With national elections looming in just six weeks, and polls indicating that Labor and Kadima are headed for the opposition benches, both parties have suddenly rediscovered the need to defend the country and its citizens. [more]

It has been four days since Israel has finally responded to the relentless attacks by Hamas-led Arabs in the Gaza Strip. One cannot help but notice how the peace-loving nations of the world and organizations of caring people cry out against the “Israeli aggression” daily. One can only be touched by the efforts of all of these individuals and governments in the quest for a peaceful solution in the Middle East and the cessation of violence by both sides in the current conflict. [more]

As we well know, the international media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict generally portrays Israel as an aggressive occupier and a militant state. Take a look at the headlines and articles that made the international news scene in the coverage following the end of the recent Hamas-Israel ceasefire. [more]

We have forty-five seconds from the time the missile leaves Gaza and reaches us. The tracking system lets each area know that a rocket is due to land in their vicinity. Then the siren wails. It may not land on your doorstep or penetrate your roof, but it is somewhere around. [more]

As night fell, and we lit our Chanukah candles, we were filled with new hope; as our government finally undertook its basic responsibility towards its citizens and launched the long-delayed IDF strike against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. [more]

Current thinking on Middle East conflicts, in Israel, the US and other countries, suffers from serious fallacies leading to nowhere. Particularly pernicious are four widely accepted but wrong assumptions: [more]

On Friday, a Hamas spokesman made Israel the following proposal: You keep the stream of humanitarian aid and supplies flowing into Gaza and we will keep launching rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians. It was an offer Israel had little choice but to refuse. [more]

the intimations of senior government officials are to be believed, the IDF is poised to embark on an assault against Hamas the like of which has not been seen since the Muslim extremists captured Gaza from Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah in June 2007. [more]

What to make of this week’s exchange of platitudes between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Syrian President Bashar Assad? Olmert was on his way to Ankara to promote peace with Syria just as Assad was holding a news conference with Croatian president President Stipe Mesic in Damascus. [more]

Sunday night was the first night of Chanukah, the holiday with as many meanings as it has spellings. Why do we celebrate? Pick one or pick all … [more]

With the primaries now history and the national elections at our doorstep the real issues need to be addressed. Zionism and in particular its progeny, the State of Israel, can boast some of the greatest accomplishments in modern times. A people who have risen from the ashes, Israel has made the desert bloom and its economy thrive. But six decades since the modern re-establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people, the State of Israel has yet to realize one fundamental feature that many states accomplish upon their inception - secure and recognized borders. [more]

Israel today is facing threats unlike any other in its extraordinary history. In a period of tremendous global instability, the nation is beginning to tremble violently, highlighted by the recent internal unrest in Hebron. Wars and rumors of war are swirling about; fear frothing amongst continual conflict with the Palestinians; horrors howling in the winds surrounding the Jewish land. Amid this chaos, cold, unrepentant action must be taken by Israel against her greatest threat. [more]

Lame duck Israeli and US leaders are making a serious effort these days to ensure that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process enters an irreversible track before they leave office. Palestinian negotiators are also trying to put on the record the latest that the talks have accomplished. [more]

There is something absurd about the current talks between Israel and Syria and about Turkey’s alleged role as a peace broker. Turkey is basically telling Israel to relinquish territories to Syria to achieve peace, while Turkey itself achieved peace with Syria as a result of its obstinate refusal to give in to its territorial demands over the Hatay (or Alexandretta) Province. [more]

[In upcoming elections,] the centrist voter will be faced with a choice of either voting for an extreme right-wing Likud list, the ideological emptiness of Kadima, or the center-left Labor Party, which has a clear and sensible direction for the country, both diplomatically and on the economic-social front. [more]

I was saddened to hear that many used their pulpits to criticize the brave Jewish heroes whom the government forcefully expelled from The Peace House in Hebron and the hundreds of other Jews who stood with them in support of their right to stay there. [more]

