Welcome to the Weekday Holyland Update, Flight 120209, Primordial Fear edition. Our tour today will fly over the realms of taboo expunging rituals, the suicidal two-step, a desperate ploy by a forgotten hack, political witch-hunts and Judicial arrogance. Please fasten your seatbelts as we are entering a pocket of para-physical activity.

Remember I told you about the Jehovah patients of the black coat persuasion, who are protesting the very limited (and utterly unavoidable, and been going on for 24 god fornicating years) employment of workers on the Sabbath at Intel's microchip plant on the outskirts of Jerusalem? Well, some of our sane brethren had enough. So they decided to remind the jehovahists how easy it would be to inconvenience them and disrupt their way of life right back by simply declaring ourselves aggrieved enough to exploit their myriad taboos and superstitions. Some of the means were coarse if effective - filling the streets of a nearby ultra orthodox neighborhoods (where most of the rioters come from) with porno leaflets and painting some nasty, explicit graffiti about the leader of the "Haredi Congregation" who is behind the latest round of tantrums. But one ploy was pretty brilliant, and bears repeating: They wrote the full name of Jehovah in Hebrew on the pavement of the road leading out from the ultra-orthodox self-imposed ghetto.

Why is this brilliant? Because according to Jehovahist taboo rituals, the explicit name of the daemon in written form (YHWH) may neither be desecrated nor erased. Which means all the daemon-fearing yids can't leave the hood. What to do? The finest minds of jehovahism deliberated furiously for three hours - during which traffic at the intersection stood still, as enforced by the police - till they came up with a brilliant solution! A non-Jewish child of under 13 was fetched from a nearby kosher slaughterhouse, where he works (all in strict compliance with labor laws, I'm sure...), equipped with a bucket of paint and sent to climb a large tree overlooking the offensive inscription. Boy then drizzled the paint onto the leaves and branches, from which it indirectly dripped onto the letters, eventually obscuring them till it was safe to trample them without pissing sky-daddy off. No word on how or whether the boy was compensated.

No, I ain't making this up. I'm just gonna let that speak for itself. See what I have to put up with?

In other news, our Minister of Culture ^{(irony is dead alert)}, Limor Livnat, made a desperate attempt to return to the national radar by stuffing her foot firmly in her mouth. Livnat, speaking to Likud activists, forgot that her profession is not about speaking her hearts inner truth and said something about how poor Bibi got stuck with "A horrible US administration". Bibi was quick to distance himself, saying Livnat "doesn't speak for him". Um, bubba - she's a minister in your damn cabinet, so yeah, she pretty much does. But Bibi's in enough trouble with the Sicarii faction who want to piss in the world's face, so he can't can the stupid Livnat, even though she's from his own party and it wouldn't cost him coalition-wise.

Reason the Sicarii are upset with Bibi is his rhetorically unprecedented, yet practically empty declaration of a construction freeze in the settlements. Of course, it all depends on the the meaning of the words "settlement", "construction", "freeze", and "is". The freeze doesn't apply to any of the "unified Jerusalem" (more on that in a sec). It also doesn't apply to "public structures" in the other settlements, cause hey, schools, and synagogues, and ritual baths, and so on and so forth still need to be built, plus those are convenient for settlers to stage a sit-in at.

So Bibi is shocked that his grand, unprecedented gesture wasn't accepted rapturously by either Ramallah or Washington, whereas the right-wing here declared itself once again disillusioned, disenchanted and totally not friends anymore with the Bibster. So now Bibi, ever the panicker, feels the need to mollify the right: "Don't worry, it's a limited, one time thing. At the end of the ten months we'll go back to building" - because obviously we won't have made any deal to give any of it back, so c'mon, what's a few months between friends? Answered the right wing: Save it, two-face. So now comes more backtracking, and 84 residential buildings on occupied land outside of "Jerusalem" will still get the go-ahead.

Concurrently, building inspectors have been attacked over the past two days upon arriving in settlements to oversee the pretense of a construction freeze. Civil war, here we come.

Speaking of Jerusalem, the European Union is threatening to throw a fascinating monkey wrench in the works by recognizing East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinians. Loyal readers of this fine and educational feature (all six of 'em) know that Israel conquered an "East Jerusalem" from Jordan covering six square kilometers, and has turned that into 72 square kilometers, which Israel has annexed outright (unlike the rest of the West Bank, which is formally occupied, and not annexed). Now when you say "Jerusalem" to the average Jew, they stand up on their hind legs - kinda the same as the average Muslim Arab's reaction to "al-Quds". However, far too few Jewish Israelis know that what's being sold to them as "Jerusalem" that "has been united" and "must never be divided again", includes dozens of villages that have never ever been part of Jerusalem.

Anyway, if the EU goes through with its threat, that may mean the death knell of any Israeli hope to keep any of the Jewish neighborhoods built east of the 1967 border line - neighborhoods which are still considered consensus even among many left wingers (and which could have easily preserved in their entirety as late as 10 years ago). If Israel doesn't wake up and smell the coffee, it will lose control of the holy basin as well.

Apropos Europe, there was a big brouhaha this week when some right wing MK's "exposed" that the EU and European governments donate millions of euros every year, the vast majority of which go to left wing-oriented organizations. Most of these are straight-up human rights orgs, but some are more partisan. Thing is, the wingnuts are all aghast "what??? a foreign government donating money to groups aiming to change policy in another country?!! And what kind of traitors accept money like that?!?!?" - like Israel doesn't do just that in the US and many other countries... (but in our case it's for a just cause!!!)

Remember last time I had a good word for our Chief Justice, Mrs. Dorit Beinish? Well, that's over. Beinish got all high and mighty - and mendacious - when she as head of a panel of judges turned down an appeal demanding that the details of the deal to release Gilad Shalit from captivity be released, which was filed on the grounds that there can't very well be any public discourse about the deal if its very details are kept under wraps. "There is no deal yet, so there's nothing to publish", said Beinish, clinging to the fact that there are still a few dozen disputed names, out of around a thousand. Another excuse was that the German mediator between us and Hamas would quit if the details were published. Well, excuse me, then.

Finally, remember how the Chief of Staff of the great and mighty Israel Defense Forces  got embarrassed a coupla times over recent months, first with his credit card number being stolen from his desk, then with a pistol being jacked from his drawer? Well, bad news keeps coming for the troubled little military outpost known as the chambers of the Man In Charge. His bodyguard was arrested on charges of brutally raping a woman outside a club - two days prior to his scheduled wedding, no less (nuptials postponed, natch). Victim failed to pick him out of a photo array, but from accounts of the confrontation at the pigsty, she seemed in little doubt he was the guy who violated her. Porkers say they got plenty of forensics on the guy even without the victim ID'ing him. We'll see. Our breed of porkers don't have a high cred quotient. As Frank Lopez told Tony Montana in "Scarface": "A Chazir is a pig that don't fly straight". Sounds like our local breed of bacon. They tend to wear blue.

And on that gastro-sartorial note I will now return you to your own familiar brands of crazy - which, as noted in this space before, if not looking like a cakewalk in comparison, I would strongly advise relocation. WHU airlines is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours. Please collect your luggage and check your comments and thumbs. Thank you for flying the crazy skies.