02/04/2023
The 21-year-old who massacred seven Jews and wounded another five when he opened fire on them as they left synagogue last Friday night in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood of Jerusalem wasn’t a lone wolf. Neither was the 13-year-old boy who shot a Jewish father and son Saturday afternoon as they walked home from synagogue in Ir David in Jerusalem. How…
01/27/2023
The Iranian revolutionaries plod into the fifth month of their uprising against the regime with little tangible help from the outside world. To date, more than 500 Iranian revolutionaries have been killed by regime forces directed by the Revolutionary Guard Corps. More than 18,000 have been arrested. So too, unfettered by restrictions on its nuclear activities enacted under the long-abandoned 2015…
01/27/2023
In 2007, then-editor of Israel’s far-left Haaretz newspaper David Landau implored then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “rape” Israel. Landau told Rice that Israel “wants to be raped by the United States” into making territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Landau’s statement, which was widely reported at the time, was and remains shocking. But over the past quarter-century, it has become common practice for the…
01/22/2023
Friday morning brought the first piece of good news from Israel’s Supreme Court in years. Yediot Ahronot’s top headline declared that Supreme Court President Esther Hayut intends to resign if the Knesset passes Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s judicial reform package. Hayut’s stewardship of the court over the past six years has been disgraceful and destructive to both the court and the…
01/18/2023
Speaking to the Saudi English-language newspaper Al Arabiya, last month Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his case for peace between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Such a peace, he explained, would be “a quantum leap for overall peace between Israel and the Arab word,” which would change the Middle East “in ways that are unimaginable.” Netanyahu understated the point. As…
01/13/2023
“For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now we’ve fallen from it.” So proclaimed author Hillel Halkin in a hysterical requiem for Israel published last week in The Jewish Review of Books. Halkin’s metaphorical cliff is the right-religious bloc’s electoral victory on Nov. 1, 2022 and the formation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth…
01/06/2023
Does the Israeli left protect Israel from international condemnation and prosecution? This has been the left’s key claim for more than a generation. From former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak to opposition leader Yair Lapid and his colleagues, to the last of Israel’s leftist reporters, commentators and activists, all major and minor operatives on the Israeli left have long insisted…
01/06/2023
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who passed away this week at the age of 95, was a historically significant figure for many reasons: He was the first pope in six centuries to retire, rather than die in office. He was the first German pope in postwar history. He was also a friend of the Jews. To be sure, Benedict’s restoration of…
With the swearing-in of the latest Netanyahu government, Israel will embark on a new course in foreign policy—and just in time. For the past year-and-a-half of the Bennett-Lapid-Gantz government, Israel’s foreign policy ceased to be independent. In the days and weeks before Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz formed their coalition, they committed themselves to a policy of “no…
12/23/2022
Ahead of Hanukkah, two students at Colgate University in New York vandalized a campus menorah. When they were caught, they explained that they didn’t mean it. They were just drunk. The incident at Colgate isn’t a big story in and of itself, because anti-Jewish incidents on campuses happen every day, all over the United States. However, the explanation the students…