Monthly Archives : June 2016

    We are living at a time when preconceived notions are crashing down one on top of the other.     We thought that nothing would ever change in the Arab world. But the Arab world hasn’t merely changed, large portions of it have collapsed. And regimes that have so far survived are beating a path to Israel’s door.…

  One of the more remarkable aspects of the blood libel sounded by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in his address before the European Parliament in Brussels last week, is the claim that he ad-libbed the part about rabbis poisoning Palestinian wells.     After refusing to meet President Reuven Rivlin who was also in Brussels last week, Abbas ascended the…

    This week, MK Michael Oren stood up to his boss in the Kulanu party, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, to the political Left, including hundreds of retired security brass, and to the IDF General Staff. The former ambassador to Washington urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to sign the multi-year security assistance deal that US President Barack Obama demands…

    Over the past few days, two incidents occurred which together, tell us the story of the Israeli Left.     Monday night, Channel 10 revealed that the Labor Party has no regard for Israel’s national interests.   Channel 10 disclosed that ahead of the 2015 Knesset elections, Labor – and now Zionist Union – leader MK Yitzhak Herzog…

  As far as the White House is concerned, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s top reporter, is President Barack Obama’s unofficial mouthpiece.   This was one of the many things we learned from The New York Times in David Samuels’s profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.   In the course of explaining how Rhodes was able to sell Obama’s…

  Is Islamic State opposed to gay marriage? Was anger at the US Supreme Court’s decision mandating recognition of homosexual marriage what prompted Omar Mateen to massacre fifty Americans at the gay nightclub in Orlando on Saturday night?     What about gun control? Is Islamic State, to which Mateen announced his allegiance as he mowed down innocents like blades of…

  There was something poetic about the events that bookended the past week of diplomacy. This week began with French President Francois Hollande’s “peace” conference and ended with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s state visit to Moscow.     From the perspective of both substance and style, the contrast between the two events couldn’t have been more striking.     France…

    Strategic thinking has always been Israel’s Achilles’ heel. As a small state bereft of regional ambitions, so long as regional realities remained more or less static, Israel had little reason to be concerned about the great game of the Middle East.   But the ground is shifting in the lands around us. The Arab state system, which ensured…

    The Israeli Left is a one trick pony. As it sees things, all of Israel’s problems – with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with Europe and with the American Left – can be solved by giving up Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem (along with Gaza which we gave up already).   Once Israel does this,…