05/30/2014
On June 10, the Knesset will elect President Shimon Peres’s successor. As he departs the President’s Residence at the end of June, the media will provide saturation coverage of his final days and tell us over and over that Peres is the greatest statesman in Jewish history. His personal gravitas is Israel’s single most important asset in the world, they…
05/29/2014
Originally published in TheTower.org An Israeli news station has reported this morning on a poll conducted by Professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University showing that the acceptance of Israel by Israeli Arabs increased markedly between 2012 and 2013. Channel 10/Nana reported (Hebrew) that the poll’s surprising results bucked conventional wisdom: “The research shows that…
05/28/2014
By Ron Lipsman Originally published in the American Thinker Caroline Glick has written a provocative new book entitled The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. In it, she argues that the futile quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict over the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is…
05/28/2014
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement rampant in Europe for Saturday’s murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and the assault and battery of two Jewish brothers outside their synagogue in a Paris suburb later that day. Anti-Israel incitement is ubiquitous in Europe and…
05/19/2014
What makes PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas tick? In 2008, when Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood, he did so for the same reason that Yassir Arafat rejected then prime minister Ehud Barak’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood at Camp David in 2000. In both cases, the PLO…
05/16/2014
Last Sunday, the government passed what was billed as a major reform in Israeli broadcasting. The cabinet voted 18-2 to eliminate the fee the public is forced to pay to finance public broadcasting, shut down the public broadcasting authority and open a new public broadcasting authority that will be unfettered by the wreckage of the old one. …
05/15/2014
A Solution to Grapple with by Rick Richman Every time negotiations for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fail — and they have now failed under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations — peace processors ritually repeat that creating two states is the “only” solution. The Palestinians willing to negotiate with Israel, however, insist they will never…
05/15/2014
Brig. Gen. (ret.) Uzi Eilam is an octogenarian who served as the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 until 1985. Last Friday Eilam gave a head-scratching interview to Yediot Aharonot’s Ronen Bergman in which he claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a decade from completion. He said it is far from clear that…
05/09/2014
Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, is a joyous holiday. In Israel, every year, from Eilat to Metulla, from Tel Aviv to the Jordan Valley, everyone across every spectrum – secular, religious; rich, poor; left, Right, Ashkenazi, Sephardi – is out celebrating. The reconstitution of the Jewish state, and its growth within three generations from a third world economic…
05/06/2014
Republican Senator Rand Paul is an isolationist. This ought to make him a natural ally for appeasers like Steve Walt and John Mearshimer and the whole blame Israel first crowd. And indeed, he has taken positions, like opposing additional sanctions on Iran that placed him in their camp. But Paul is a mixed bag. Last week,…