Posts Tagged ‘Ehud Barak’
Tough As Cottage Cheese
Posted by: Rechavia Berman on: June 20, 2011
Welcome, intrepid travelers, to another excursion of the Weekend Holyland Update airlines. Today’s flight will take us to the realms of faux-popular uprising, low-grade racist pogroms, the upshot of a sad joke, another one, an altar where the people are sacrificed to a bloodthirsty deity,and finally a mass wedding. The menu will consist of bland lumpy cheese with a subversive sperm sauce. Off we go!
The big story of the past few days has been the uproar over the price of cottage cheese. A little half pound cup of cottage cheese has hit 8 ILS (about $2.35, or about twice what y’all pay), and people freaked out, starting Facebook protest groups and all manner of oh-so courageous actions, vowing in the face of mentionable peril to refrain from consuming said curdled lumpy stuff for a month(!!) in protest. I think they crossed the 100K threshold on all the groups combined, and the big shopping chains have already begun to “heed the voice of the people” and lower the prices somewhat. This, of course, is the classic retail ploy: Jack the price, wait for the outrage, score for heeding the voice of the people and lower the price to somewhere between the old price and the original increase, thus still raising the price but fronting like you gave a discount. Even the pols are rushing to join in on the “cottage revolution” and are now “promising” to put basic dairy products back under price control. Gotta heed the people!
What most people missed, of course, is that it’s not about the fucking cottage cheese (or koh-tej as we call it here). In Israel, we make less for equivalent work than anywhere in the developed world, yet pay more for virtually everything. Milk, sugar, salt, meat of any kind… we pay more for a liter of olive oil than they do in Britain. Surely you’ve heard of the vast olive orchards of Albion? The proud olive oil heritage of Wessex? The presses of Cornwall? I mean, no wonder they pay less for the stuff than a country like Israel that…oh, wait.
In the case of the cottage cheese the only difference was that the three dairy giants (Tnuva, Strauss and Tara) got caught up in their own greed and bottom line-worship and made the price-creep a little too damn noticeable. One of the financial rags claimed it was Tnuva that started it. This time, that is. It doesn’t matter who started it, just like it’s not about the cottage cheese. It’s the same with everything. While I’ve accepted, to the immense sorrow of my steak-loving heart, that we pay double to triple than in the states for beef, because cattle really does have production challenges here so that it needs to be imported, in most cases there’s absolutely no good reason for any of this. Israel is a dairy empire. Our cows regularly win prizes for the yield and quality of their milk. Anyone trying to sell me any crap about the size of the market and economy of scale will get smacked. Ain’t no way it should be feasible for Muller to ship yogurts all the way over here and still be price-competitive. None. In related news: In the past year, five people in Israel joined the ranks of billionaires. Over 123,000 joined the ranks of the poor.
But the Goddess-cursed sheeple in this country don’t get it. They don’t get that it’s the occupation and the constant garrison-state mentality that perpetuates the unholy deal in which the major companies provide various clandestine services to the security apparatus (and jobs to any donkey that got tied long enough to the gate of a military base to retire as a colonel or better), and in return get the right to rape the populace and its sovereign resources with a sandpaper prophylactic. This started in Israel’s infancy, when the economy really was weak, and the socialist state needed to cut entrepreneurs all kinds of slack so that the invisible hand wouldn’t wither and die, and so that the populace would get some sort of services and goods. But now? Sheeeet.
This all ties in nicely with something from the previous dispatch. Remember Sami Ofer, the octogenarian billionaire who was shitlisted in the US for doing business with Iran, the Knesset debate on which was abruptly halted after the chairman was handed a mysterious note and who then promptly died (the tycoon, not the chairman) in the midst of the whole affair?
