Browsing Category : Articles

  Mahmoud Abbas must be great at cards.   The PLO chief has no real assets to speak of.   He’s physically unattractive. He has zero charisma. He’s old. And no matter how hard he tries, Abbas can’t do much of anything to dampen public support for Hamas or raise public support for himself. By many accounts, if elections are…

On June 10, the Knesset will elect President Shimon Peres’s successor. As he departs the President’s Residence at the end of June, the media will provide saturation coverage of his final days and tell us over and over that Peres is the greatest statesman in Jewish history. His personal gravitas is Israel’s single most important asset in the world, they…

  Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement rampant in Europe for Saturday’s murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and the assault and battery of two Jewish brothers outside their synagogue in a Paris suburb later that day.   Anti-Israel incitement is ubiquitous in Europe and…

  What makes PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas tick?   In 2008, when Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood, he did so for the same reason that Yassir Arafat rejected then prime minister Ehud Barak’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood at Camp David in 2000.   In both cases, the PLO…

  Last Sunday, the government passed what was billed as a major reform in Israeli broadcasting.   The cabinet voted 18-2 to eliminate the fee the public is forced to pay to finance public broadcasting, shut down the public broadcasting authority and open a new public broadcasting authority that will be unfettered by the wreckage of the old one.  …

    Brig. Gen. (ret.) Uzi Eilam is an octogenarian who served as the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 until 1985.   Last Friday Eilam gave a head-scratching interview to Yediot Aharonot’s Ronen Bergman in which he claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a decade from completion. He said it is far from clear that…

  Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, is a joyous holiday. In Israel, every year, from Eilat to Metulla, from Tel Aviv to the Jordan Valley, everyone across every spectrum – secular, religious; rich, poor; left, Right, Ashkenazi, Sephardi – is out celebrating.   The reconstitution of the Jewish state, and its growth within three generations from a third world economic…

  Republican Senator Rand Paul is an isolationist. This ought to make him a natural ally for appeasers like Steve Walt and John Mearshimer and the whole blame Israel first crowd.   And indeed, he has taken positions, like opposing additional sanctions on Iran that placed him in their camp.   But Paul is a mixed bag.   Last week,…

  For most commentators, President Barack Obama’s biggest achievement in his four-nation tour of Asia was the enhanced defense treaty he signed with Philippine President Benigno Aquino. The pact permits US forces to operate on Philippine military bases and sets the conditions for joint training of US and Philippine forces, among other things.   There are two problems with the…

  Anti-Semitism is not a simple bigotry. It is a complex neurosis. It involves assigning malign intent to Jews where none exists on the one hand, and rejecting reason as a basis for understanding the world and operating within it on the other hand.     John Kerry’s recent use of the term “Apartheid” in reference to Israel’s future was…