Israel is the only sovereign state whose destruction international society will excuse
Please read it all:
“If you take a trip overseas
Tuck your Star of David into your shirt
It’s dangerous if they know you’re from here.
If they ask you, say you’re from Greece
Say you’re from Sudan
So they don’t make trouble for you.”
- translated from the Tea Packs song “Neshika Le’Dod”
A few years ago, on a family holiday in London, we spent an afternoon watching the street performers at Covent Garden - fire-eaters, trick-cyclists, jugglers. One of the better acts, a young man with a mop of dirty blond hair and an Edwardian tweed jacket, combined the three skills for his raucously applauded finale, juggling fire-torches and dousing them in his mouth while mounted atop a particularly precarious unicycle. Earlier in his routine, already sky-high on the bike,he had called out for a volunteer to throw three sticks up to him - fat-bodied juggling clubs, I believe they’re called - and my young sweet son had been the first in the sizable crowd to raise his hand and been selected. The juggler called down and asked him his name, he obliged, and then the juggler asked where he was from. I felt my heart skip a beat. I’d seen Israel demonized on the pages of some of the heavyweight newspapers during the trip, noticed nasty anti-Israel books prominently displayed in central London bookstores, and heard from Jewish friends about the steadily rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents. When my son said “Israel,” I truly feared the crowd would boo him. They didn’t. Some of them appeared puzzled and the juggler nearly fell off his unicycle, but that was because the information didn’t compute. My son looks more Scandinavian than Semitic. “Israel?” the juggler queried. “Israel,” the boy repeated confidently. The juggler shrugged his shoulders (as much as one can atop a unicycle), the act continued, and I heaved a silent sigh of relief. I wonder whether a London crowd would react serenely today. I wonder because the anti-Semitic tide has risen far higher in the last few years, and especially in the last few months,[…]