Marinating in the milk and honey of Israeli hyperbole

As you might expect, the “sermon near the Mount”, as delivered by Donald Trump to the Knesset in Jerusalem, was less a case of “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God” as “Blessed are you lot to have me, and you will call me your peacemaker.”

- SEAN O'GRADY

With the exception of a heckler rapidly dispatched by the parliamentary guards (Trump, naturally, was impressed by their “efficiency”), the various Israeli statesmen on parade seemed to be in some sort of competition to heap the most sycophantic praise on a prophet who, it must be said, differs from Jesus Christ in several crucial respects.

Benjamin Netanyahu called him Israel’s greatest friend ever in the White House, nominated him, again, for the Nobel Peace Prize, and said he should also get his own nation’s greatest honour, the Israel Prize, though you suspect Trump wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than the freehold on the entire state of Israel, brimming with “potential” as he put it. The speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana, even compared Trump’s stature to Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king who lived two and a half thousand years ago and freed the Jews from Babylonia. (The Israelite prophet Isaiah claimed Cyrus as a messiah, by the way.)