Is Israel Beyond Saving – or Worth it?
“Israeli spies have done more harm and have damaged the United States more than the intelligence agents of all other countries on earth combined…They are the gravest threat to our national security.” – Admiral Bobby Iman, former Deputy Director of the CIA
I have been reading Uri Avnery for many years now, the old sage and liberal conscience of Israel. In his 91st year now, Uri started out as a fourteen-year-old courier for the Irgun, but left them when he was old enough to disapprove of their methods. He has been an active Zionist for 77 years.
When I began doing Heritage TV work in Atlanta I always enjoyed working with what I called the “golden oldies” talent — those who not only watched world events but participated in them. They were light years beyond the book knowledge crowd, because their whole lives had been a non-stop educational experience. Many had been WWII veterans who then went on to have incredible careers, but not always publicly known ones.
Uri became my expert in internal Israeli politics due to his vast experience. After serving and being wounded in the 1948 war, he went into journalism and migrated into the Knesset for ten years in 1965 when Ben Gurion was still in the game. And troublemaker he was, being assaulted on several occasions and seriously stabbed once.
The lock down in the American Press toward any criticism of Israel is so total that it includes never republishing anything from the Israeli media where Zionists fight tooth and nail constantly over everything imaginable with their hardball, take no prisoners politics.
As a long time opponent of the Israeli hard Right and Netanyahu Likuds, when I wanted to know what new outrages they were involved in, I would watch for Uri’s columns. And so it was when Bibi finally bootstrapped another coalition together from Israel’s fractious multiparty system, the bad news from Uri came with the foreboding title, “Who can save Israel?”