While we await - please! - the first bountiful showers of our so far unseasonably summery winter, we are told that our water resources are so alarmingly deficient that new, draconian restrictions on household use are in the works. In the past relatively rainless four years, Israel has managed to amass a water deficit of four billion cubic meters. [more]

What can we expect of a US president-elect eager to repair America’s image abroad in general, and in the Middle East in particular? [more]

The mass rally organized by Hamas in Gaza to celebrate its 21st anniversary yesterday was a spectacle repulsive to Israelis. [more]

The days pass and Arab aggression grows more blatant and deadly. The world becomes less and less friendly towards the Jewish state, but in turn, the response from Israel’s present leaders - Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni - can be summed up as humiliation piled upon humiliation. [more]

Nations not only have the right, but the obligation to defend their citizenry and territory from attack. As such, it is only a matter of time before Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers are called to account for the death and destruction wrought by thousands of missiles they have fired into Israeli cities, towns and kibbutzim over the past seven years. [more]

There was a house, not small in size, located in Hebron. It stood between Jew and Arab, between Israeli and Palestinian. As was the way of many things, an Arab sold the house to a Jew and the Jew was smart enough to know that others would question the sale - most especially his own government - and so he registered the sale, he videotaped the sale, he documented the sale. [more]

In recent weeks we’ve been hearing time and again about the “Saudi Initiative” or “Arab Peace Initiative,” partly thanks to the Palestinian Authority, which bothered to publicize it with an ad posted in Israeli newspapers and decorated with the flags of Arab states. Meanwhile, President Shimon Peres has been declaring, both in Israel and abroad, that the Saudi peace initiative constitutes a basis for a diplomatic process. [more]

When he met with Assad yesterday, Jimmy Carter should have kept in mind the regime’s insecure and vulnerable position. Some of that insecurity is economic. After a half century of Ba’ath Party rule, the Syrian economy remains an inefficient, heavily regulated socialist command economy. Because the country’s oil sector provides a quarter of its GDP, half of the government’s revenues and some two-thirds of its export receipts, declining oil prices are having devastating effect. The International Labor Organization has estimated Syria’s unemployment rate at almost 18 percent. But most of Syria’s weakness, which has become ever more apparent since Bashar Assad assumed power in 2000, is political. [more]

The Golan Heights looked like a war zone this week. Helicopters and fighter aircraft zipped over the wet, green hilltops, as thousands of soldiers practiced war against Syria and Hizbullah in a massive exercise involving the Golani Brigade, cannons and Merkava tanks. [more]

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of internal law and advocate of “new international law” is a mild-mannered, white-haired, 78-year-old scholar-activist who, seemingly, weighs his words carefully - before lobbing rhetorical bombs.  He has reminisced that his family was so assimilated that it was in “virtual denial of even the ethnic side [of its] Jewishness.”  Over the years, however, Falk has taken an interest in things Jewish, including the destruction of European Jewry.  His reflections have led him to conclude that Israel is now “slouching” toward another Holocaust. But this time, it is the Jews who may be dreaming of carrying out the genocide. Falk asks: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.” [more]

The next government of Israel will be headed by the Likud under Binyamin Netanyahu, the public opinion polls said. But that was before Monday’s Likud primary, which shifted the party considerably to the right. Will centrist voters who might have been mulling abandoning Kadima because of its leftward drift under Ehud Olmert now put their faith in Tzipi Livni? [more]

Among the plethora of proposals US President-elect Barack Obama is being offered from unofficial sources in this transition period, chances are that the joint Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations project entitled “Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President” will command a prominent place. Two chapters of this report address one of the most urgent issues Obama will have to confront: Iran’s purported nuclear weapons development project. [more]

US Admiral Bull Halsey, a rational and responsible man, said, “Hit hard, hit fast, hit often.” Rationality and responsibility are qualities quite foreign to those who shape Israel’s policy toward its enemy, the Palestinian Authority. Their policy is “Hit softly, hit slowly, and hit seldom.” [more]

