Browsing Category : Articles

The final days of the Iran nuclear deal


  There is a growing chance that by October, the nuclear deal with Iran, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will be dead. Under the deal with the U.S. China, Russia, Germany, Britain and France, Iran purported to accept limitations on its nuclear program. These limitations included capping its low enriched uranium stockpiles at 300 kg,…

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Lob’s hostile (but disarming) takeover


Apparently, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is sensitive to criticism. Over the past week, it received enormous – and well-deserved – flak after it announced the decision of its nominating committee to select former HIAS chairman Dianne Lob to serve as the Conference’s next chairman. In what is largely viewed as a formality, the full Conference…

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American Jewry’s Organizational Crack-Up


  Last week an event occurred will be remembered as a key moment in the disintegration of organized American Jewish support for Israel and American Jewish organizational life itself. Last Friday, the leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations announced that the Conference’s nominating committee had selected Dianne Lob, the immediate past president of HIAS to…

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Pandemics, Palestinian incitement and peace


A few weeks ago, officials in Israel’s Health Ministry were calling for Israel to “medically annex Judea and Samaria” for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. The notion was that while Israel and the Palestinian Authority are separate political entities, from a public health perspective, they are indivisible. On a practical level, the call was superfluous. From the moment the…

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Israel and Trump’s war on the coronavirus


The presidency of Donald Trump has shaped coalition talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White party chairman Benny Gantz. For weeks, the chief stumbling block holding up a unity government deal was Gantz’s attempt to delay or block Israeli implementation of Trump’s deal of the century which greenlights the implementation of Israeli law over parts of Judea…

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Coronavirus lessons for coalition talks


We are living through a grave crisis. And crises have a knack for clarifying fundamental truths. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed several of them. First, our ability to control our world is limited. An unknown number of months ago, through unclear means, the coronavirus broke out in China and landed in the rest of the world shortly thereafter.  Over the…

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Israeli sovereignty and Gantz’s bad faith


The coalition talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz are being held behind closed doors. A lot of contradictory information is being leaked about the issues on the table and about the form of the deal for a unity government being hammered out. But all the leaks are consistent about one aspect of…

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Israel and the demise of the global village


In the face of the steeply rising number of coronavirus patients and the breakneck speed of political changes in Israel, few people have stopped to notice that the world we have grown accustomed to living in for the past generation is falling apart. The global village is collapsing under the weight of the pandemic. How Israel deals with this dramatic…

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Benny Gantz and the pyromaniacal cockpit


If Blue and White Party leader MK Benny Gantz forms a minority government with Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beitenu Party and the Labor-Meretz party, based on the outside support of the Joint Arab List, Gantz’s success will torpedo Israel’s relations with the United States. This week, a senior official who was present during Gantz’s meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in…

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What happened to the Israeli Left?


MK Ofer Shelah from the Blue and White party is the architect of his party’s current efforts to form a government with the support of Joint Arab List. If Shelah succeeds, he will have formed a radical, post-Zionist minority government entirely dependent on 15 Arab lawmakers, who reject Israel’s right to exist, just to stay afloat. As Shelah blazed forward…

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