To no one’s surprise, Israel has stepped up its efforts to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank, thereby undercutting the already slim prospect of a two-state solution and thumbing its nose at its chief ally, the United States. Israel has been building settlements and roads in the West Bank, populated in the main by […]
Despite an upsurge of anti-Christian incidents in Israel of late, Israel’s Foreign Ministry reportedly intends to boycott an academic conference on that topic scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on June 16. The conference, to which clerics, foreign diplomats and scholars have been invited, is the brainchild of Yisca Harani, an expert on Christianity who […]
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is back in the saddle again after winning his third five-year term as president of Turkey. In a runoff election on May 28, widely regarded as a referendum on his 20-year reign as Turkey’s dominant politician, he handily defeated challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu by a margin of 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent. “We […]
A day after former finance minister Avigdor Liberman warned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would grant ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel grotesquely excessive subsidies in the interests of keeping his coalition intact, Netanyahu proved his point. On May 21, Liberman charged that Netanyahu was “willing to sell out on all values in exchange for power.” What […]
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, distorted reality in an unwise speech he recently delivered at the United Nations marking the 75th anniversary of the nakba, the dispossession of the Palestinians from their lands and homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Speaking at the UN’s General Assembly’s first-ever commemoration of this traumatic event, […]
Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, rarely a month has gone by without an upsurge of fresh fighting. These clashes have pitted Israel against Iranian-backed Palestinian factions in Gaza whose long-term goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. […]
Trips by two high-ranking Republican politicians to Israel in the past week add credence to a recent Gallup survey that Republicans in the United States are more likely to support Israel than Democrats. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a likely contender […]
Israel is a miracle by any yardstick. Resurrected after two millennia, it was reborn after the Holocaust, the greatest disaster in Jewish history, and in the teeth of bitter Arab hostility. According to the Hebrew calendar, Israel will mark its 75th anniversary on April 25. In terms of the secular Gregorian calendar, Israel reemerged after […]
Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of Iran’s deposed monarch and an Iranian opposition leader, turned up in Israel on April 17 and became the most high-profile Iranian ever to set foot in the Jewish state on a public visit. Pahlavi, whose father Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ruled Iran until the 1979 Islamic revolution, arrived in […]
Since returning to power late last December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that one of Israel’s major foreign policy objectives is to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and thereby enlarge the 2020 Abraham accords and reduce the scope and seriousness of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia — a […]