01/29/2021
Israel is the world leader in COVID-19 vaccinations. By late January, more than 85 percent of Israelis over the age of 60 had completed the two-round vaccination process. If the vaccination drive continues apace, Israel will have completed the vaccination of its adult population by mid-March. Many observers watch Israel’s breakneck vaccination drive with admiration. But several powerful anti-Semites are…
01/22/2021
President Joe Biden and the small crowd assembled on the Washington Mall for his inauguration Wednesday celebrated the event as “democracy’s day.” But in truth, the state of democracy in America today is nothing to celebrate. The talking heads on TV, Democrats and a smattering of anti-Trump Republicans insist that the fault for all of America’s political woes lies with…
01/15/2021
What purpose did it serve for President-elect Joe Biden to liken Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) to Adolf Hitler’s top propagandist Joseph Goebbels? In response to a question about the two Republican lawmakers following remarks on January 8, Biden said, “I was being reminded by a friend of mine…when we’re told [about] Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the lie,…
01/15/2021
In an interview with the New York Times last month, President-elect Joe Biden restated his intention to return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Israel opposes this plan because the 2015 deal ensures Iran will become a nuclear armed state. Media reports over the past few weeks have detailed some of Israel’s plans to convince the incoming administration to…
01/08/2021
It was hard to watch the scenes of President Donald Trump supporters storming the Capitol on Wednesday as the joint session of Congress was convened to debate and ratify President Elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Suddenly, the home of America’s representative government was threatened not by Islamic terrorists or China or Russia, but by the people the lawmakers represent…
01/01/2021
The rift between Israeli and American Jews is palpable almost everywhere you turn today. The most glaring disparity surrounds how they view President Donald Trump. The vast majority of Israelis adore Trump. The vast majority of American Jews despise him. But Trump isn’t the only thing or even the main thing that separates them. The main issue that separates Israelis…
01/01/2021
I interviewed Jonathan Pollard in Butner Federal Prison in North Carolina just before Passover in 2005 as a correspondent for Makor Rishon newspaper. Pollard, then 50 years old, had already served 20 years of his life sentence. His wife Esther, who we picked up on the way to the prison, was living then in a dark, small room in a cheap, malodorous…
01/01/2021
After a decade of unadulterated hostility, over the past few weeks Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Erdogan and his advisors have been waging a charm offensive on Israel. How are we to understand this sudden turn of events? In the 1990s, aside from the U.S., Turkey was Israel’s closest strategic ally. The alliance between the two countries was felt in everything from tourism…
12/25/2020
Over the past several weeks, Israel’s political commentators have repeatedly declared the demise of the political left. On the face of things, they are right. The polls all show that the right-religious bloc will win a comfortable majority in the Knesset elections scheduled for next March. There is no way that the left-Arab bloc will win a sufficient number of…
12/16/2020
For 72 years, U.S. presidents sought to achieve peace between Israel and the Arab world. For 72 years, they largely failed. What for so long eluded presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama seems to have come effortlessly to President Donald Trump. In the space of just four months, together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has achieved four peace deals between…