Making the gravy train (gondola?) run on time

Israel has successfully followed the United States in throwing away all the sympathy gained for it by terrorist acts against it. We sure don’t need to see another news interview with an Israeli teenager saying how it isn’t even safe to drink lattes at a cafe anymore, when people in the West Bank are without water.

When Ariel Sharon offered Arafat a one-way ticket to Beirut, I thought what I’m sure we all thought: “Man, what a crappy travel agent he’d make.” So you have to wonder who’s Colin Powell’s travel agent, as he makes his way slowly to Israel by way of Morocco, Spain and possibly Tahiti. In Morocco they asked him if he was lost, shouldn’t he be in Israel? His response is unrecorded, but I like to think it was “I came to Casablanca for the waters.”

Did you know that Israel is the only recipient of US foreign aid that gets it all at once in January, rather than paid in instalments? Not that Bush would threaten the funding (which I understand is now mostly military aid), but he couldn’t if he wanted to.

Sharon has been quietly gathering right-wing nuts for the winter, adding 2 religious right parties to his cabinet in case Labor develops a backbone and quits. It might have been nice if some of the media had told us what their positions are, but I assume pretty ghastly, given that they’re supposed to push to the right a cabinet that already includes advocates of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Arab states and Palestinians need to recognize Israel, but no one ever says what that means. I’ve said this before, but not in a few years, so it bears repeating: what is there to recognize? Israel has no borders; I mean, even Israel couldn’t tell you what it’s borders are supposed to be. It has no constitution, but has essentially been a self-selecting body, setting the rules as it goes along for the choosing of its successors. You could say the same thing about Britain, but it’s not quite the same thing. How about the Israeli population? Well, Sharon would exclude from that Palestinians who actually lived there but were expelled by military force and terror, but include, potentially, me and any other Jew in the world. Recognize Israel, I’m not even sure there is such a thing.