Well, he was being brought to rest at the Trumpledor St. cemetery, where like 90% of Israel’s founding fathers are buried, and where no common folk have been buried in decades. Somehow (gotta love the somehow), the Ofers were able to buy a plot or a few there some 20 years ago. So Sami’s procession is winding down Trumpledor street, near the beach, when suddenly, from one of the balconies, thunder the sounds of Hefner’s “The Day That Thatcher Dies“. Turns out that Alon Uziel, a clwnish “hipster” and semi-obscure music critic for major portal “Walla!”, decided to throw a little fuck-you party. He was even silly enough to write a blog post bragging about it, with footage and all. Most of my friends (myself included) felt this was highly childish and in terribly bad taste (although a surprising number of serious people felt otherwise), but we don’t pay Uziel’s freelancer fees. Walla does – or rather did, since it sent him a terse telegram (love the quaint touch there) terminating his “association” with the site, for the high felony of offending the mighty. This, of course, was enough to tilt most people – even those who found Uziel’s original stunt revolting – back in his favor.
A few days later billionaire Yithak Tshuva (the guy who threw a tantrum when the public demanded he pay a semi-fair tax on the oil he found off our coasts [the government originally gave him the concession to drill for a criminally low share of any profits], then launched a smear campaign accusing those in favor of the tax hike of trying to sell Israel economically to the Arabs) married off his son. This of course is fine. What isn’t fine is that he did this on public land in the Ben Shemen forest, which he occupied for ten days despite being turned down for approval by the authorities. I got married at Ben Shemen forest myself. My guy threw up a little hippie/Bedouin compound among some pine trees, it cost next to nothing and we occupied the land for less than 36 hours from setup to cleanup. We didn’t take over a huge chunk of land and bring in heavy machinery to smooth the ground and so the fuck on. Then came the cottage cheese thing. The wonderful Dror Fuer wrote the following in the financial paper Globes:
“They say we’re just jealous. Sure we are. When one of us faces ruin due to a kid’s root canal or a transmission replacement for his beat up jalopy, while one of them spends $2M on a single evening, while his friend is forgiven a $20M debt just because he deigned to buy a newspaper while selling another company to the Chinese, how shall our heart not fill with dark rage? When a young couple moves in with the folks because they can’t afford the rent or mortgage while the rich man buys another private jet, when I gaze sadly at a cup of cottage cheese at the supermarket as they compete for another discounted, privatized public asset, how shall we not be envious? When they are protected in their tax shelters while we can’t even write off our kids’ kindergartens – how shall we not clench our fists??”
In other words, suddenly many more people understand how normally mellow people can hate the rich fucks enough to shit on their funerals. It won’t stop there, either.
OK, that was long. Snapshots the rest of the way:
The judonazi faction among the settlers went on another of their little pogroms (which they call “price tags” and which are designed to harm the IDF and the government by forcing them to protect Ishmaelites), and torched a mosque near Ramallah. A few days later, the operators of the “Jewish Voice” website were detained for questioning in an operation that involved about 100 cops and stasi agents. Jewish Voice is the mouthpiece of the followers of a rabbi named Yitzhak Ginzburg, who is so hopped up on kabbalah his racism is completely off the charts (he has stated that there are no innocents among the Palestinian enemy, and has supported the “King’s Torah” book, published about 2 years ago, which sanctions the killing of babies if one “reasonably suspects” they might grow up to harm Jews.) This website has also been reporting, with uncanny insider dope, on the “price tag” attacks – kinda like the Hutu radio stations were “just reporting” on massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. But anyone who thought that the authorities were starting to take the budding krystalnacht kids seriously was soon disabused. The police categorically denied that any of the detainees was even suspected in connection with the arson. They also denied that the arrest had to do with a little scoop the Jewish Voice ran the day before, about a regional IDF commander keeping settler and religious-right soldiers away from certain activities – but this last sounds more likely. The Green Beast and the Stasi always get their panties in a bunch whenever media, especially non-conglomerate media, dares to make them look bad. So expect the price tags to keep on tagging.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak – the guy who dragged Labor to its worst election results ever, then effectively killed it by teaming with Nutanyahoo in the most right-wing and racist government this country has ever seen, then broke up the party and kept his four little midgets while the other Labor idiots finally managed to go cold turkey into opposition – he appears to be negotiating a merger with Likud, where he and two other lucky souls will be given safe spots in the party’s list for the next elections. You could see it coming a mile away, but still.
This is old, and my bad for leaving it on the cutting floor last time when it was fresh, but you gotta check this out. The religious disease in full effect.
