Has Israel won the Oslo War? Is the Aksa intifada over? Over the past several weeks a number of prominent voices have weighed in on this topic claiming triumphantly that indeed, the war is over. Israel has won. There are several objective factors that lend to this conclusion. Israel's economy, which was teetering on the verge of collapse in…
On June 30, the Council for the Protection of Journalists penned a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon protesting a missile attack the previous night on an office building in Gaza. According to the CPJ, whose honorary chairman is Walter Cronkite, the building housed the offices of several foreign press organizations, including the BBC and MBC. According to the…
Sunday morning Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter made an incredible disclosure at the cabinet meeting. Dichter stated that Israel is the largest contributor to the Palestinian Authority's budget. Israel gives the PA one billion dollars a year. This comprises 45 percent of the PA's total budget. "There is no oversight [to ensure] that each and every dollar Israel…
As a little boy is murdered by rockets on his way to nursery school; and as soldiers are killed and wounded when bombs, burrowed deep beneath their outposts are detonated by terrorists using video cameras and increasingly sophisticated digging machines; and as 17 would-be suicide bombers are intercepted en route to Israeli population centers in one month, all eyes are…
Thursday morning it was announced that the eight British servicemen who were nabbed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Shatt al-Arab waterway on the Iraq-Iran border earlier in the week had been released to the custody of the British Embassy in Teheran. Remarking on the transfer of the British sailors and marines who had been pictured blindfolded and forced to…
This week was the first time that the Palestinian Authority publicly acknowledged its responsibility for the Aksa Martyr Brigades terrorist group which is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department. In an attempt to solve an employment dispute between the PA and the Aksa Brigades, the central committee of Fatah, which is to the PA…
The events of the past week have laid bare the three pathologies of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. First we have the Palestinian rank-and-file. Under the headline "Palestinians turn on tunnel men," Reuters reported Sunday that in the aftermath of the IDF's recent operations in Rafah aimed at uncovering underground tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt to…
"By the end of 2005, not one Jew will remain in Gaza." Thus spake Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday morning. Sharon's statement is troubling on many levels. First, the triumphalism: Why is the prime minister of the Jewish state acting as if it is a good thing to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Jews? It sounds like something Yasser…
Standing before the EU parliament in Brussels on May 16 2001, French EU parliamentarian Paul Marie Couteax made a stunning statement. After condemning Israel's actions to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism as the "theocratic excesses of this religious state," Couteax declared that Europe should supply the Arab world with nuclear weapons. As he put it, "I have no…
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now tentatively set to bring his "new plan" for withdrawing IDF troops from the Gaza Strip and uprooting Israeli settlements there and in Samaria to the cabinet for its approval next Sunday. The new plan, we are told, is simply an incremental variation on Sharon's previous plan which was overwhelmingly rejected by Likud party members…