Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ill-conceived and potentially disastrous scheme to weaken the Supreme Court by means of radical judicial legislation has dominated the news cycle in Israel of late. It has also drowned out his provocative and dangerous plan to tighten Israel’s control of the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinians. In recent […]
Two Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have broken out in the past 36 years, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000. A third intifada is looming in light of a significant upsurge of Palestinian violence, Israeli retaliatory raids, and the absence of any movement toward resolving the century-old […]
Their stiff body language was unmistakably indicative of their sharp policy differences over the combustible, still unresolved Palestinian issue. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken extolled the virtues of a two-state solution during his first trip to Israel following the formation last month of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government, the Israeli prime minister archly […]
Reluctantly complying with a Supreme Court ruling last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no alternative but to bite the bullet on January 22 and dismiss Aryeh Deri as a minister in his cabinet. His dismissal took effect on January 24. If he had not fired Deri, who was recently convicted of tax fraud and […]
Jake Sullivan, U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, spent several days in Israel late last week sizing up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government, which, after less than a month in office, has already managed to alienate legions of Israelis and Diaspora Jews. Sullivan was the first Biden administration senior official to confer with […]
Eighty thousand Israelis braved cold winter rain on the night of January 14 to attend a rally in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square to vent their anger and outrage at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial proposal to radically overhaul the judicial and legal system. Still other Israelis staged smaller protests in Jerusalem and Haifa. Had I […]
Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet again, was sworn in on December 29, nearly two months after he and his allies won a parliamentary majority in the November 1 general election, the fifth since 2019. By any yardstick, this is the most right-wing, religiously conservative government in Israel’s history. Critics, lambasting […]
In Israel’s most recent general election on November 1, its fifth in three years, right-wing parties triumphed and a left-wing party was all but decimated as Benjamin Netanyahu roared back to power after 18 months in opposition. Netanyahu and his allies — the Religious Zionist Party, United Torah Judaism and Shas — won 64 out […]
It was a brief political partnership, yet it was remarkably eventful and predictably disappointing. Naftali Bennett, a rightist, and Yair Lapid, a centrist, formed an expedient alliance after the inconclusive 2021 general election in Israel. They agreed to share power in a rainbow coalition government of right-wing, centrist and left-wing parties whose overarching objective was […]
China’s global rivalry with the United States has reached Saudi Arabia. Late last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping spent three days in the desert kingdom in a landmark visit during which he signed a myriad of agreements with his Saudi counterpart, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, a key […]