The Quartet's envoy and former World Bank president James Wolfensohn is reputed to be quite a deal maker. One of the deals he made as the Quartet's envoy to the region was the purchase by wealthy American Jews of greenhouses owned by the Jews who were expelled from Gaza this past summer and their transfer as a gift to the…

While most Israelis have been caught up in the general elections fever brought on by the election of the socialist workers' boss and radical post-Zionist Amir Peretz to the helm of the Labor Party, another contest has been unfolding in the shadows.   The long-run consequences of this other contest may very well surpass in importance the issue of who…

With Histadrut general strike king Amir Peretz’s primary elections victory over Vice Premier Shimon Peres last week, the Labor Party has finally removed all its masks and officially embraced post-Zionism as its guiding ideology. By electing Peretz, the Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion has declined to the status of an anti-Zionist political party.   While Oslo and Labor’s embrace of…

It would seem that the world has gone mad. Israel's security is being systematically undermined by its own government and the US-led international community. At this point it seems that the Sharon-Peres government is engaged in a perverse competition with the Bush administration to determine who can come up with the most deranged counter-terror policy.   Last week it was…

The French are in serious trouble. They have a home-grown insurrection on their hands. In some ways – mainly in the intensity of the violence – the current insurrection recalls the 1968 student rebellion. But there is a major difference between the spring of 1968 and the autumn of 2005. In 1968 the rioting students – at least those who…

In the year and a half which preceded the implementation of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal and expulsion plan from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, the leftist elites in Israel waged an unrelenting cultural war against the Israeli Right generally and against religious Zionists specifically. Religious Zionists were portrayed by the media, by entertainment icons, by Sharon's advisers, and…

Gazing from across an ocean at the undoing of US President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court was like gazing at Elysium.   In the public debate that erupted in the wake of Bush's announcement four weeks ago that he was nominating his personal attorney to the highest court in America, we saw what…

Wednesday was a difficult day. First, on Wednesday morning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel's annihilation. Then, a few hours later, a Palestinian terrorist blew up at a felafel stand in Hadera and murdered five Israelis.   Israel's responses to these events revealed as much about its strategic confusion as Ahmadinejad's speech and the bombing revealed about our enemies'…

Today may well be the beginning of the end of Syria as we know it. The UN's German investigator Detlev Mehlis is set to submit the findings of his investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri to the UN Security Council today.     The German magazine Stern reported this week that Mehlis will finger several…

When the Sharon government decided to expel all Jews from Gaza, their communities' physical isolation and the fact that they were fenced-in and thus geographically limited, eased the work of the evacuation forces both during the planning and implementation of their mass expulsion.   Today for residents of Judea and Samaria as well as for those on the Left who…