With the swearing-in of the latest Netanyahu government, Israel will embark on a new course in foreign policy—and just in time. For the past year-and-a-half of the Bennett-Lapid-Gantz government, Israel’s foreign policy ceased to be independent. In the days and weeks before Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz formed their coalition, they committed themselves to a policy of “no…
12/23/2022
Ahead of Hanukkah, two students at Colgate University in New York vandalized a campus menorah. When they were caught, they explained that they didn’t mean it. They were just drunk. The incident at Colgate isn’t a big story in and of itself, because anti-Jewish incidents on campuses happen every day, all over the United States. However, the explanation the students…
12/16/2022
On Dec. 9, MK Ayman Odeh met in New York with U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The meeting was arranged by the PLO’s mission to the U.N. Odeh heads the Hadash Party and is a co-leader of the five-member Joint Arab List Knesset faction, along with MK Ahmed Tibi. During the course of their meeting, Odeh reportedly delivered a petition…
12/09/2022
Outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid has never been a high-minded politician. During his five months in power as caretaker prime minister, he tried to get the only non-leftist television station in the country thrown off the air. He called his political opponents and their voters “s**ts,” and “forces of darkness,” who have no right to exercise their legal right to…
12/09/2022
The Israeli Right won Israel’s November 1 elections. The four parties in incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s ruling right-wing coalition won 64 seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. Although the polls were close, the Right’s clear-cut victory is easy to understand. Israel’s electorate is center-right, by a large margin. Israel’s three-year electoral paralysis owed to the presence of splinter right-wing parties that refused to…
12/02/2022
On Monday night, an Egyptian television reporter covering the World Cup tournament in Doha, Qatar was assaulted by an angry mob and forced to leave the games to avoid being lynched. The mob assaulted him because they mistook him for an Israeli reporter. Qatari officials were reportedly embarrassed by the incident. They weren’t embarrassed about the crowd’s violent anti-Semitism, though.…
11/28/2022
The deadly bombings at two Jerusalem bus stops on Wednesday morning were the first bombing attacks Israelis have suffered in their capital in recent years. They shouldn’t have surprised anyone, though. Jerusalem has been the scene of a steadily escalating stream of Palestinian stabbing, shooting and vehicular attacks against Jews since the start of the year. In recent weeks, Palestinian…
11/18/2022
he Biden administration is feeding Israel to the wolves. That is the only reasonable way to understand Channel 14’s bombshell report on Sunday that the FBI has opened an investigation of IDF soldiers in relation to the death of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Abu Akleh died on May 11 in Jenin while she was embedded with Iranian-controlled Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists…
11/05/2022
After an electoral triumph as profound as Tuesday’s win for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud Party and the right-religious bloc, you’d think that politicians and voters would be having street parties and celebratory rallies, similar to those of Ehud Barak and his supporters in the aftermath of their victory in 1999. But the response of both voters and…
10/31/2022
Most of Israel’s commentators insist that Tuesday’s Knesset elections—the fifth in fewer than four years—are about the same thing the last four were about: Benjamin Netanyahu. If you vote for Netanyahu’s Likud Party, or for the other three parties in his right-religious bloc, then you are for Netanyahu. If you vote for caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party,…