Word: gilboa
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...Still, most Israelis, according to political scientist Eytan Gilboa from Bar-Ilan university in Tel Aviv, will give Obama high marks for his reassurance of an "unbreakable" bond between Israel and the U.S. and for his criticism of those Muslims, such as Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who deny the Holocaust. "But Israelis will need to be convinced that they'll be living next to a Palestinian state that isn't Hamastan," says Gilboa, adding, "It seemed like Iran's nuclear issue was low on his priorities, and that's a main problem not just for Israelis but Arabs...
...nation of Gilboa, led by King Silas Benjamin (Ian McShane) - based on the Bible's Saul - has been at war for generations, most recently with neighboring Gath. His son Jack (Sebastian Stan) is taken hostage at the front but is rescued by David Shepherd (Chris Egan), who destroys a supposedly invincible Gath tank - a "Goliath," natch - by slinging a grenade duct-taped to a wrench. David is called to court in the gleaming new capital, Shiloh, where the cunning Silas parades him as a hero and eyes him as a potential rival...
...thoughtful, he makes Kings' quasi-biblical declamations seem natural - as well as the idea that a First World Western country would be run by a tyrant in pinstripes, selected as King by God, who made a crown of butterflies alight on his head as a sign of divine mandate. (Gilboa's emblem is a butterfly, a symbol made unexpectedly ominous by its resemblance to an upside-down NBC peacock.) (See the top 10 TV series...
...cleaned-up version of Manhattan - is stunning. You're lulled by familiarity, then rattled by reminders - say, a scribe following on Silas' heels, scribbling hagiography on a tablet computer - that this is a very different place. But some of creator Michael Green's inventions are puzzling or simplistic. Gilboa and Gath have modern armies, so why are they facing off across trenches as if it were World War I? (Apparently so that David can have dramatic moments walking across enemy lines.) Gilboa is an advanced capitalist state, so how can Silas be manipulated by his brother-in-law (Dylan Baker...
...these faults - and Kings' taste for melodramatic cheese, slathered with an overheated operatic score - when McShane is onstage. But Egan's David is an upstanding stiff, and when Egan gets a McShanian monologue at the end of the two-hour pilot, he sounds ridiculous. The subplots involving Jack and Gilboa's gilded nightlife play like a bad marriage of The Tudors and Gossip Girl...