For a new bit of “religion fucks with your mind” – remember Yithak Ginzburg? The guy who wants to kill Palestinian babies so they don’t endanger future good Jews? Well, he was troubled, as religious fucks are wont to do, by sins of the flesh, and by the wasting of manly vigor on the equally empty pursuits of pussy and jerking off. But fear not!
“if you fell in your lifetime into too much sex (whether in the form of self-abuse or abuse to others), don’t despair – become totally involved in overthrowing the contemporary, corrupt and anti-Torah political system. That’s the way to repair the damage you’ve done to yourself and others by misusing your sex drive. In Kabbalah we are taught that rectification must come from the very same psychological drive that brought about the damage.
So rectify sex with politics.”
In other words, if you’re a nebbishi yemenite student, hopelessly in love with the Ashkenazia chick with the pretty braid, and have sinned once too often by substituting your hand for her, don’t worry – here’s a gun, and there’s the PM, and….
IDF Chief of Staff Benny Ganz has decreed that the official mourning for fallen soldiers, Yizkor, will now read “May God remember the soldiers” rather than “May Am Israel (the People of Israel) remember”. It’s especially funny since he decreed that it should read “Elokim” and not Elohim. Elokim is what devout Jews say when they are mentioning their skydaddy casually and don’t want to profane the term. So not only is the common grief over fallen soldiers being denied to those who don’t care to involve Jehovah (whether because they’re agnostic, atheist, Druze…whatever) – but it’s not considered solemn enough to say “God” in full. Not Jehovah, mind. Not the explicit, forbidden name. Just the generic “God”.
And finally, on a pseudo-light-hearted note, 153 Israeli couples fell 11 short of a world record when they held a mass wedding in Cyprus. The reason all these Israelis tied the knot on the island is not a shared craving for souflaki and ouzo, but because for whatever reason, either one or both of each couple is not considered Jewish according to the orthodox establishment, and therefore can’t marry in Israel. There is no civil marriage in Israel, and if the medieval fucks from the rabbinate don’t like you or suspect the purity of your Aryan – sorry, I mean Jewish, of course! – blood, you may be in trouble, as this guy found out.
The Palestinian Fatah-Hamas “reconciliation” ceremony was called off for now, and we’ll talk September and UN votes next time. You can look up Tom Friedman’s latest (maybe not-that) silly suggestion on the matter on your own if you need a guffaw.
That’ll do it for now. WHU Airlines is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours. Please collect your senses and check your comments (and donations, if you’ve a mind) where appropriate. Thank you for flying the crazy skies.
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Democracy, Israel Style
Posted by: Rechavia Berman on: June 5, 2011
- In: Occupation
- 1 Comment
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the re-launch of The Weekend Holyland Update, coming to you live from the tranquil rural colony (“moshava”) of Karkur, Israel. Today we shall visit the realms of hypocrisy, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing – all of the glory that is Israel. Hang on tight, the captain has turned on the “no dogs and Arabs allowed” sign.
The big story this week was the sanctions imposed by the US government on Israel’s largest conglomerate, The Ofer Brothers Group, controlled by the (now suddenly deceased) Sami Ofer and his brother Yuli. The reason for these sanctions was the discovery that the Ofers had sold an oil tanker to Iran, in contravention of US-imposed sanctions on the Islamic regime of that country – sanctions that Israel of course is loudest in demanding, for fear of Iran’s purported nuclear weapons program.
So a big public uproar ensued here in the holy land, and a hearing on the matter was scheduled to be held at the Knesset’s Economy Committee. But 15 minutes into the hearing, chairman Carmel Shama (Likud) was handed a mysterious note, and promptly ended the hearing. This of course launched hours of twitter jokes, but the fact remains that in the so-called “Only Democracy In The Middle-East”[TM] pulled the plug on a hearing at its sovereign parliament because some shadow spook sent the committee chairman a secret note.
