In the world of international diplomacy few issues receive more wall-to-wall support than the notion that it is essential to establish a Palestinian state. Leaders worldwide are so busy speaking of how essential it is for a State of Palestine to be founded that none of them seems to have noticed that it already exists. This state was officially founded…
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an evil man. But he is not a stupid man. Indeed, he is smart and fastidious. He understands power and how to get it. And he understands that the purpose of a nation's foreign policy is to sell ideas and messages and to build coalitions that enable a state to achieve its national aims. Due…
It would seem that American Jewry has lost its sense of honor. In early 1984, as he sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson made a major misstep. In a conversation with African-American Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman, Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies," and to New York City as "Hymietown." When the remarks were…
Israel prides itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East. But if we are not careful, we will lose that distinction. Today Israel finds itself increasingly under the rule not of law, but of lawyers. And the results are similar to the results in other states where the rule of law is undermined. Lawlessness, loss of personal security…
There are two reasons that IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz's resignation this week was essential. First, during the war last summer with Hizbullah, Halutz failed to conceive of a war fighting plan for the IDF. Having failed, he needed to go. Second, both during the war and in the six months since its cessation, Halutz lost the…
Ehud Olmert's Kadima Party is on the skids. The weekend opinion polls showed that if elections were held today, the Likud would win 29 Knesset seats while Kadima, which now controls the government with 29 seats, would fall to 12 seats. But elections are anything but a foregone conclusion, and if his colleagues have their way, Olmert's political destruction will not…
The average Israeli is not particularly interested in the US-led war in Iraq. As far as most Israelis are concerned, that war, going on just a few hundred kilometers from our borders, might as well be taking place in outer space. It simply doesn't seem connected to our local reality of the Palestinian-Iranian and Lebanese-Iranian jihad. Although greeted with sadness,…
There is something insidious about half-truths. To accept a half-truth demands accepting also a lie. Last week, readers of The Wall Street Journal were presented with a particularly insidious half-truth along with a lie in the form of an op-ed by University of Haifa professor and prominent Israeli intellectual Fania Oz-Salzberger. Oz-Salzberger's article, "With Friends like These… Jews,…
With the Israeli media scope-locked on bigger stories, the fact that Thursday Prime Minister Ehud Olmert paid an obsequious and shameful visit to a country which propagates Holocaust denial and sponsors the Palestinian jihad went largely unnoticed. No, Olmert did not visit Iran. He visited Egypt. Iran's Holocaust denial conference last month was roundly condemned in Israel and…
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yasser Arafat was a master of the big lie. Since he invented global terrorism with the founding of the Fatah terror organization in 1959, Arafat successfully portrayed himself as a freedom fighter while introducing the world to passenger jet hijackings, schoolhouse massacres and embassy takeovers. To cultivate the myth of his innocence Arafat ordered his…