06/30/2017
There are four important aspects to the government’s decisions on Sunday relating to egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall and the conversion bill. The first is that by and large, the headlines of the stories distort rather than explain what the government decided. The second is the nature of the American Jewish community’s response to the government’s moves. The third…
06/28/2017
Should the United States pay Palestinian terrorists? For the overwhelming majority of Americans and Israelis this is a rhetorical question. The position of the American people was made clear – yet again – last week when US President Donald Trump’s senior envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt met with Palestinian Authority chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and repeated Trump’s…
06/23/2017
Earlier this month Norway, Denmark and Switzerland did something surprising. Norway announced that it was demanding the return of its money from the Palestinian Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Secretariat, for the latter’s funding of a Palestinian women’s group that built a youth center near Nablus named for PLO mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi. Denmark followed, announcing it was cutting off…
06/20/2017
More insights from Washington D.C. on Israel, the Trump administration, the US Embassy not YET moving to Jerusalem and also a bit about Iran.
06/20/2017
The homes of the terrorists who murdered Border Police officer Hadas Malka on Friday evening are now bedecked with Fatah flags and banners reading, “Our heroes.” Far from condemning the terrorist attack, Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and his comrades are condemning Israel. Its security forces, they allege obscenely, committed a “war crime” when they killed the…
06/16/2017
It may very well be that this week was the week that Israel and the US put to rest former president Barack Obama’s policies and positions on Israel and the Palestinians. If so, the move was made despite the best efforts of Obama’s team to convince the Trump administration to maintain them. The details of Obama’s policies and positions have…
06/13/2017
Thursday afternoon, US President Donald Trump reacted to former FBI director James Comey’s Senate testimony by telling an audience of his supporters, “We are under siege.” He was right. Trump and his presidency are besieged by an army of investigators whose apparent goal is to delegitimize, with the goal of destroying, his presidency. This was the lesson of Comey’s testimony…
06/09/2017
US President Donald Trump has been attacked by his ubiquitous critics for his apparent about-face on the crisis surrounding Qatar. In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump sided firmly with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the other Sunni states that cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and instituted an air and land blockade of the sheikhdom on Monday.…
06/06/2017
How can we explain the international community’s indifference to Palestinian suffering? Every day, angry bands of protesters burn the flag of Israel, call for the destruction of the Jewish state and insist that Israel and its Jewish citizens be shunned from polite society and thrown out of the global economy all in the name of opposing “the Occupation.” Although the…
06/02/2017
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump bowed to the foreign policy establishment and betrayed his voters. He signed a presidential waiver postponing the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem for yet another six months. Ahead of Trump’s move, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a last-ditch bid to convince Trump to move the embassy to Jerusalem. But it was not…