Just-recently retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who had already come out publicly in favor of the Ofers a day earlier, wrote an op-ed on Israel’s leading Internet portal, YNET, saying that it’s not illegal to trade with Iran (technically false, practically speaking sometimes true, depending on the whims of the authorities) and that Iran isn’t even considered an “enemy country” (false, it’s specifically referred to as such in several laws, including one that bans anyone who visited it from running for Knesset for seven years). Then, to change the subject and get the Ofers off the front pages, he went on to say it would be “stupid” to attack Iran and expressed grave concerns as to the judgment of PM Netanyahu* and Defense Minister Ehud Barak**. In addition, Dagan also said that Israel should have accepted the Saudi (Arab League) peace proposal, but then said that once it became an Arab League proposal it became “verboten”. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I know.
So the powers that be hit back through anonymous administration sources, who attacked Dagan as a “pompous” figure who is endangering national security in order to pave his way into national politics. While Dagan may be eyeing elected office as his next career (It’s either that or business for these guys after they’re done playing with guns), it seems that the anonymous sources (whom the media were only too happy to quote as such, as if these guys were courageous whistleblowers who faced some consequences from their bosses for speaking out) went a little too overboard. See, they criticized that he has failed, in his 8 year tenure, to stop the Iranian nuclear menace. Since Iran still doesn’t have nukes, I don’t see how this computes. Plus, I guess Stuxnet didn’t happen, and we didn’t whack all those Iranian nuclear scientists after all, and we didn’t whack Imad Mughniyah (only Hizballah’s very hard to replace #2 and chief of ops)… All on Dagan’s watch. I’ve heard of What Have You Done For Me Lately, but this is kinda ludicrous.
The noise didn’t stop there. On Saturday evening, as the remnants of the Israeli left were protesting in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square and citing Dagan’s words, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe “Boogie” Ye’elon (Likud) blasted Dagan, saying that “If as a result of Dagan’s statements the public begins to doubt the judgment of the country’s leaders – that is undoubtedly detrimental to national security”. Ye’elon, who has managed to have an illustrious career and rose to the position of IDF Chief of Staff despite suffering from a severe disorder known as caecomentis***, went on to say that “I think that it is democratically improper to criticize elected officials”. Got that? Only Democracy in the Mid-East, baby! (Update: Now they’re talking about trying him for exposing state secrets. This just gets better).
As mentioned above, the Israeli left held a rally, on the 44th anniversary of the start of the 6-Day War, to call FOR the establishment of a Palestinian state (i.e. for relinquishing the territorial conquest achieved in that war). There was all sorts of fine talk (although not fine enough for some, who were disappointed by the lack of talk of refugees, right of return and BDS). However, all the political entities represented at the rally maybe – maybe – total 30 Knesset seats, or 1/4 of the electorate. And that’s optimistic. The one party that says it supports a 2-state solution and has a chance in hell of forming a government after the next elections, Kadima, was conspicuously absent. I understand that Kadima, which makes its living in the “mainstream Zionist” sector, didn’t want to be seen supporting a rally where people were waving Palestinian flags and shit, but there’s a way around that. Here’s what Tzippi Livni, the utterly ineffectual Chairperson of the Opposition, could have said (based on her world-view, not mine):
“It was not easy for me to attend this rally tonight. While I fully support your right to wave Palestinian flags and all sorts of extremist signs, I must confess that I neither approve nor agree. To me, the Palestinian flag is the emblem of an enemy, and brings to mind senseless slaughter and hatred of Jews for being Jews. However, peace is made with one’s enemies.
Some people may rejoice at the establishment of a Palestinian state, and contemplate the yielding of lands of the utmost historical significance to the Jewish people with joy and even glee. Some people may feel nothing at the prospect of making concessions in the very heart of Jewish national consciousness, in Jerusalem. I am NOT among them. It is only with the heaviest heart, and under the most undeniable necessity, that I am willing to take such measures.
But I did come here tonight, and I came to say that despite this heavy heart, and all misgivings and doubts I may harbor as to the good intentions of our Palestinian neighbors, I do indeed agree that it is in Israel’s own vital interest to make this sacrifice and complete the partition to which we agreed when we asked the world to grant us the irrevocable right to a homeland of our own. Much as I would love nothing better than to maintain Israeli sovereignty over our historical heartlands, and over our eternal capital and its vicinity to the fullest extent, a clear-headed analysis of the needs of our nation at this point in history demand that we set aside those wishes and support the creation of an independent Palestine alongside Israel, for that is the only way to defang the increasing voices doubting our own right to independence and sovereignty.
