Yom Kippur is coming soon.  After that, the Israeli election.  It’s possible the order should be reversed, we’ll see.

In any case, as with every year, I’ll have plenty of sins to repent for.  My ribs may break from being beaten. Tellingly, though, we Jews atone collectively, the confessional is in the plural.  I’m not sure if “imperialism” is in the Al Chait, but — especially since October 7 — it should be, because we are indeed imperialists, just not in the way the kaffiyeh-clad students at Columbia claim.

No, we’re intellectual imperialists.  Our sin is the arrogance of our assumptions, the notion that others, specifically the Palestinians, think like we do, want what we want, and have the same priorities.

Wrong.  On all fronts.

So hopefully by Neilah this year my old illusions will slumber behind closing gates.  If so, my primary “agent of awakening” will be Einat Wilf, former Member of Knesset from Labor, having served Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo Accords.  Now Wilf is a roving — though never raving — advocate of “let’s get real” with regard to the conflict.

Joining her as co-author of some of her books (the latest, October Return) is Adi Schwartz, who used to write and edit for Haaretz, no less.  In other words, if Israel held a “fallen leftists” competition, these two would top the podium.

And what was the cliff they fell off of?  The belief that there were Palestinian moderates, of which there may be a few, but not many, or not nearly enough, which was proven not so much by the murderers and rapists and flesh-burners of October 7 — we knew Hamas was barbaric — but by the jubilation and ululations that greeted the terrorists when they returned to Gaza’s streets, and the relative silence, later lamely broken, by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

And so, a reckoning is called for, a reordering of things.  To that end, Einat Wilf has formed the Oz Party (in Hebrew “oz” means boldness, courage) and is standing for........

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