Yossi Sarid

In the past year, between Tisha B'Av and Tisha B'Av, the prophets of wrath and the prophecies of destruction have multiplied.

The ultra-Orthodox parties have been disconnecting the terminally ill patient from the life support machines. This is not mercy killing, it's deduction killing: They're deducting from the state education system and adding to the ultra-Orthodox education.

American Jews have recently placed themselves on the front line of assistance for Darfur. They have promised to neither rest nor remain silent until it is redeemed.

Just as not every citizen can be defense minister, we may soon find out that not every citizen can be education minister.

Those who are busying themselves with boycotts and ostracism would have acted more rationally and fairly if they had first boycotted the products of their own country.

No, it is not good to die. But if nevertheless that is our fate, then it is better to die for our country, which does not care so much about us, and all of this is on the condition that we die as soldiers, and not as civilians.

There is nothing wrong with doing business and making a profit, but we expect someone with a great deal of wealth, like Barak, to show a great deal of concern for his subjects as well.

Judging by the results of the first round of the primary, and barring a last-minute change, we can already predict the general elections; they will be elections of warmed-over soup.

There is no nation in the world that doesn't attribute superior qualities to itself, and inferior ones to other nations.

On second thought, the heart reveals to the mouth that it's better for our leaders to continue traveling in their sleeper car, as on a night trip to Sderot. One can never know when the harm they do is worse: in their sleep or while awake; sleep and slumber, keeper of Israel.

The napping syndrome is beginning to look endemic, like a contagious disease transmitted by the tsetse fly in Africa. A whole government fell asleep in the hot summer.

Israel is not Soviet Russia, thank God, and thus has no Solzhenitsyns, but it also does not have a great many Rostropoviches. People are not thrown into a dungeon for protesting here, but sometimes they are thrown into a pit.

Disdain spells the end for a politician, and therefore there is not much importance to the question as to when exactly the end will come; it?s already here.

This year, I am ashamed to admit, I was less emotional. Independence Day was shrouded in a surreal haze.

History teaches us that lawbreakers bring disaster upon movements of national liberation.

What more can be said in praise of the family that hasn't already been said? From it we emerge and to it we return, and to it we will give a reckoning, even on the state of our bank account. The family is also our life, it will rescue us from every trouble and it really has rescued quite a number of important people on whose heads masses of troubles have fallen of late. Their families are their atonement.

There is no special reason to remember, and so I will recall a sin: I am the minister who appointed the Winograd Committee that examined tuition in the institutions of higher learning.

Daniel the justice minister has been thrown into the foxes' den. Yet, it is difficult to fathom why a genius like Friedmann is prepared to be the tail of "the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines."

If the leadership of Moses was based on a great vision of saving a nation from its oppressors, the leadership of Pharaoh was based on a petty accounting of how to profit from the enslavement of another nation.

Every soldier killed has a name, which was given to him by his father and his mother, and it is their right to determine the name of the war that buried their son and left them with a dog tag.

The country is inundated with nostalgia for the previous state comptrollers. True, they aren?t succeeding all that well in explaining how precisely in their time the rotten apples piled up in the crate.

Something important has happened in the United Kingdom. Prince Harry, 22, the younger son of Crown Prince Charles and the late Diana, plans to take part in the war in Iraq as a platoon commander.

When the uniforms are doffed and the masks of secrecy are lifted, the truth is exposed and the heroes are naked, sometimes. How long will Israel, as opposed to Denmark, be a land flowing with disappointment and sour milk.

Israeli teachers earn much less than their colleagues in all other developed countries. They are at the bottom of the international salary scale, but the expectations of them are sky-high.

It is no wonder that responsibility is now seeking its owners. It is simply passing over the heads of our leaders; it is high and they are as low as grasshoppers.