Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has finally found a mission she can sink her teeth into. This week Israel's would-be prime minister declared that she will leave no stone unturned in her quest to commute the sentences of two Israeli drug dealers just condemned to death by a court in Thailand. Yigal Mahluf and Vladimir Agronik were arrested in Bangkok last…
Apparently Israel is no longer a voting issue for most American Jews. Seventy-eight percent of American Jewish voters cast their ballots for Senator Barack Obama on November 4. Obama, who boasted the most liberal voting record in the Senate, has never distinguished himself as a firm supporter of Israel. For instance, he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment that called on…
US President George W. Bush has six weeks left in power. If he acts fast, that may be enough time to secure his place in history – at least in terms of the Middle East. Bush's initial reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks were a rare display of political and intellectual courage. Gazing at the rubble of the World Trade…
A Somali pirate and a former US defense secretary are flying to London for vacation. One of them is stopped at immigration at Heathrow airport and arrested on suspicion of committing war crimes. Which one do you think it was? On Tuesday, Somali pirates, sailing in little more than motorized bathtubs, armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and sustained…
US President-elect Barack Obama has properly sought to maintain a low profile in foreign affairs in this transition period ahead of his January inauguration. But while Obama has stipulated that the US can have only one president at a time, his aides and advisers are signaling that he intends to move US foreign policy in a sharply different direction from…
Two weeks ago, the Palestinians and their anti-Zionist Israeli and international partners finally produced a smoking gun. They had a videotape of evil settlers brutally attacking poor, defenseless Palestinians as they innocently picked olives with their enlightened supporters in a grove by the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron. The local media went into a feeding frenzy. The footage led the…
With Senator Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential race, the stakes have been raised for Israel's February 10 general elections. Whatever the Obama administration's position on Israel may be, it will not be more supportive of the country than the Bush administration has been. And over the past year, the supportive Bush administration has decided not to prevent Iran…
On Sunday Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz drove yet another stake into the country's political discourse. Last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that despite his resignation and the fact that elections have been called for February 10, he intends to renew negotiations with Syria. He hopes to commit Israel to surrendering the Golan Heights to Bashar Assad, Iran's Arab proxy, before…