relief (so do Dexxy and Stuey . . . they’d have had a good case for cruelty to animals).

On the bright side, I met a lovely woman yesterday evening, at the opening party for a new theatrical production of Oliver Twist (at least Fagin shouldn’t be portrayed too unkindly here), the latest project of legendary Israeli film director, Menachem Golan.

But I think I’ll call her tomorrow.

Gever Gever*: The Israeli Male

In most societies, for a man to be referred to by a woman as a chnun – the Hebrew for geek/nerd (rhymes with ‘fun’, in a silly northern English accent) – would generally be considered a grave and emasculating insult.

When my ex, Nurit, used to refer to me as such, regularly – sometimes in public, to amuse her friends (I liked that) – I would take it badly. No woman in the UK even nearly called me that. I mean I am just not. Okay, I wear glasses, and don’t do drugs or ride a Harley, and I call my mother a little too often . . . but I am into Dylan and punk and footie (I am sure I could think of more things, given time). But when the next woman (and the one after that) confirmed Nurit’s assessment, it made me start to think that perhaps I am just not the wild man that I had once considered myself.

It then started to dawn on me that, to these women, this was not an insult. Far from it. They cherished their chnun, a male who could show emotions other than through, inter alia, greeting another male with a bear-hug so tight that he feels his ribcage being crushed, or a handshake consisting of a vertical slap and then shake so strong that he has the sensation that his eyeballs are being forced out of their sockets.

Straight Israeli men also often greet each other with a kiss, something virtually unheard of where I come from. But such demonstrative displays – interestingly, performed most by the very types who I get into regular trouble for referring to as “monkeys” (“apes” for the even more challenged) – clearly don’t run very deep, perhaps being the remnant of some macho army bonding thing. And they tend to be the very limit of your average Israeli man’s emotional range.

Witnessing the behaviour of an Israeli male around an attractive female is somewhat akin to watching one of those National Geographic documentaries on baboon mating rituals in Gabon. Take the manager of ‘my’ café/kiosk, on Rothschild Boulevard, for instance. I have always found him nothing less than ungracious and thoroughly unpleasant. But, come an attractive woman, and he miraculously transforms into a gushing nincompoop.

For a general lack of etiquette, Israeli men have few peers. I will never forget having garinim (sunflower seeds) spat all over my lap for 90 minutes, by a Beitar (of course) football fan, during a match in Jerusalem. And the guy knew full well what he was doing (I decided to say shtum, however, rather than later have to recount words similar to those of Woody Allen’s character in Play It Again Sam: “Some guys were getting tough with Julie. I had to teach them a lesson. I snapped my chin down onto some guy’s fist and hit another one in the knee with my nose.”)

An interesting anthropological exercise involves observing groups of Israeli couples in a restaurant. In most other countries, there tends to be some cross-gender interaction. In such situations here, however, the males and females often chat amongst themselves, Goodfellas style, the former usually about football, sex, and/or – if they are a little more sophisticated – property (one often even sees tables with the men all seated at one end and the women all at the other). It’s as if the men are saying to their lady folk “You wouldn’t understand”. Of course, they are right – they wouldn’t – but Israeli men don’t even go through the pretence.

Whatever issues I have with Israeli women (and they are not few), the men here have a far better deal than the women. Moreover, the reason Israeli women behave in the way that they do (and I will get onto that, I hope, in the not too distant future) is because they have had to bear the brunt of Israeli men for all of their adult lives (though the men, in turn, can reasonably point to the fact that, unlike most normal teenagers – who, following high school, go off to party at university for three years – they are thrust into the IDF [but melchett mike is not about fairness]).

There is a popular notion that all Englishmen are like Hugh Grant (in his non-Sunset Boulevard persona). This is not true. While an Englishman might know how to hold his knife and fork correctly, place him in a football ground, in front of 22 men chasing a pig’s bladder, and you will soon see how civilised he is (this experiment produces even more interesting results if you first let him spend a couple of hours in a public house).

If two Englishmen have a disagreement, they will usually settle it by knocking the living daylights out of each other. Over here, on the other hand, fists are rarely raised. I once witnessed a road rage incident in downtown Jerusalem, which consisted of one man holding another in a headlock for an entire 15 minutes, not wanting to throw a punch. The scene took me back to Jewish Sunday league football in England, where squabbling opponents would trade ‘handbags’ (at twenty paces), not truly desiring to hurt one other.

Cut through all the bluff and posturing, therefore, and inside your average Israeli man you will ultimately find a “nice Jewish boy”.

* Gever is Hebrew for male. Israeli men commonly greet each other with this word, a more macho version of the English man (as in “Hey, man”). Gever Gever (see title) is an expression used, often sarcastically, to describe machismo.