I do not condone violence. I certainly do not condone violence against Israeli soldiers, whether it is coming from Palestinians or Israelis, secular or religious. But what I want to talk about is the double standard that has become almost laughable. [more]

December 9 marks the 60th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, sometimes referred to as the “Never Again” Convention. Six decades have passed since this new era of genocide prevention was proclaimed in the wake of the Holocaust. On this oft-ignored anniversary, we must acknowledge our abysmal failure in preventing the most destructive threat known to humankind - the crime whose name we should even shudder to mention - genocide. [more]

For those following the planned evacuation of the illegal settlement in Hebron ironically called the “House of Peace,” it has been an eventful couple of weeks. Extreme violence on the part of settlers toward both Palestinians and Israeli police and soldiers, petitions of Knesset members to reverse the ruling of the High Court, letters to the president and countless threats of civil war have become the normal means of discourse. [more]

Nothing I have written on Jewish identity as The Jerusalem Post’s Jewish world correspondent has elicited the amount and vehemence of response as the November 21 front page report on the relative lack of Israeli media coverage of the US Jewish federations’ General Assembly in Jerusalem (”GA largely ignored by Hebrew-speaking press”). The article noted the Hebrew-speaking media’s apparent disdain for the conference, together with what American participants felt Israel had to gain from a closer conversation with American Jewry. [more]

Last month, my PR firm was hired by the Binyamin Regional Council to organize and lead a day trip exclusively for foreign journalists , allowing them to visit communities under the council’s jurisdiction. About 25 journalists representing many of the major media outlets in both the US and Europe signed up for the tour, which included stops in Kochav Ya’acov, Ofra, Eli and Shilo. The purpose of the trip was to allow the journalists to meet with the residents to see what life is really like in “the settlements.” [more]

There is a lot riding on how yesterday’s standoff in Hebron between authorities and post-Zionist settler extremists ultimately plays out. Though no one was gravely wounded, the violent evacuation of Beit Hashalom, and the events leading up to it, again exposed the depth of the chasm that divides our society. [more]

Jerusalem’s Old City is the holiest part of Judaism’s holiest city. What we now call the “Old City” is what the Bible means when it refers to Jerusalem. There should be little doubt that the new Obama/Clinton policy for Israel will include pressure on Israel to negotiate away Israel’s full control of the Old City and other parts of Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu now has the opportunity to, as he has so often put it in the past: “change the facts on the ground.” [more]

In a recent study conducted by NATAL (Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War), researchers discovered that close to 56 percent of Sderot residents have suffered in some way from Palestinian rocket attacks. According to the report, presented by Natal Community Staff Director Dr. Roni Berger in Beersheva on November 24, nearly half of Sderot’s population has been either physically or emotionally harmed by Palestinian rocket fire. [more]

Like a number of OU products, this one was stamped parve. The one-page document which made its way across my desk is entitled “Working in Coalition with Evangelical Christians”. And, according to reports, it is one of a number of resolutions which was expected to be approved at this past week’s Orthodox Union Convention in Jerusalem. [more]

Islam will never accept Israel unless the ideology undergoes a reformation, but it cannot do so and still be called Islam. That said, there is no future for the Jewish state if it believes that the Muslim world will ever accept it in true and lasting peace. [more]

Again we see the return, in vain, to negotiations with the Palestinians. Olmert is not the only one engaging in talks and promising us that very soon we shall secure a deal (which he has no mandate to commit to at this time anyway) – our three major parties are back to the old tune: They will courageously pursue an agreement that would guarantee peace and security. [more]

Menahem Mendel of Kotsk was one of the great Hasidic masters of the 19th century. One day, according to legend, a Jewish freethinker living in the shtetl confronted the rebbe with a provocative question. He brazenly asked Menahem Mendel, “Do you really believe in the resurrection of the dead?” The rebbe thought for a moment, then exclaimed: “I believe in the resurrection of the living!” [more]

