A day after former finance minister Avigdor Liberman warned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would grant ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel grotesquely excessive subsidies in the interests of keeping his coalition intact, Netanyahu proved his point. On May 21, Liberman charged that Netanyahu was “willing to sell out on all values in exchange for power.” What […]
George Soros arouses strong reactions. Very strong reactions. A financier and backer of progressive causes, he has been praised by liberals and lambasted by conservatives. Donald Trump, the former president of the United States; Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, and Republican Party figures like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Marjorie Taylor […]
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, distorted reality in an unwise speech he recently delivered at the United Nations marking the 75th anniversary of the nakba, the dispossession of the Palestinians from their lands and homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Speaking at the UN’s General Assembly’s first-ever commemoration of this traumatic event, […]
President Joe Biden made an impassioned and important point a few days ago in a speech to Howard University’s graduating class. Warning that malevolent elements in the United States are attempting to roll back generations of racial progress, he correctly classified this kind of bigotry as a phenomenon passed on from one generation to the […]
Arranged marriages, a common occurrence among ultra-Orthodox Jews and traditional Muslims, apparently rarely break up. As one of the chief characters in Skekhar Kapur’s appealing romantic comedy, What’s Love Got To Do With It?, points out, only six percent of these unions fail. “You grow to love the person you’re with,” he says. The person […]
Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, rarely a month has gone by without an upsurge of fresh fighting. These clashes have pitted Israel against Iranian-backed Palestinian factions in Gaza whose long-term goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. […]
The first Palestinian Arab rebellion in Palestine broke out in 1936 and flickered out in 1939. It would be the final revolt of its kind during the British Mandate era, but hardly the last Palestinian uprising. Two more revolts erupted long after the birth of Israel, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000. […]
Imad Mughniyeh, a founder and principal of Hezbollah, lived and died by the sword. A notorious terrorist, he masterminded a string of suicide bombing attacks in the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans, Israelis and Argentinian Jews and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon. Before the September 11, 2001 […]
Israel is riven by profound political fault lines pitting Jewish liberals and moderates against conservatives and ultra-nationalists and secular Jews against haredim. Israelis are a fractious lot, though they tend to be united in times of emergencies and wars. These tensions emerge in The Lesson, a thoughtful, jolting and disturbing six-part Israeli drama directed by […]
Much to its dishonor, the Polish government recently conducted an orchestrated campaign against a respected Polish scholar who disagrees with its skewed nationalistic narrative of the Holocaust. The object of its wrath, Barbara Engelking, is the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the author […]