The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria exactly a month ago, killing some 50,000 people and levelling thousands of residential and commercial buildings, appears to have worked to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s advantage. Syria, one of Israel’s prime enemies, was relegated to the political wilderness following the outbreak of its civil war in 2011. […]
Call it a beacon of peace and coexistence in the Middle East. The Abrahamic Family House, a multi-faith sanctuary of worship in Abu Dhabi encompassing a mosque, a synagogue and a church, was inaugurated on February 16 and opened to the public on March 1. Consisting of the Imam al-Tayeb mosque, the Moses Ben-Maimon synagogue […]
The award-winning columnist of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, fears that Israel’s future as a liberal democratic state may be imperilled by the radical judicial reforms Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government wants to phase in. Friedman, the newspaper’s former bureau chief in Israel and Lebanon, told an Americans for Peace Now webinar […]
Yehuda Fuchs, the Israeli major-general in charge of the army’s Central Command, was absolutely correct to brand the murderous rampage by Jewish settlers in the West Bank town of Huwara on February 26 as a “pogrom.” “What happened in Huwara was a pogrom carried out by law-breakers,” he said after hundreds of vigilante settlers killed […]
A three-part series on some of the issues of the day in Israel, titled Into the Land and presented by the Times of Israel website, is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. These concise and probing documentaries deal with the lamentable state of the Dead Sea, the market in ancient archeological artifacts, and the […]
Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government is unequivocally committed to expanding Israel’s web of settlements in the West Bank as much as it is bent on thwarting Palestinian statehood there. This much is evidently clear in the wake of two events in the past few days. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a champion of Israeli settlers in the […]
At a press conference in Kyiv on February 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took a question from an Israeli reporter about Israel’s cautious position on the war. Israel has adopted a nuanced stance toward the conflict in Ukraine, with many observers having described it as a […]
One year on, the revanchist war that Russian President Vladimir Putin began in Ukraine last February 24 has degenerated into a protracted struggle of epic proportions with no end in sight. Universally regarded as the deadliest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, it has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Russian and […]
Trust is the fuel we run on and the air we breathe, Barry Avrich muses at the start of his fascinating documentary, The Talented Mr. Rosenberg. Yet, as he quickly adds, trust can be misused as a weapon by the unscrupulous. Avrich, a prolific Canadian filmmaker, was thinking of Albert Allan Rosenberg, a notorious resident […]
I first saw Chariots of Fire, the award-winning British movie, at the 1981 Toronto International Film Festival. Having been moved by it, I jumped at the chance of watching it again, this time on the Turner Classic Movies channel. As I tuned in, I wondered whether it would have the same mesmerizing effect on me. […]