In the topsy-turvy world of the United Nations, no issue gets more consideration, monopolizes more resources or engenders more sloganeering than the “Question of Palestine.” [more]

It isn’t enough to read a United Nations General Assembly resolution and to conclude that Israel is an aggressor. It also isn’t enough to read an article on Wikipedia. What a person must do is look under every stone and realise the dirt that lies beneath. The Six Day War, a war which unarguably set the agenda of Israel’s future borders, is often used as example of Israel breaking international law, but this is truly a farce. [more]

There is no accident in the terminology used by the media, courts and the political representatives of the security forces. They are all connected by the same thread of libelous statements against the Jewish pioneers in Judea and Samaria, and perhaps, even more so, against the Jews living in the City of our Fathers, Hevron. [more]

The more economically intertwined Yehuda-Shomron is with Israel’s national economy inside the Green Line, the more secure its political future will be. [more]

I’ve been a Palestinian firster for most of my professional life. I believe that the Palestinian issue is the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the key to regional peace, and the sine qua non for preserving Israel as a Jewish democratic state.  These arguments remain valid. What’s changed is that a conflict-ending agreement between Israelis and Palestinians may no longer be possible. [more]

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told a think-tank audience in Abu Dhabi yesterday that “the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran poses the most immediate threat to the stability” of the region.  Gulf Arabs don’t have to be convinced that Persian hegemony is a peril. They understand that an Iranian bomb would be directed against them as much as against Israel and the West. They worry, too, that Iran is indoctrinating their restive Shi’ite populations with the ayatollahs’ extremism. [more]

The Torah identifies the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron as the oldest piece of Jewish-owned property. There Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried. [more]

The Muslim and Arab world - presumably excluding Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah - have just made an unprecedented overture to the people of Israel. [more]

Since the first “land for peace” deal with Egypt in UN Resolution 242, the diplomatic goal of most peace proposals has included the concept of “land for peace.” The idea behind the concept of “land for peace” is that Israel “took” land from Egypt, which, in exchange for getting that land “back”, granted Israel peace. [more]

Golda Meir once said that as long as the Arabs hate us more than they love their own children, there will not be peace. We can flip that thought onto Israeli leadership: as long as our leaders love themselves more than they love their country, their people and the future of Jews, then their leadership will be hateful, and their actions and decisions will remain highly questionable. [more]

Condoleezza Rice has said, “Frankly, it’s time for the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Absolutely, the timing is right. With Islamic terror spreading, the growth of extreme Islamic factions, Islamic terror sleeper cells being created in the US, it is definitely the time for the establishment of a “Palestinian” state. While US forces make it difficult for Islamic terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will need a new headquarters. Gaza is simply not big enough. [more]

The great battle of our younger years was between Communism and democratic liberalism. Its contemporary equivalent is Arab nationalism versus Islamism. That implies some extremely important, often misunderstood conclusions. [more]

Human Rights and Jewish organizations everywhere must vociferously declare their outrage that a Jewish family was brutalized as they slept quietly in the night, mother and children beaten, her infant child torn from her arms, and her teenage daughter’s finger broken. [more]

One needs not be overly sophisticated in order to understand why the settlers eyed this specific house: It marks a vital site in their unhidden plan to create Jewish contiguity between Kiryat Arba and Hebron’s city center. [more]

No other nation on earth except Israel remains under the persistent attacks of an enemy whose reason for existence is the absolute destruction of the Jewish state. Few other nations would permit this barbarity. [more]

En route to unwavering nationalism, religious Zionism left behind whole worlds of knowledge, morality, and truth-seeking; worlds of values and creation were dismissed without a second thought. [more]

Now that Barack Obama has been elected president and the option of direct US-Iranian negotiations seems a viable possibility, the enthusiasm of those that had [previously] pushed for such US involvement has waned. In fact, this scenario - that so many had paid lip service to - is ironically now arousing concern if not outright fear within Europe, Arab Middle Eastern states, and Iran itself. [more]

