Thursday, October 08, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
Elah Valley, Philistine-Israelite border region, October 8 - A rhetorical confrontation between a Philistine warrior champion and his opponents, led by Saul, king of Israel, concluded this morning with the former emerging as the clear favorite in the eyes of potential voters, a series of surveys has found.
Goliath, a giant who has taunted the Israelites for several days, continued his jibes against the Hebrews and their God today, with the Israelites barely able to muster a retort. The Philistine warrior dared his foes to send a single combatant to face him instead of settling the conflict with a full-scale battle, a challenge that Saul and his military commanders have so far not accepted. Polls showed the Philistine warrior leading the Israelites by and average of 11% two days ago, and the gap has only increased in the interim, growing to 24.3% as of the unanswered challenge this morning.
Analysts expect a landslide Philistine victory. "Voters know a strong candidate when they see one," explained Doe Egg, an electoral statistician. "The Israelites' inability so far to mount an effective response to counter Goliath's arguments has only hurt them. Some experts believed that ignoring his barbs might make them seem above the fray and the Philistines uncultured and immature, but those analyses failed to account for the visceral resonance Goliath's talk produces. If the numbers hold when voters go to the polls officially, were looking at the Israelites being lucky to garner even forty percent of the votes. That's landslide territory. It's hard to see how Saul and his camp will recover from this development at this stage, let alone close the gap that already existed before the debate."
The Israelite king has struggled to maintain morale among his constituents and loyalists as Goliath has landed rhetorical punch after rhetorical punch. Saul has had to allocate manpower and resources to stem the hemorrhaging of voters, instead of to rebutting Philistine talking points or criticizing Goliath's record or policy proposals, let alone putting forth a positive vision of the future he seeks to create.
As spokesman for the Israelite campaign sought to downplay the significance of the debate. "There are plenty of hours until that actual contest, and a lot can change in that time, and besides, people overstate the impact of debates on these things, since the vast majority of voters have made up their minds," insisted Abner ben-Ner of the royal Chiefs of Staff.
A last-minute write-in campaign in Israelite ranks seeks to name David, a shepherd from Hebron and the youngest of eight brothers, as champion. Experts consider the effort a long shot.
Khalil Abd al-Khaliq Dweikat, 21, was apprehended Wednesday afternoon after an incident in which police allege he injured a Jewish man and an Israeli Arab in a stabbing attack; the Jew later died of his injuries. After an initial period of isolation and interrogation, the alleged perpetrator requested that his attorney assure the public he perpetrated the killing ironically, and demanded that they not make the mistake of thinking him a bourgeois mainstream drone who just does what society expects; in fact he imitates that behavior in an effort to mock it.
Tehran, August 21 - Diplomacy and politics are all about compromise. Both arts require flexibility, creative thinking, and efforts to craft win-win situations in which all parties to the issue can walk away with a compelling argument that they gain from the outcome. Iran therefore proposes the following: the Islamic Republic will depart from its long-held position that Israel has no right to exist, and will grant full recognition of the Jewish State, and in return, that Jewish State will concede to our eliminating it by violent means.
Bialystock Ghetto, August 13 - Authorities mandated this week that the Jews of this city elect delegates to a council that will represent the community in its dealings with the German occupation administration, sparking a campaign by several dozen prominent Jewish figures to serve on the council, with one ambitious man boasting that he possesses unparalleled abilities in pointless efforts to delay, soften, or otherwise thwart in some measure the inevitable genocide on the horizon.
Damascus, July 23 - Cryptozoologists and other enthusiasts of paranormal phenomena have begun including Assad regime claims of thwarted Israeli airborne operations in their logs of unconfirmed-but-definitely-real incidents, opening a new realm in which the credulous can enjoy the sense of superiority and insider status born of knowing something most other people are too closed-minded to accept.
B'nei B'rak, July 16 - Residents of this entirely-ultra-orthodox city, the second-most-impoverished in the nation according to Central Bureau of Statistics data, possess no knowledge that by dint of their membership in the Jewish people they control global finances, and media, a new study reports.
Rome, July 9 - Leaders of the world's largest Christian denomination have commissioned a study to determine whether the body's ages-old ambition to convince adherents of the Mosaic faith to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and as their savior from Original Sin might meet more success with Jesus not in the role of the divine incarnate - a notion anathema to longstanding Hebraic sensibilities - but in a form of proven palatability to prominent, if not large, swaths of progressive Jews: opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland.
New York, July 3 - Yesterday's series of protests in solidarity with Palestine and against Israeli annexation of Palestinian land attracted so many attendees that at our best-attended event, 
Jerusalem, June 25 - Impending legislation to remove criminal penalties for possession of marijuana has led a group of concerned scientists to caution against the move, given the paucity in Israel of decent baked goods of the type often eaten following use of the drug, representatives of the group stated today.
Tel Aviv, June 4 - Israeli secret intelligence officials and agents scrambled today to mitigate damage that resulted since late last week when a maintenance worker unintentionally activated a machine that set in motion violent outbreaks in many major American urban centers and several smaller locales, an anonymous spokesman for the agency disclosed Thursday.
Tel Aviv, May 21 - Document leaks from within an Israeli intelligence organization revealed this week that longstanding animosity from surrounding Arab states, by those states' own accounts an expression of opposition to Jewish sovereignty on land they consider Arab Muslim, in fact occurs as the intentional product of a secret Israeli propaganda campaign to prevent people from those neighboring countries from wanting to get to the Jewish state to escape the oppression and misery they face in their own lands.
