It turns out his general, Ariel Sharon, had hijacked the Israeli army and invaded Beirut without initial permission to do so. A lot of Sharon's soldiers would fight in Lebanon during the weekday and return on weekends to surround his house, chanting against the war in Lebanon.

Lionel Rolfe

But I said to myself that as important as Israel is, I was not going to be forced to follow the likes of Jewish facists like Begin, Shamir and Sharon -- whose ideological mentor Vladmir Jabotinsky admired Mussolini's kind of politics, but not Hitler's, only because Hitler hated Jews whereas Mussolini was much more laissez faire with his Jew hatred.

So convulted were the Jabotinsky's allegiances, forces identified with him sided with the Nazis against the Communists in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Perhaps I had asked for the kind of trouble I had with the Christian thugs. For I had quite publicly refused to attend a Christmas play at Woodrow Wilson High School, objecting because, as a Jew, I was being forced to listen to another religion's propoganda.

The principal told me that this was a Christian country, and I had better get used to that.

Later I edited, for nearly a decade, the B'nai Brith Messenger, the third oldest newspaper in Los Angeles. It was a Jewish paper, and had my grandmother lived to see me in such an exalted position, she would have been very proud. My grandmother read the Messenger for many years -- read every line of it.

Now suddenly Israel's strongest supporters are the likes of Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson or the Bushes, folks whose natural inclination would be to hang Jews because they are too liberal and somehow satanic.

Or chase them through back alleys and curse them as Christ Killers or perhaps kill them in pogroms.

Or stab them in the back to please the Saudis.

The likes of Nixon, Reagan and Bush triumphed -- and the result looks dangerously like It Is Happening Here.

Same in Israel.

It looked like Rabin and Arafat were putting together something through the peace process when Rabin got shot. All during that period, Binyamin Netanyahu was giving speeches to his right-wing followerspractically urging Israelis to kill Rabin. When one of their numbers pulledthe trigger, the right was rewarded with the leadership of Israel.

It used to be a novel way of running an election. Kill anyone who might accomplish something and put the thugs in charge of everything. Meanwhile a very few million Jews are surrounded by a sea of angry Arabs -- people who have every right to be pissed off at the likes of a Sharon.

The world has become a bit of a nightmare, I fear. And not just for Jews.

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