worship the glitch

"The newly elected Netanyahu, presiding over a precarious coalition that seats the centrist Labor party with the right-wing zealots of Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beytenu party, needed some ploy to stall re-engaging the Palestinians, an untenable prospect considering his hawkish campaign promises and the unstable alliance that is his cabinet. Looking back in time, he found the same canard he touted a decade ago, that of demanding some sort of recognition as a precondition to negotiations.

But whereas the old demand - recognizing Israel’s right to exist - was understandable, the new one - recognizing Israel as a Jewish state - is ludicrous. Writing in Ha’aretz, Israeli columnist Gideon Levy captured the demand’s idiocy in full glory when he suggested mockingly that Netanyahu might as well have thrown in a demand for the Palestinians to recognize the Sabbath as the Jewish people’s day of rest, or recognize the religious laws that prohibit Jews from eating leaven during Passover.

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