Religious Zionists have officially admitted that they are too polarized - over politics, theology and personality - to share one home. That, more than anything else, explains the demise of the National Religious Party yesterday, age 52. Sad, really, when you consider the movement’s illustrious history. [more]

Pity the Hamas leadership as it tries to fathom how Israel will respond to the organization’s repeated violations of the cease-fire. [more]

Not only did the lions of the Left usurp the throne and bring their jackal lackeys into the heartland of the pride, they also neutralized the rightful heir to the throne – the young Israelis. [more]

The sane Arab world objects to Hamas’ conduct, even if quietly. If there is a sort of consensus in the Arab world regarding who should not be “ruling the territories,” the answer is Hamas. [more]

The central work of Beilin’s life – promoting a two-state solution – is the logical extension of Theodore Herzl’s dream. This may come as a surprise to some in the far-right who associate Zionism with the idea of Greater Israel. Yet the readiness to compromise in order to secure the fate of the Jewish state has always gone hand in hand with Zionism. [more]

Kristallnacht, on the other hand, is not about the end product of hate but the process. It represents the reality that a Holocaust does not just happen; it has to be prepared, cultivated, acted upon first in small steps, then bigger ones, and finally the biggest. [more]

During the past three decades the rise of militant Islam has in many ways dominated political events in the region. The consequences of Iranian religious radicalism can be observed in the Persian Gulf region, in the Arab-Israel conflict, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Although Iranian Islamic militancy appears to be as dominant as ever, this may not be the case during the next decade. [more]

One of the greatest issues facing the Jewish nation today is if we have the right to hold on to certain parts of Eretz Israel, even if it will cost Jewish lives. [more]

I believe that it is in the US interest for Israel to destroy the Iranian nuclear sites, since the destruction and the rise in oil prices resulting from a non-nuclear Iranian retaliation would still be much less than the consequences of a nuclear war following an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel and an Israeli nuclear retaliation. [more]

Past efforts to appease PLO terrorists did not protect Britain, France, and Italy from major terrorist operations on their soil. Today, expressions of sympathy and diplomatic efforts do not preserve them from being targets of radical Islamists. Some leaders now understand this fact; others do not. [more]

It should not be surprising that ruling party Kadima leads the trend in dishonesty (and corruption as well), as its very creation was an act of dishonesty. Kadima founder Ariel Sharon was for almost 30 years a proponent of settlements and decried their removal as “tyranny of the majority.” In the 2003 elections, as head of the Likud, Sharon defeated his opponent, Labor candidate Amram Mitzna, by attacking Mitzna’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from the territories. But shortly after the election, Sharon proposed and executed this exact plan.  Within the Likud, Sharon faced substantial opposition regarding the disengagement.  Sharon thus called for a referendum on the issue, expressly stating he would abide by it. Yet when Likud members voted against the plan by a 20 percent margin, Sharon ignored the results and carried out the disengagement anyway. [more]

The upcoming 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht on November 9 and 10 provides an occasion to grapple with the question of whether, in the current decade, the Jewish people are reliving the 1930s. To answer that one has to look at issues such as genocide and hate promotion, appeasement of totalitarians, Western leadership and so on. The correct answer must then be: “Yes, but only in certain aspects.” [more]

Israel and the United States are on a collision course with the victory of Barack Obama for the US presidency and [the predicted victory of] Binyamin Netanyahu in next February’s elections here promise a return of the frosty relations when Bill Clinton was in the White house and Netanyahu had his disastrous first term in the Prime Minister’s Office. [more]

By criminalizing those promoting [Holocaust denial], we not only transform them into martyrs posing as champions of free speech, but also enable them to insinuate that “the Jews” are preventing them from demonstrating the truth of their warped and evil doctrines. [more]

