Both galling but Obama pretends a lot. De Gaulle didn’t.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
14 September '12..






To those among us with some historical memory, these tense days might be reminiscent of days no less tense on the eve of the Six Day War. Then too Israel was beset by existential threat.

Egypt had blockaded the Tiran Straits, kicked out UN forces from Sinai and filled our airwaves with bellicose bluster about annihilating the Jewish state, a.k.a. the loathsome “Zionist entity.”

Four and a half decades later, we are threatened by Iranian nukes and all around us is regurgitated the bellicose bluster about annihilating Israel, a.k.a. the loathsome “Zionist entity.” To those of us who still remember, the vehement vows to obliterate us sound eerily similar.

But the comparables hardly end here. Our nervous systems are today mercilessly put through the wringer – but not for the first time. Yesteryear too, our very existence seemed to equally hang in the balance during a protracted waiting period of uncertainly, compounded by the realization that somewhere, behind closed doors, life-and-death decisions are being weighed by pressured individuals tugged in contradictory directions and bearing unenviable burdens.

We didn’t know back then, in 1967, about Yitzhak Rabin’s breakdown but plenty of us felt at the end of our own tether.

And as our white-knuckle ride on history’s roller coaster tumbled and tossed us 45 years ago, the world watched with apathetic aplomb. Our grueling anxiety was no skin off assorted foreign noses. It was our misfortune and none of their own.

Just as now.

Already back in 1967 what concerned the august statesmen of fellow democracies was hardly our welfare and survival.

What they feared most was an Israeli preemptive strike. That, they warned sternly, would grievously upset the international apple cart.

Guardian calls Israel “an arrogant nation”, and also gives op-ed to Foreign Office grandee who complained about Jews on the Iraq inquiry

Robin Shepherd
Robinshepherdonline.com
24 March '10

Charles de Gaulle once famously referred to the Jews as an “arrogant and domineering people”. The Guardian newspaper in its editorial today refers to Israel as “an arrogant nation that has overreached itself”. Not the government of Israel — castigated by the Guardian for using British passports in a “Mossad murder squad” in Dubai, as well as over the spat with Washington — but the nation of Israel itself.

I suppose they would argue that that there is still enough daylight, however thin a sliver of it, between de Gaulle’s open disdain for Jews and their equally open disdain for the Jewish state.

But let’s leave whatever room for discussion may still be available on that particular question to one side for a moment, and move on to an op-ed piece published alongside the editorial by a senior Foreign Office mandarin who last year made one of the meanest anti-Semitic remarks to have been made in mainstream Britain for many years.

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