A Dishonourable Knighthood: Why Shimon Shouldn’t Have Gone

During my first couple of years in Israel, I used to take my shoes to be repaired by a cobbler on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road. The lovely old gentleman was born and grew up under the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948). When I first told him I was British, far from throwing my shoes back in my face, his eyes lit up as he reminisced, with no little nostalgia, how wonderfully polite the British soldiers were during that period, almost as if wishing them back.

This is not the reaction one would expect from a cold study of the history books. Even if the British could have explained away the 1939 White Paper – severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine – as political necessity, the turning back of ships packed with survivors of German death camps smacked of unimaginable cruelty.

But the deferential Israeli attitude to everything British prevails to this day. When the English football team and fans visited Tel Aviv for a European Championship qualifier, in March of last year, the authorities bedecked the Tel Aviv promenade in the flag of St. George, turning it into a Middle Eastern Southend-on-Sea. And the annual British Film Festival, at the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa Cinematheques, is more popular than any other.

But there is something more than a little patronising about Britain’s attitude towards Israel. And it defies logic.

Whatever his many detractors in Israel might say about him, no one can deny that President Shimon Peres has devoted much of his life to masterminding the survival of Israel and its citizens, through unremitting wars with Arab neighbours to daring operations like Entebbe (of which he is widely considered to have been the brains). The Queen and Prince Philip, on the other hand, have spent much of theirs gallivanting around the Commonwealth, gazing at natives’ bouncing dangly bits, in one “Bongo-Bongo Land” or another (let’s face it, I’m sure that’s how the wonderfully un-PC Prince would view them) .

Not a single member of the Royal Family has ever been on an official visit to Israel. During her 56-year reign, the Queen has undertaken over 250 official visits to more than 130 different countries. Her total abstinence from Israel is all the more remarkable when one considers her constitutional role as Head of the Church of England. Has no one ever informed her that some pretty heavy Christian sh*t has gone down here too?

A leaked email exchange between his aides, last year, suggested that Prince Charles – who has visited Israel once (for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin) – was unlikely to do so again, as Israel might use any such visit to bolster its international image (God forbid). And the heir to the throne did not respond to a fresh invitation, last week, from President Peres – in town to receive an honorary knighthood from the Queen at Buckingham Palace – despite having said that it was his lifelong dream to visit the grave of his grandmother (Prince Philip’s mother), on the Mount of Olives (I suppose that cash flow could be an issue for the Prince, in these recessionary times).

In view, especially, of Britain’s deep, problematic involvement in the history of this Land (the effects of which are still felt here), the Royal reticence towards Israel does the Family a disservice and Israel a dishonour.

With the man’s penchant for international recognition, it was never going to happen, but President Peres should have politely declined this dishonourable knighthood.

No One Likes Us: Why We Shouldn’t Care

“No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us, we don’t care . . .”

So sing fans of Millwall Football Club, in South East London, who, yes, it is true, no one likes. If they weren’t such scum, however, there would be something rather admirable about their attitude . . . an attitude I share when it comes to being Jewish and a Zionist (still).

I often talk to my cousin on the phone in the mornings, to alleviate the tedium of my drive to work (though the monotony is often broken anyway by some Israeli nutter, holding his mobile in one hand and a ciggie in the other, who – with one leg on the dashboard, and without indicating – swerves across three lanes of traffic in one fell swoop). Marc still listens to the BBC Wind-up Service on his way to work, and never ceases to be antagonised by the anti-Israel, Islamophilic propaganda served up most mornings (since when did the average ‘Beeb’ listener become so interested in documentaries about, inter alia, lesbian suicide bombers in Aden?)

My policy has long been not to listen to, or read, such media. It always just brought me down. Their purveyors are not going to change. Nor am I. And nor are most of the other listeners to and readers of the BBC Wind-up Service and The Guardian, etc, who do so precisely because such media reinforce and legitimise (or so they think) their bitter, warped, Jew-hating – oft cunningly veiled as mere Israel-hating (as if that is okay) – view of the world. Quite frankly (and apologies to my mother’s friends, some of whom I believe read this blog), I feel that – now that I am living in Israel – they can all go and f*ck themselves (though they could have done so before, too).

Israel has to put its own interests first. It is dog-eat-dog in this (mental) part of the world. And Israel cannot always afford to worry about what everyone else thinks – never mind some sex-starved single-mother in Stoke Newington, who just happens to have taken a dislike to those weirdos in their black gabardines “down Woolworths” – before acting (poisonous Persian dwarf in your M&S jacket [see Virginal Meanderings], take note).

Jews know only too well what happens when they wait for the world to act. And we have seen, since then, what we can do when forced, and in a position, to take care of ourselves. But, like Israelis and their tea, the world doesn’t like its Jews too strong.

We shouldn’t give a hoot, therefore, about Ken “you are just like a concentration camp guard” Livingstone, George “I never took a penny from Saddam” Galloway, David “From Toe Job to No Job” Mellor, or any of their ilk. I wear it as a badge of honour that such miscreants would not appear to be particularly fond of us.

You see . . . Leeds and Millwall fans can find common ground, after all.