Recent opinion pieces … have dealt with the current situation in Acre. While we certainly applaud the initiative taken by Honig and others in attempting to identify the root causes underlying the violence that now threatens to engulf what has otherwise been a peaceful town, a proper understanding of last month’s events will only be gained through an examination of recent changes in the city and on the local level - not through some selective citation of isolated disturbances in other places or through vain generalizations derived from the long-standing regional conflict. For organizations (like our own) working in Acre, the roots of the current conflict are clearly traceable to recent developments in the city itself. [more]

Today, November 2, the Balfour Declaration is 91 years old. It was the crucial first official recognition of Jewish national aspirations. [more]

[For Barack Obama], there’s no avoiding the Middle East - either because some flare-up will demand his attention, or because of the alluring temptation to go down in history as the president who finally - finally - brokered the deal that gave the Palestinian Arabs a state and delivered Israel from decades of terrorism. [more]

Thirteen years after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, both the Lef and the Right have embraced a single corrosive motto: “Never forget, never forgive.” If they persist, our Zionist enterprise is at risk. [more]

It is that time of the year again, when the media has a field day over the memorials for the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. [more]

The adventures in Israel never cease. The story goes that, upon seeing a fox running out of the Beit HaMikdash, Rabbi Akiva started laughing. In short, he explained to his students that despite this terrible omen, it is yet a sign of better times to come. The question remains: What to do until those times arrive, and should we make an effort to bring them quicker and on a more positive note? [more]

A few people have already asked me why I haven’t commented on the US elections yet. The short answer is that I don’t think it really matters. [more]

If recently amended US and Israeli intelligence reports are correct, the next US president will have precious little time to engage Iranian leaders in any further negotiations over its nuclear weapons program. He will be focusing instead on the details, operational plans and ramifications of a US direct military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. [more]

Israeli human rights groups must condemn the manner in which Border Guard forces evacuated the Federman Farm in Hebron. According to reports, the evacuators arrived at the family home late at night and raided it while breaking windows, as children slept inside. The family says that after it was forcefully evacuated, its belongings were buried under the ruins of the home. We need to examine whether this aggressive modus operandi undermines human rights principles. [more]

The harsh curses directed at police and Border Guard officers by some settlers on Sunday are intolerable. They are so intolerable that it would be better that these thugs be handled not by law authorities, but rather, by the kind of authorities that can order forced hospitalization. [more]

There are quite a few people around here who still refuse to face up to reality: Israel’s three leading political movements have gone bankrupt. They finished their role and are facing a liquidation sale. Kadima, Labor, and Likud no longer have something to sell. [more]

The Knesset’s winter session opens today, but there will be no keynote address by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who announced Sunday that, under “the current circumstances,” he would not press for a legislative agenda. [more]

On Sunday, the Associated Press disseminated worldwide a photo of “a Jewish settler” confronting unseen Palestinians in northern Samaria. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what to make of this: a bare-chested, pipe-wielding teen, ski-mask drawn over his face, goth T-shirt tied to a belt holding up camouflage trousers. [more]

The West Bank - known only as Judea and Samaria until 1950 - is indisputably the Biblical heartland of the Jews. [more]

This article may seem at first to be dealing with nothing more than semantics. But in this case, we are dealing with words pertaining to our very identity. Our identity is the way we perceive ourselves and broadcast that perception to others. The name we are given and words we use to describe ourselves are fundamental to our identity. [more]

Among my sources for a recent piece, “Are We Funding the Lebanese Army or Hizbullah?” (Human Events, Oct. 20, 2008), was my friend and colleague, Clare M. Lopez, who - when I mentioned to her my concerns regarding Hizbullah’s having wormed its way into the legitimate Lebanese defense apparatus as an official component of the army - said to me, “It’s actually the other way around. The army now appears to be part of Hizbullah.” [more]

While Osama Bin-Laden’s followers are on the run in various locales around the world, his supporters among the Palestinians in Gaza are operating with virtual impunity - launching an increasing number of attacks on Israel in recent months and spreading their hateful ideology. [more]

