Something is terribly amiss with the food distribution system Israel and the United States created in the Gaza Strip a few months ago to alleviate hunger and starvation among its 2.2 million inhabitants. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), conceived by Israel and managed and financed by the United States, was established to avert endemic food […]
If Israel was a normal country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have resigned almost immediately after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the greatest single catastrophe in Israel’s seven-decade history. It would have been unreasonable for him to have stepped down so soon after this unprecedented disaster, which resulted in the deaths of about […]
This week’s sectarian violence in the southwestern Syrian province of Suweida, which ended on July 18 with a ceasefire brokered by the United States, has temporarily upended Israel’s plan to improve relations with the new government in Syria. Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara deployed forces to Suweida in mid-July to quell tensions after clashes broke out […]
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has floated a trial balloon that had no business being launched in the first place. Katz told journalists recently that he is promoting a plan to squeeze the 2.2.million Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the Gaza Strip into a “humanitarian city” that will be built on the ruins of Rafah. A […]
Hezbollah, having been degraded by Israel during the low-intensity war of attrition in 2023 and 2024 and the all-out two-month war in 2024, is reeling from its defeat as it attempts to regroup and recover. But the path forward will be exceedingly difficult for Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy which, until last year’s conflict, was Israel’s […]
The Palmach, the elite fighting unit of the Haganah self-defence force in British Mandate Palestine, is at the core of Palmach Rising, a 95-part Israeli television series now available on the Izzy streaming platform. Described as a teen drama, each episode is about 20 minutes in length. Judging by the first five, they are likely […]
I last saw Judgment At Nuremberg years ago, when I was a teenager. Some films age badly, but after watching it again recently on the Turner Classic Movie channel, I can confidently say that it stands the test of time. It is a fine film that deals accurately and seriously with a historically important subject. […]
Adam Raz, in his meticulously researched book, Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property (Verso), exposes an extremely sensitive and explosive issue, one that Israelis cannot conveniently sweep under a rug. Raz, an Israeli human rights researcher and historian, deals with the plunder of moveable property left behind by Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced […]
Benjamin Netanyahu’s fourth face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump since last July appears to have gone reasonably well, certainly better than his previous visit in April. The Israeli prime minister and the U.S. president met at a White House dinner on July 7 to discuss several core topics — the prospects of a ceasefire in the […]
Michael Curtiz’s classic, Casablanca, was released by the Warner Bros. studio in 1943 following its premiere in the previous year. Despite the passage of eight decades, it is remarkably fresh. I watched it on the Turner Classic Movies television channel, and it remains as vital and engaging as it was when I last saw it […]