Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov, made some very strange comments the other day that cast doubt on his grasp of current affairs in the Middle East. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, he accused Israel of aggressive behavior toward Hezbollah, claimed that the cross-border tunnels the Israeli army discovered last year in southern […]
Dominique Strauss-Kahn rolled the dice and lost. DSK, as he was popularly known, blundered in a moment of incredible stupidity, setting into motion castastrophic events that cost him his career, tarnished his reputation and destroyed his marriage. DSK was managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a potential president of France when disaster struck on […]
Israel has launched an ambitious infrastructure program to expand existing settlements, construct new ones and build more roads in the occupied West Bank, says Hagit Ofran, the head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch Project. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad objective is to consolidate Israel’s control of the West Bank and block the emergence of a […]
After signing historic normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan this past summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have assumed that Saudi Arabia would be next in line to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. U.S. President Donald Trump, who was instrumental in facilitating these path-breaking accords, buoyed Netanyahu’s confidence by boldly […]
Germany’s last election after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power was held on March 5, 1933. The Nazis captured 288 out of 647 seats in the Reichstag, winning 43.9 percent of the vote and establishing the national socialist party as the largest parliamentary bloc. Although 17 million voters were mesmerized by his vision of Germany, most […]
David Fincher’s workmanlike film, Mank, shines a spotlight on one of the most productive collaborative partnerships in the annals of the Hollywood movie industry. Citizen Kane, the enduring 1941 cinematic classic, was the brainchild of Herman Mankiewicz, a seasoned wordsmith who struggled with alcoholism, and Orson Welles, a precocious upstart who basked in self-adulation. Now […]
A tempest with far-reaching ramifications is brewing in Carmiel, a picturesque town of 46,000 in northern Israel. Carmiel was built in 1964 as part of an Israeli government plan to increase the Jewish population in the Galilee, which is inhabited by a slight majority of Muslim and Christian Arabs, the descendants of Palestinians who did […]
Iran is reeling following the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of the architects of its covert nuclear program. The audacious strike was a humiliating assault on Iran’s national pride, but not necessarily a crushing blow to its nuclear ambitions. Fakhrizadeh, a physicist and brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was gunned down in […]
Otto Ullmann, a 13-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Austria, bid his parents farewell in Vienna in 1939, just months before the outbreak of World War II. He was bound for Sweden, where he would live the rest of his life. Ullmann spent a year in a Swedish orphanage and then obtained work as a farm […]
Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was conquered by Islamic State in June 2014 and recaptured by Iraq in July 2017. Matthew Carnahan’s gritty war drama, Mosul, which is now available on Netflix, focuses on a small Iraqi police squad as it carries out a mopping-up operation on the eve of Mosul’s liberation. He dedicates the […]