In one of the most virulent attacks on the IDF in recent memory, Ha'aretz's senior diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn penned an article published in The Washington Post on August 18 in which he accused former Chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz specifically and IDF commanders generally of responsibility for the war. In Benn's view, the IDF's definition of the…
A hundred and forty years ago, on August 22, 1862, US president Abraham Lincoln commented about the nature of the American Civil War in a letter published in the Washington Intelligencer newspaper. His draft letter contained a sentence which James Welling, the newspaper's editor edited out because he considered it too common and folksy for his "dignified" publication. The president…
On Sunday morning, November 3, 1968, the IDF General Staff was presented for the first time with COS Haim Bar Lev's plan for the defense of the Sinai Peninsula. The plan called for the construction of a line of separation along the water line of the Suez Canal to be defended by small outposts, spaced five to six kilometers apart,…
How did it come to pass that Yassra Bakri, a 20-year-old Israeli Arab nursing student at Safed College, and her girlfriend, Samiya Asedi, another Israeli Arab student, said nothing for 20 minutes about the presence of a mass murderer on a No. 361 Egged bus this past Sunday morning? And how is it that the murderer was certain that…
The television camera lens moves with seeming effortlessness from the pictures of suffering and death at the Hebrew University to the carnival in Gaza City, where thousands take to the streets in celebration of the pictures from Jerusalem. Gazing at the revelers on the screen, one strains one's eyes to find an expression of shame, guilt, or remorse…