01/18/2023
Speaking to the Saudi English-language newspaper Al Arabiya, last month Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his case for peace between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Such a peace, he explained, would be “a quantum leap for overall peace between Israel and the Arab word,” which would change the Middle East “in ways that are unimaginable.” Netanyahu understated the point. As…
01/13/2023
“For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now we’ve fallen from it.” So proclaimed author Hillel Halkin in a hysterical requiem for Israel published last week in The Jewish Review of Books. Halkin’s metaphorical cliff is the right-religious bloc’s electoral victory on Nov. 1, 2022 and the formation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth…
01/06/2023
Does the Israeli left protect Israel from international condemnation and prosecution? This has been the left’s key claim for more than a generation. From former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak to opposition leader Yair Lapid and his colleagues, to the last of Israel’s leftist reporters, commentators and activists, all major and minor operatives on the Israeli left have long insisted…
01/06/2023
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who passed away this week at the age of 95, was a historically significant figure for many reasons: He was the first pope in six centuries to retire, rather than die in office. He was the first German pope in postwar history. He was also a friend of the Jews. To be sure, Benedict’s restoration of…
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.…