Two months after Jordanian parliamentarians unanimously passed a motion demanding the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Amman and the recall of Jordan’s envoy in Tel Aviv, Israel and Jordan have begun to take the first steps toward improving their contentious relationship. The resolution was passed on May 17 in protest over Israeli “crimes” against Palestinians in […]
Ami Ayalon describes himself as “a strange bird” and an “outsider” in his frank and heartfelt memoir, Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy And The Hope For Its Future (Steerforth Press). Ayalon’s self-portrait is true, yet false. Having held top-level governmental posts in Israel, he is very much of an insider. But […]
Mustafa al-Kadhimi, the prime minister of Iraq, is due to arrive in Washington next month to discuss the future of the U.S. military presence in his country. His discussions with President Joe Biden could well be testy in light of recent events. Since Biden’s inauguration in January, pro-Iranian militias have increased the frequency of their […]
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is preparing for a crucial conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C. It will probably take place in August, after the newly-elected president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, assumes office. Late last month, Biden said he hopes to meet Bennett at the White House “very soon.” His press secretary, […]
When Howard Ball informed his mother he had accepted a position at Mississippi State University, she was aghast. “Her response was very loud and, for her, terse: You are meshugenah!” he writes in Taking the Fight South: Chronicle of a Jew’s Battle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (University of Notre Dame Press). “She truly believed […]
There has been a “paradigm shift” in Palestinian public opinion since the fourth Gaza border war between Israel and Hamas this past May, says prominent Palestinian pollster and political analyst Khalil Shikaki. Judging by his most recent surveys, Hamas has supplanted the Palestinian Authority as the defender of the Palestinian cause, while Palestinians are now more […]
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former prime minister, is proving to be an irresponsible and reckless opposition leader who cares only for his own political interests. On July 6, Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its ultra-Orthodox allies voted against a Knesset motion to renew the citizenship law, which they have consistently supported for the past 17 years. Enacted during […]
Edward Ball’s great-great-grandfather, Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, was a racist who sought to restore white dominance in Louisiana during and after Reconstruction in the wake of the U.S. Civil War. A Creole from New Orleans whose ancestors hailed from Brittany in western France, Lecorgne was a “hero” of his times because he fought for “whiteness” in the […]
The Debt, a thriller directed by John Madden, seamlessly blends two interlocking themes: the Holocaust and vengeance, as exacted by Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad. Now available on Netflix, it flits between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s and is set in Israel, East Berlin and Kiev. The plot is familiar, reminiscent of Israel’s […]
David Koffman asks a pointed question in the introductory essay of his book, No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging (University of Toronto Press): “Has there ever been a better home for the Jews than Canada?” As he observes in this volume of perceptive and erudite essays, which grew out of a […]