On July 31, 2015, an Israeli settler in the West Bank named Amiram Ben-Uliel walked into the Palestinian village of Duma under the cover of night and proceeded to carry out a macabre plan. Intent on seeking vigilante vengeance against Palestinians for the fatal driveby shooting of Israeli civilian Malachy Rosenfeld one month earlier, Ben-Uliel, […]
Israel finds itself in uncharted territory. For the first time in its history, Israel faces an unprecedented situation in which the state is pressing criminal charges against an incumbent prime minister. On May 24, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in the Jerusalem District Court, charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Much to his chagrin, he […]
Just days after the Israeli media reported earlier this month that Iranian military forces were being withdrawn from Syria, Israelis learned that Iran had sprung a nasty surprise on Israel. Iran, Israel’s most formidable enemy, had launched a cyberattack on Israel’s water and sewage facilities. Channel 12 broke the news on May 9, but the actual […]
Polish Jews invested high hopes in Poland’s campaign for independence from Russia and its rebirth as a sovereign state in 1918. But the period during which these events transpired coincided with the most widespread and possibly deadliest antisemitic violence in modern Polish history. Nearly 300 pogroms and anti-Jewish riots erupted in areas either still under […]
Twenty years ago today, Israel withdrew unilaterally from its self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon, ending a lengthy occupation that the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, described as a “tragedy.” Under cover of darkness, Israeli armored personnel carriers, trucks, jeeps and tanks rolled into Israel, accompanied by several thousand troops from the South Lebanon […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs should remove the headstones of two German prisoners of war buried in military cemeteries in the United States. The gravestones of Alfred Kafka and Georg Forst, who died in U.S. internment camps in 1943, each bear a swastika — the hated symbol of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement — and an […]
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, has been accused of blaming the Jewish community for flouting social distancing regulations during the current coronavirus pandemic. This is a patently unfair accusation. Last month, de Blasio personally supervised the dispersal of a large, tightly packed ultra-Orthodox funeral procession in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Two thousand […]
Television arrived late in Israel. A generation of Israelis missed it altogether. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, panned TV as “uncultured” and a “waste of time.” He would much rather read a book, he told an interviewer. During that austere era, some Israelis shared his view, considering TV an indulgence that could best be […]
Moshe Dayan, a black patch covering his left eye, was one of Israel’s most identifiable figures. An army general, a government minister and the scion of a Zionist pioneering clan, he was at once flamboyant and reserved. Dayan figures prominently in Anat Goren’s biopic, Dayan: The First Family, which will be screened online by the […]
The coronavirus pandemic has been with us for about four months, sickening and killing people and disrupting economies around the world. In all probability, years will elapse before it is finally eradicated. An equally deadly virus, which mutates across borders and cultures and has caused the deaths of millions of people, has endured for centuries. […]