03/21/2017
Jordan is the country to Israel’s east with which Israel has had a formal peace for 23 years. And its people hate Israel, and Jews, even more than the Iranians do. Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel. It’s ugly. Twenty years ago, on March 13, 1997,…
03/17/2017
There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him. This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This week we…
03/14/2017
US President Donald Trump is losing his focus. If he doesn’t get it back soon, he will fail to make America great again or safe again in the Middle East. After holding out for a month, last week Trump indicated he is adopting his predecessors’ obsession with empowering the PLO . This is a strategic error. There are many actors…
03/10/2017
An acrid stench of repression is spreading through America. Last Thursday, conservative political scientist Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute was attacked by a leftist mob at Middlebury College. Murray was invited to Middlebury by the college’s AEI club. He was to discuss his new book, Coming Apart, which discusses the plight of white working class Americans. Middlebury’s liberal…
03/07/2017
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman is in over his head. Few had high hopes for Liberman when he was appointed to his post, but most observers on the political Right were willing to swallow the pill of having a man with an understanding of military and strategic affairs that began and ended with applause lines because his appointment solved two pressing…
03/03/2017
The State Comptroller’s report on Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s war with Hamas in the summer of 2014 is exceedingly detailed. The problem is that it addresses the wrong details. Israel’s problem with Hamas wasn’t its tactics for destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels. Israel faced two separate challenges in its war with Hamas that summer. The first had to…
02/28/2017
Was former secretary of labor and assistant attorney general Tom Perez’s victory over Cong. Keith Ellison over the weekend in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical leftists in the party? That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory. Along…
02/24/2017
In his speech before the members of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations in Jerusalem this week, President Reuven Rivlin said that Israel has three overriding foreign policy concerns: “Number 1: Relations with America. Number 2: Relations with America. Number 3: Relations with America.” There is a lot of truth in Rivlin’s hyperbolic statement. …
02/17/2017
When they met on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin were both walking wounded. Netanyahu arrived in Washington the center of a criminal investigation the chief characteristic of which is that selected details of the probe are regularly leaked to the media by anonymous sources who cannot be challenged or held to account. These…
02/14/2017
MK Tzipi Livni is apparently well regarded at the UN. According to media reports, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called Livni and offered her the position of under-secretary-general. Guterres’s offer to Livni is supposed to be a trade-off. Livni will receive the appointment in exchange for the US canceling its veto of his plan to appoint former Palestinian…