Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, set a record when he spoke to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. on July 24. In delivering his fourth speech to Congress in 28 years, he surpassed Sir Winston Churchill, who delivered three speeches on Capitol Hill. Netanyahu, who has been in office even […]
Iran, Israel’s regional rival and arch enemy, is moving closer to joining the nuclear club, a prospect that would unsettle and destabilize the Middle East. Two months ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has enriched enough weapons-grade uranium to make at least several nuclear bombs in just a matter of days and […]
The timing was not accidental. On July 18, a day before the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued a sharp but non-binding advisory opinion stating that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was illegal and should be terminated as soon as possible, the Knesset passed a motion, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu […]
It is now official. Israel is fighting a three-front war. On July 20, several hours after a Houthi armed drone evaded Israeli defences and struck a high-rise apartment building in the center of Tel Aviv, killing a 50-year-old man and wounding eight others, Israel retaliated. The Israeli Air Force, in one of its longest operations, […]
The toxic effects of the Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel have spilled over into Canada in the form of a sharp intensification of antisemitic incidents. As Deborah Lyons, Canada’s former ambassador to Israel and now its special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, said recently, “It’s clear from the data we’re seeing, […]
Stuart Heisler’s taut drama, Storm Warning, is a rarity, one of the relatively few mainstream Hollywood films that have been critical of the Ku Klux Klan, a notorious racist organization that gained immense popularity, even respectability, in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movies […]
As Israeli troops swept into West Beirut in mid-September of 1982, they raided a high-rise building housing the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Research Center on Colombani Street in the heart of the cosmopolitan Ras Beirut neighborhood. In short order, they seized a vast library of books about Israel, Zionism, Judaism and Jews and […]
Mohammed Deif, the elusive commander of Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is like the proverbial cat with nine lives. Against all odds, he manages to survive and pull through impossible situations. Needless to say, his astonishing knack for survival has constantly frustrated Israel, his arch nemesis. In the past two decades, he […]
Amid its protracted war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and its increasingly destructive war of attrition with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel is creating unacceptable and potentially destabilizing facts on the ground in the occupied West Bank. Earlier this month, on two successive days, Israeli government bodies converted yet more land in the West Bank […]
Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president-elect, is regarded as a “reformer” in some Western circles. Within the strict parameters of Iranian politics, this could even be true. Compared to his staunchly conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May along with the Iranian foreign minister, and to his hard-line opponent, Saeed Jalili, […]