09/08/2023
Last Wednesday, a spat between Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch and Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan caused an international uproar.Dayan was appointed by the Bennett-Lapid government. He is a member of Gideon Sa’ar’s party of former Likudniks and an outspoken hater of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It might thus have been expected that when Kisch sent a letter to Dayan…
09/01/2023
On September 28, Israel’s Supreme Court is expected to rule in favor of a petition from the far-left Movement for Quality Government to overturn the November 1, 2022 elections. In January, MQG petitioned the Supreme Court asking the justices to ban newly sworn in Netanyahu from serving in office. MQG argued that with all due respect to the 2.4 million…
08/20/2023
Campaigners against Israel’s Netanyahu government scored a notable victory on Aug. 4. After a six-month demonization, defamation and harassment campaign against the Kohelet Policy Forum and its chief donor, Arthur Dantchik, Dantchik, a Philadelphia businessman, announced that he was ending his support for the conservative Jerusalem think tank. Moshe Koppel, a Bar-Ilan University professor, founded Kohelet a decade ago as…
08/05/2023
Outgoing Supreme Court president Esther Hayut is playing the short game. She wants to clear her desk, finish the work she set out to achieve when she took over as Supreme Court head in late 2017 and let the chips fall where they may. Shortly before Hayut assumed office, she set out her judicial vision in an address before the…
07/28/2023
The Hebrew language—the language of the Jewish people—lacks a concept of history. The closest term to history is zikharon, or “memory.” Although both concepts—history and memory—relate to past events, they relate to those events and to the nature of time itself, in entirely different ways. The concept of history involves thinking about time in a linear fashion. Time is circular in…
07/28/2023
Tablet online magazine hosted a symposium on the desirability of continued U.S. military aid to Israel and asked that I weigh in. To read the entire symposium, click here. What follows is my article. AT THE HEIGHT OF OPERATION PROTECTIVE EDGE, Israel’s seven-week war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, then President Barack Obama imposed an embargo on a…
07/24/2023
On the surface, Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to the White House on Tuesday felt like old times. U.S. President Joe Biden warmly greeted Israel’s ceremonial head of state and repeatedly stated that the U.S.’s commitment to Israel is “ironclad.” Biden mentioned that he spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the day before and arranged a visit for Israel’s actual…
07/14/2023
Amos Hochstein, the U.S. special presidential coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security, arrived in Israel on Tuesday for meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi. Briefing Netanyahu on U.S. efforts to mediate a formal normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia was the official reason for the visit. But it became clear that was…
07/07/2023
What can we expect from the Israel Defense Forces’ current operation in Jenin? According to the IDF, the goal of the operation is to disable the massive terror infrastructure that Palestinian groups have built in the Jenin refugee camp. Over the past year-and-a-half, due to the policies of the previous government and to IDF support for those policies, the area…
06/30/2023
On Thursday night, with sunken faces, Channel 13’s legal correspondents delivered the news: The judges presiding over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial for bribery and breach of trust had told the prosecutors and defense attorney last week that the prosecutors have not proven their charge of bribery, and are unlikely to succeed in doing so, since all their major witnesses have…