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 […]
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 […]
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 […]