Eric Margolis referred last year to the long-ago observation by Arthur Koestler that Israel risked becoming a nasty Sparta-style warlike regime, hated, hyper aggressive, ruleless and souless.
Koestler was born poor in 1905, 120 years ago this month. A Hungarian Jew and a writer, he bounced around for a while, living for a short time in Palestine (the British Mandate) in 1926, and then working in Berlin for the infamous Russian Zionist Vladimir (later called Ze’ev) Jabotinsky.....
.....Americans don’t like to believe they are little more than helots, because being serf or slave to a foreign power is obviously contrary to our own founding mythology.
So maybe the question is not what to do when your best friend is a nasty Spartan, but what do you do when you realize he views you, your family and country, and your political and military infrastructure as part of their serviceable, if not particularly bright, helotry?
