03/06/2020
The day after Israel’s latest Knesset elections, Democrats in fourteen states in the US voted in Super Tuesday. This year’s Democratic presidential primaries pit the party establishment, represented by former Vice President Joe Biden against the party’s activist base comprising revolutionary socialists led by Senator Bernie Sanders. Their fight casts in stark relief the dismal state of both the Israeli…
The hundred rockets and missiles that Gazan terrorists launched into Israel this week served as yet another reminder that we have an account to manage with Gaza. “Manage,” not “settle,” because we lack the opportunity to settle our score with Gaza. There is not today, and for the foreseeable future, there will not be any regime in Gaza that will…
02/21/2020
With our attention focused on other things – Israel’s elections, the legal fraternity’s aggressive lawfare against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump’s peace plan, to name just a few – profound strategic shifts have upended the strategic balance in the Middle East. Israel’s two most formidable adversaries – Iran and Turkey – both came up short in their quests…
02/14/2020
The UN Human Rights Council’s release Wednesday of its blacklist of companies with financial ties and business relations with Israeli Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is a reminder of Israel’s vulnerability and the vulnerability of Jews worldwide. The vile, bigoted list, which singles out for boycott firms that do legitimate business with law-abiding Israelis just because they are Jews is yet…
02/07/2020
On Wednesday morning, NeverTrump propagandist Bill Kristol told his MSNBC audience that Democratic chances of victory over US President Donald Trump will rise if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated in Israel’s elections on March 2. Along the same lines, if Netanyahu fails to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before the election, not only…
01/31/2020
From 1994 through 1996, as a captain in the IDF, I served as a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the PLO. Those years were the heyday of the so-called peace process. As the coordinator of negotiations on civil affairs for the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, I participated in all of the negotiating sessions…
01/31/2020
In Israel’s early years, every time the US ambassador traveled to Jerusalem to meet with government leaders, he would have his chauffeur stop his car at the entrance to the city, and replace its diplomatic license plates with regular civilian plates. The State Department refused to recognize that Jerusalem was part of Israel. The license plates were for Israel. And…
01/24/2020
Leaks about the details of President Donald Trump’s peace plan are contradictory. Until the President releases his plan officially, we won’t know for certain what it involves. But from what we have experienced so far with the Trump administration generally and President Trump in particular, it is clear that Trump does not accept the premise that formed the foundation of…
01/24/2020
What the foreign leaders who came to Jerusalem this week to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz will take home from their visits is unknowable. But we do know what they brought with them. Whether they intended to or not, the leaders who came this week to Israel’s capital to bow…
01/24/2020
“Our international position has never, ever, in the history of the state since 1948 until today, ever been so terrible.” So declared MK Yair Lapid in February 2016. Today Lapid is the leading contender to serve as foreign minister in a future Blue and White government. At the time, there were indications that Lapid merely exaggerating rather than flat out…