12/28/2015
Today Israel’s bilateral relations with Brazil are moving towards a full-blown crisis. If the government doesn’t address the causes of the crisis, going forward it will find itself unable to competently advance Israel’s interests in the international community. Brazil has the 9th largest economy in the world and is a rapidly growing market for Israeli exports.…
12/25/2015
This past July, unknown assailants threw a firebomb into the home of the Dawabshe family in Duma. The mother, Reham and the father Saad along with their eighteen month old baby Ali were killed. Four year old Ahmed was critically injured. Authorities immediately alleged that the assailants were members of a Jewish terrorist organization. The accusations were…
12/25/2015
Former Knesset member Yinon Magal is no paragon of personal virtue. The rookie lawmaker from the Bayit Yehudi, who left a successful career in journalism to enter politics resigned his position last month when he found himself drowning in a pool of muck of his own making. Magal resigned last month after one after another, four women alleged…
12/18/2015
At some point between 2006 and 2008, the American people decided to turn their backs on the world. Between the seeming futility of the war in Iraq and the financial collapse of 2008, Americans decided they’d had enough of the world. In Barack Obama, they found a leader who could channel their frustration. Obama’s foreign policy, based on…
12/11/2015
On Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech before the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum. Kerry focused on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and sought to draw a distinction between the two-state policy model, which he supports, and the one-state policy model, which he rejects. To justify his rejection of a policy based on Israeli sovereignty…
12/03/2015
The foundations of American Jewish life are under assault today in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Academia is ground zero of the onslaught. The protest movements on campuses are first and foremost anti-Jewish movements. For the past decade or so, years, Jewish communal leaders and activists have focused on just one aspect of this anti-Jewish campaign.…
12/01/2015
Even before the dust settled on last Friday’s happy headlines proclaiming that after 30 years in federal prison, Jonathan Pollard was being released, we discovered that his release wasn’t the end of his sad saga. Pollard’s parole conditions are draconian. For the next five years he will be under curfew, barred from stepping outside his apartment after 7…
11/24/2015
Since the Islamic State attacks in Paris on November 13, we have seen the development of a new, and strange justification for the Obama administration’s insistent refusal to jettison its manifestly failed strategy of contending with IS specifically and with Islamic terrorism generally. In broad terms, Obama’s strategy for dealing with radical Islamic terrorism and jihadist movements…
11/20/2015
On Tuesday night Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publically for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008. Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the…
11/17/2015
As the cleaning crews were mopping up the dried blood from the stage and the seats of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, a depressing act appeared on stage in distant Iowa. Saturday night the three contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination took to the stage in Iowa for a debate. The moderator asked them whether they…