The week before Hizbullah launched the war in the north, Ha'aretz's chief diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn wrote an ode to the Islamist movement. Entitled, "We need a Nasrallah," Benn romanticized the terror master, writing, "Nasrallah hates Israel and Zionism no less than do the Hamas leaders, [kidnapped IDF Cpl. Gilad] Shalit's kidnappers and the Kassam [rocket] squads. But as opposed…

Northern Israel is a vacationer's paradise. From hiking trails to walk on, to rivers to swim in, to luxury hotels to bask in, to mystical sites to seek inspiration from, it has something for everyone.     This is why, when last week I took my first vacation in four years, I made my way to the North.   As…

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's secret visit to Sderot Tuesday morning was met with snorts of disgusted laughter. When the prime minister of Israel treats a visit to a city in Israel as a military secret on the order of an American presidential visit to Baghdad, the message he sends is clear: Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last summer was a national…

On Sunday, as Cpl. Gilad Shalit's terrorist captors in Gaza prepared their ultimatum, in Jerusalem, at the Mt. Herzl military cemetery a crowd stood quietly around a grave, bowed their heads and remembered one of the greatest heroes the State of Israel has produced.   The 30th memorial ceremony for Lt.-Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed on July 4, 1976…

Since replacing Ariel Sharon in office last December, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has refused to permit a large-scale IDF incursion into the Gaza Strip. The hundreds of rockets, mortars and missiles that have rendered the Western Negev's population and economy hostage to Palestinian rocket crews could not budge him from his refusal to take the war to the enemy. Indeed,…

It is painful to watch Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni try to contend with the terrible outcome of the Palestinian terror strike against the IDF on Sunday morning.   They use so many fancy and angry words. They sound so resolute. And yet, they have nothing useful to say. Two soldiers are…

As is its habit, the Israeli media missed this week's big story. While our television channels, mass circulation dailies and publicly funded radio stations were scope-locked on the tragedy of children in Gaza killed and injured because they were being used as human shields by the terrorists pummeling Sderot and the Western Negev with rockets and mortars, the world took…

Sunday morning Israel Radio reported that a delegation of judges met with Justice Minister Haim Ramon and demanded that he defend them from what they consider to be unprecedented media attacks against them.   The meeting with Ramon took place on the same day the Supreme Court went a step further in its usurpation of the power of the people's…

During his tour this week of European capitals, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that in addition to Judea and Samaria, he plans to transfer a number of neighborhoods in Jerusalem to Hamas. In his words, "Not all the Arab neighborhoods will be part of the city in the future."   Olmert claims that taking these Arab neighborhoods out of Jerusalem's…

Sunday Palestinian Hamas Authority Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar was in Teheran meeting with his boss, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Ahmadinejad reportedly devoted the meeting to reminding Zahar that jihad is the only path for the Palestinians, and demanding that Hamas redouble its attacks against Israel.   This report tells us little we don't already know about Hamas and Iran. Since…