In a speech before his Labor Party on Tuesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a rallying cry that the world as a whole should welcome. Calling for moral and political courage in dealing with a world in transformation, Blair said, "The radical decision is usually the right one. The right decision is usually the hardest one. And the…
Meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is very much like visiting with your grandfather. He is warm and engaging. He lives in the history he did so much to write, speaking of events that happened 50 years ago with the same spark with which he speaks of the latest developments. His personal warmth, clear love for his people, and his…
Sharon: No military solution to the war with the Palestinians Caroline B. Glick Sep. 26, 2002 In a comprehensive, exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon offers his perspective on the possibility that Israel is forced to respond to an attack by Iraq during a US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein's regime. He also details his…
MKs Yossi Sarid and Ofir Pines-Paz are huffing-and-puffing mad. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has just committed the most cardinal of sins. He has appointed a man overtly supportive of the prime minister to head the Mossad. "This is a dangerous precedent," Pines-Paz huffs. "This should be a professional, not a political appointment," Sarid puffs. Fighting…
On Wednesday, the IDF carried out a successful operation in damage control. By spiriting Intissar and Kifah Ajouri into the Gaza Strip at Netzarim rather than having them pass through at the Erez checkpoint, where the international press corps was waiting to photograph the first targets of the government's new policy of punishing relatives of terrorists, the IDF prevented…
In one of the most virulent attacks on the IDF in recent memory, Ha'aretz's senior diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn penned an article published in The Washington Post on August 18 in which he accused former Chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz specifically and IDF commanders generally of responsibility for the war. In Benn's view, the IDF's definition of the…
A hundred and forty years ago, on August 22, 1862, US president Abraham Lincoln commented about the nature of the American Civil War in a letter published in the Washington Intelligencer newspaper. His draft letter contained a sentence which James Welling, the newspaper's editor edited out because he considered it too common and folksy for his "dignified" publication. The president…
On Sunday morning, November 3, 1968, the IDF General Staff was presented for the first time with COS Haim Bar Lev's plan for the defense of the Sinai Peninsula. The plan called for the construction of a line of separation along the water line of the Suez Canal to be defended by small outposts, spaced five to six kilometers apart,…
How did it come to pass that Yassra Bakri, a 20-year-old Israeli Arab nursing student at Safed College, and her girlfriend, Samiya Asedi, another Israeli Arab student, said nothing for 20 minutes about the presence of a mass murderer on a No. 361 Egged bus this past Sunday morning? And how is it that the murderer was certain that…
The television camera lens moves with seeming effortlessness from the pictures of suffering and death at the Hebrew University to the carnival in Gaza City, where thousands take to the streets in celebration of the pictures from Jerusalem. Gazing at the revelers on the screen, one strains one's eyes to find an expression of shame, guilt, or remorse…