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…

  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.…

  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…

    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…

    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…

  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…

  Maybe the EU did us a favor on Wednesday. At least now we know what we’re up against.   With the publication of its new guidelines to member states encouraging them to label Jewish products produced beyond the 1949 armistice lines, the Europeans finally convinced us that they hate us. They don’t care about peace. They don’t care about…

    It is notable that the same week that Israel marked the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of prime minister and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas went before the UN Human Rights Commission and asked the UN to establish “a special regime of international protection” for the Palestinians against Israel.   “It…

    Democratic Senator Chris Coons from Delaware betrayed his backers and his voters when at the end of the summer, as the Senate returned from recess, he announced that he was supporting President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.   Coons announced his decision in an address at the University of Delaware. There Coons acknowledged that the deal was…

  US Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican firebrand from Texas, is running for president. Up until a few weeks ago, his candidacy was met with indifference as the media and political operatives all dismissed its viability. But that is beginning to change. The voices arguing that Cruz, the favorite of Tea Party fiscal conservatives and Evangelical Christians may have…