Monday morning Turkey took its anti-Israel campaign to a new level. Beyond downgrading diplomatic relations with Israel; beyond suspending military agreements; beyond threatening naval war; beyond threatening to foment an irredentist insurrection of Israeli Arabs; the Turks decided to terrorize Israeli tourists landing in Istanbul airport. Forty Israeli passengers, mainly businessmen who had landed in Istanbul on a Turkish…
US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, kicked up a political storm this week. On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act. If passed into law it would place stringent restrictions on US funding of the UN’s budget. The US currently funds 22 percent of the UN’s general budget. That…
Will the Egyptian military be permitted to remilitarize the Sinai? Since Palestinian and Egyptian terrorists crossed into Israel from Sinai on August 18 and murdered eight Israelis this has been a central issue under discussion at senior echelons of the government and the IDF. Under the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, Egypt is prohibited from deploying military…
American media superstar Glenn Beck’s visit to Israel this week was a revealing and remarkable event. It revealed what it takes to be a friend of Israel. And it revealed the causes of Israel’s difficulty in telling its enemies from its friends. Many world leaders, opinion-shapers and other notables profess enduring friendship with Israel. From Washington to London, Paris…
Israeli military preparedness follows a depressing pattern. The IDF does not change its assessments of the strategic environment until Israeli blood runs in the streets. In Judea and Samaria, from 1994 through 2000, the army closed its eyes to the Palestinian security forces’ open, warm and mutually supportive ties to terror groups. The military only began to reconsider…
The Palestinians’ decision to place the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state before the United Nations for a vote next month repudiates the principles of the 1993 Oslo peace framework, through which the Palestinian Authority was formed out of the PLO. The Oslo framework dictated that the final status of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem would be determined…
Over the past several months, a certain intolerance has crept into the rhetoric of leading neoconservative publications and writers. This intolerance has become particularly noticeable since February’s neoconservative-supported overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and US President Barack Obama’s neoconservative-supported decision to commit US forces to battle against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in March. The basic concept being…
In the wake of Anders Breivik’s massacre of his fellow Norwegians, I was amazed at the speed with which the leftist media throughout the US and Europe used his crime as a means of criminalizing their ideological opponents on the Right. Just hours after Breivik’s identity was reported, leftist media outlets and blogs were filled with attempts to blame Breivik’s…
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has explained repeatedly over the years that Israel has no Palestinian partner to negotiate with. So news reports this week that Netanyahu agreed that the 1949 armistice lines, (commonly misrepresented as the 1967 borders), will be mentioned in terms of reference for future negotiations with the Palestinian Authority seemed to come out of nowhere. Israel…
Last Monday Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz gave an interview to Channel 2’s news anchor Yonit Levy during the prime-time news broadcast. Levy began the interview with a revealing “question.” Oozing professional probity, Levy said, “I assume you came here armed with wonderful data about the drop in unemployment and rising economic growth, but I want to ask you, Mr.…