We can no longer exist as an occupying force over a people not much smaller than our own, even if we regard the lands on which they sit as rightfully ours. Nor can we annex those lands and accord their inhabitants full Israeli citizenship as that enjoyed by our one million Arab citizens west of the Green Line, for that would destroy us in another way. We must make this hard choice, and we must make it proactively and not wait for the world to force it down our throats. The government of Israel must immediately enter into sincere and intensive talks with the Palestinian Authority, aimed at turning this authority into a sovereign nation, with mutually agreed borders and necessary security arrangements. We must do it because WE choose to, from a position of strength and not be dragged kicking and screaming in a manner that will deprive us of all bargaining power. This is why I have come here tonight. For the sake of Israel and no-one else. Thank you.”
(Tzippi honey? That was a free sample. Call me when you realize how useless your current speechwriters are.)
OK, this got really long, so we’ll end with a quick roundup of racism, ethnic cleansing and xenophobia items:
MK Tzippi Hotovely (Likud) proposed a bill that would forbid any official refernce to places in “Jerusalem” (including the occupied east side, 16 acres of which never was part of any Jerusalem in history but was annexed to the municipal borders of Jerusalem after 1967) by their Arab names, and would require all media to use only Hebraized names, even for Arab neighborhoods which no-one calls by their trumped-up Hebrew names. Hotovely, a rabid racist, cited David Ben Gurion as saying “we have no need of things that smell of Arabia”. Which is nice, appealing to venerated authority and all, but Hotovely should remember that Ben Gurion also referred to the parents of her BFF, MK Danny Danon, as “human dust”, and I’m sure he’d have nice things to say about Georgian Jews (such as Hotovely) as well. As my man Eddie Murphy once said: You wanna believe the stereotypes, you better believe ALL them shits…
Interior Minister Eli Yishai, he of the war against the children of migrant workers, is pushing a measure that would allow him to deport children of foreign laborers – EVEN WHEN THE OTHER PARENT IS A (JEWISH) ISRAELI CITIZEN. Paging Eli Yishai: Hitler says he’s proud of you and asks when you’re coming over to do a Sabbath with him. Don’t keep the guy waiting, dude.
The State of Israel apparently wants an Intifada of its Bedouin (IDF serving) citizens. There’s no other explanation for the blatant war it is pursing against them. Early last week there was a news report that contrary to earlier agreements, which would leave most of the “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the Negev in place, recognize them and connect them to infrastructure, the state now intends to uproot about 40% of the Negev’s Bedouins (about 30 thousand people) and force them to move into a small “pale of settlement” in the failed Bedouin shanty towns created in the 70’s. Then the other shoe dropped, when another report came that one of these unrecognized village, slated to be evacuated because it was physically impossible (or at least practically unfeasible) to hook it up to infrastructure, would indeed be evacuated – only to be replaced, on the very same spot, by a community habitat for Jews – which it is now magically possible to hook up to water and power. And some people still doubt the inherent superiority of Jews. What more proof do you need???
OK, this has all been superseded by time of posting by the typical overkill reaction of the IDF to the Naksa**** Day demonstrations. I hope to post on that tomorrow. I also hope to update this post with links, because the links I have for these items are all in Hebrew and I have no time to look for the corresponding English ones now. I’m hopelessly behind on both sleep and paying work as it is.
Thank you for flying the crazy skies with WHU airlines. The WHU is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours.Please check your comments below, where you will also find a button allowing you to make a contribution and keep your humble debt-ridden correspondent out of complete financial collapse and loss of Internet connection. Thank you kindly in advance.
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* The man who this fine family feature likes to call “The Baron Von Bibhausen”
** Known to my Hebrew readers as “Napoleon Bonakirov”, Akirov being the name of the nouveau-riche high rise where Barak, as leader of the Israeli Labor Party, lived in an $11M condo)
*** Shit for brains (Latin)
**** Like Nakba, which denotes the catastrophe suffered by the Palestinians in 1948, Naksa denotes the defeat of 1967.
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