04/21/2016
It’s been a long time in coming, but it finally happened. The IDF General Staff has lost the public trust. This is terrible for the General Staff. But it is more terrible for the country, because the public is right not to trust our military leaders. They have earned our distrust fair and square. The final…
04/19/2016
Last month, UNESCO’s director general Irina Bokova issued a statement congratulating Russian- backed Syrian forces for liberating the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State (ISIS). Bokova said Palmyra “carries the memory of the Syrian people, and the values of cultural diversity, tolerance and openness that have made this region a cradle of civilization.” Bokova added, “The…
04/14/2016
The US presidential race is President Barack Obama’s political legacy. Depending on who succeeds him, that legacy will either fade or become the new normal. To understand what he has wrought, a good place to start is with the man running to Obama’s left: Sen. Bernie Sanders. The socialist from Vermont knows how to play to the crowd.…
04/12/2016
On Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Hiroshima. While there meeting with this G-7 counterparts, Kerry strongly hinted that his visit was a precursor to a visit to the site of the first nuclear bombing by President Barack Obama next month. The irony of course is that for all his professed commitment to ridding the world of…
04/07/2016
The Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon are well on the way to joining their Jewish cousins. The Jewish communities of these states predated Islam by a millennium, and were vibrant until the 20th century. But the Arab world’s war on the Jewish state, and more generally on Jews, wiped out the Jewish populations several decades ago.…
04/04/2016
On March 25, The New York Times published an editorial effectively calling for US President Barack Obama to abandon the US alliance with Egypt. The Obama White House’s house paper urged the president to “reassess whether an alliance that has long been considered a cornerstone of American national security policy is doing more harm than good.” The editorial concluded that…
04/01/2016
Tuesday the news broke that the police are investigating Interior Minister (and ex-con) Arye Deri and opposition leader (and former criminal defendant) Isaac Herzog. The two men are suspected of carrying out various forms of financial corruption. Judging from the reports, neither man has reason to sleep easy. But then again, the investigations are nowhere near completion.…
03/29/2016
Israeli democracy is in critical condition. Sunday, the High Court of Justice ruled that the government’s natural gas policy is unlawful. The policy, which was negotiated with foreign energy companies, was to be the basis for developing the massive offshore Leviathan gas field. It was supposed to anchor future gas prices, ensure gas revenues for the government…
03/25/2016
What do radical Israeli groups have in common with their European funders? Last Thursday, Channel 2 broadcast candid camera footage of Breaking the Silence members gathering classified information on IDF operations. The footage was taken by Ad Kan activists. Breaking the Silence claims to be an organization dedicated to collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers documenting…
03/17/2016
It was ironic that the day The Atlantic monthly published what was supposed to be the definitive work on US President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he was removing the bulk of his military forces from Syria. Jeffrey Goldberg’s long profile titled, “The Obama Doctrine,” sought to define the theoretical underpinning of Obama’s…