In the year and a half which preceded the implementation of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal and expulsion plan from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, the leftist elites in Israel waged an unrelenting cultural war against the Israeli Right generally and against religious Zionists specifically. Religious Zionists were portrayed by the media, by entertainment icons, by Sharon's advisers, and…
Gazing from across an ocean at the undoing of US President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court was like gazing at Elysium. In the public debate that erupted in the wake of Bush's announcement four weeks ago that he was nominating his personal attorney to the highest court in America, we saw what…
Wednesday was a difficult day. First, on Wednesday morning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel's annihilation. Then, a few hours later, a Palestinian terrorist blew up at a felafel stand in Hadera and murdered five Israelis. Israel's responses to these events revealed as much about its strategic confusion as Ahmadinejad's speech and the bombing revealed about our enemies'…
Today may well be the beginning of the end of Syria as we know it. The UN's German investigator Detlev Mehlis is set to submit the findings of his investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri to the UN Security Council today. The German magazine Stern reported this week that Mehlis will finger several…
When the Sharon government decided to expel all Jews from Gaza, their communities' physical isolation and the fact that they were fenced-in and thus geographically limited, eased the work of the evacuation forces both during the planning and implementation of their mass expulsion. Today for residents of Judea and Samaria as well as for those on the Left who…
With Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip now a fait accompli, the question of whether the move was a mistake or not is no longer salient. The fact of the matter is that the withdrawal from Gaza created a new strategic environment for Israel and the central issue today is how Israel will contend with the strategic realities that are…
One of the most disturbing side effects of the five-year-old Palestinian terror war against Israel is the wave of global anti-Semitism that arose in its wake. The fact that the new anti-Semitic wave is rooted in the Left rather than the Right is shocking for the majority of Western Jewry, which for generations has been politically aligned with the Left.…
The announcements this week by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's top advisers, in-house generals and Vice Premier Shimon Peres (along with Sharon's dubious denials) that the government will now begin planning more land giveaways to the Palestinians after last month's destruction of our communities in Gaza and northern Samaria ought to have caused a furor in the country. And yet it…
There is not a single political leader in Israel who will not uphold the country's identity as the Jewish state. But what does that mean? Does the fact that Israel is the Jewish state mean that it has a unique mission in the world that distinguishes it from every other state? The overwhelming majority of Israelis would say that…
In the months that preceded the forcible eviction of all Israelis from their homes and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria, and during last month's expulsions themselves, the commanders of the IDF and police responsible for the operation defined "preventing" or "not exacerbating" the "schism in the nation" as one of their principal goals. This was all well and…