Maybe, just maybe Benjamin Netanyahu got carried away by the inconclusive results of Israel’s March 2 general election, the third in less than a year. Aiming for a record fifth term in office, the 70-year-prime minister sounded euphoric as he addressed jubilant supporters following the election. Calling the projected outcome “the biggest victory of my life,” […]
Turkey and Syria, once the best of neighbors, are effectively at war. On March 1, Turkey launched a major offensive into northwestern Syria, the last bastion of Turkish-backed Syrian rebels fighting the Russian-backed regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The campaign is largely designed to stop the flow of some one million displaced Syrian civilians into Turkey […]
Known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Salonica — an Aegean port situated at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East — was once home to the world’s largest Sephardic Jewish community. One of the jewels of the sprawling Ottoman Empire, the city was annexed by Greece in 1913 and renamed Thessaloniki, an upheaval that […]
President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, recently equated the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank with the growth of antisemitism around the world. It’s a bizarre and ridiculous conflation that needs to be refuted. Urging the Palestinians to abandon their rejection of Trump’s one-sided peace plan, O’Brien claimed it could be […]
Michael Winterbottom’s biting satire, Greed, which opens in Canadian theatres on March 6, is a caustic portrait of a fictional self-made British billionaire and a blistering commentary on the fast fashion industry whose downtrodden workers he exploits mercilessly. Retail mogul Sir Richard (Greedy) McCreadie (Steve Coogan) has decamped to the Greek island of Mykonos to […]
My parents, David and Genia, passed away in Toronto in 2016, leaving two less Holocaust survivors in a dwindling population of some 400,000 around the world. Mostly in their 80s and 90s, they are the last living links to an unprecedented tragedy — the systematic, industrial-scale extermination of six million European Jews from 1939 to […]
Zalman Shoval was Israel’s two-time ambassador to the United States during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Shoval, posted to Washington from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1998 to 2000, served four Israeli prime ministers. His term of office coincided with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the outbreak of the first Gulf […]
Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney who pressed charges of sexual misconduct against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, got it exactly right when he described him as “a vicious serial sexual predator who used his power to threaten, rape, assault, trick, humiliate and silence his victims.” Vance was equally correct when he said […]
Neo- Nazism terrorism in Germany, the breeding ground of Adolf Hitler’s genocidal fascist movement, has evolved into a gravely serious problem in the past few years, but at least the German political class has forthrightly acknowledged this clear and present danger and is actively trying to combat it. Just hours after Tobias Rathjen’s targeted killing […]
President Donald Trump’s Arab-Israeli peace plan, released at the White House on January 28, aroused indignation in Palestinian and Arab circles. Among the ideas that provoked a storm of criticism was one that advocated land swaps between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority in populated and unpopulated areas of Israel and the West Bank. Under […]