We call on the Lebanese government and parliament to grant unconditional amnesty to the ex-members of the South Lebanon Army (SLA) who sought refuge in neighboring Israel with their families after the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon in May 2000, in accordance with the UN Resolution 425. A grant of amnesty is justified especially in light of the fact that (after Syrian troops were forced to withdraw from Lebanon in accordance with the UN Resolution 1559) the Lebanese parliament passed in 2005 an amnesty law that pardoned numerous leaders and individuals in a bid to pave the way for a comprehensive national milieu of reconciliation among the country’s mosaic, multicultural communities that compose Lebanese society. [more]

As opposed to the manner in which the media handled the recent events in Akko, the main issue should not have been with the driver who drove on Yom Kippur or the hooligans who attacked him. Rudeness and hooliganism can be found anywhere. It’s unpleasant, but it’s certainly not fit for a headline story on the evening news. [more]

I heard about the riots in Akko at the end of Yom Kippur, on my way back from my parents’ home in Jerusalem, where I fasted. The news immediately took me back to my mixed childhood in Jerusalem’s Old City, among the Arabs and ultra-Orthodox; the sense of latent threat, of tensions below the surface, while above the surface we saw the smooth flow of prolific business ties. It took me back to the first Intifada that turned the alleyways of my childhood into a fire zone; ever since then, I have not regained the sense of safety while walking through them. It took me back to the moment when the violence erupted. [more]

The question on the agenda in a recent High Court hearing regarding Jewish National Fund (JNF) land was whether this land, bought with the money of Jewish donors over generations, should be sold to non-Jews as well. [more]

Thirty five years ago, several days before Rosh Hashana, our brigade commander held a reception for officers at our reserves brigade. The guest of honor, the IDF Central Command chief, delivered an address that included a briefing on the existing situation and on expected developments. While addressing the possibility of war, he declared that it will not be worthwhile for Egypt and Syria to embark on a military campaign because of the IDF’s superiority. [more]

Jews don’t know how to rule. This is clear to anyone observing the Israeli chaos. After all, too much time has passed since Jews were in power, and we completely forgot the meaning of sovereignty and the way to impose order. The last time Jews were in power was in the Hasmonean era, and even back then the situation wasn’t glorious. [more]

Over the past months, Israeli and Palestinian officials have been urging the completion of a final agreement on a “two-state solution” as quickly as possible to avoid a “one-state solution.” Israeli officials have spoken of it as a warning, while Palestinian officials have used it as a threat. [more]

Halting Iran’s nuclear program: It is deja vu all over again, but arguably worse. The Security Council’s recent reiteration of lame sanctions against Teheran, coupled to the mullahs rejection of the West’s July incentives package, leaves the diplomatic effort to halt the enrichment program in tatters. But this should come as no surprise. The roots lay in a simple point: The West cannot buy the mullahs off. The time has come to explore another approach, one that challenges the values that sustain Iran’s atomic ambitions. [more]

Like so many of my countrymen on Yom Kippur, I made my way to the local synagogue for the Kol Nidrei service. After the dramatic opening Kol Nidrei prayer, the cantor repeats three times, in order to underline its importance, the following passage, whose English translation reads: “And it shall be forgiven to the whole congregation of the children of Israel, and to the stranger who sojourneth among them; for all the people act ignorantly.” [more]

Last month, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave an explosive farewell interview to Yediot Aharonot. In it, Olmert, not known for his reticence to criticize political and ideological opponents, chose to mention only one by name: Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, the former chief of General Staff and my colleague at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, whose much anticipated book, The Long-Short Road, was published last month. It was fitting that Ya’alon should be singled out for criticism because the policy approach of these two men could not be more different. [more]

In a September 26 editorial, this is how Britain’s Guardian judged Israel’s efforts to convince the world that Iran’s nuclear program poses an existential threat to the Jewish state, and that military action might be the lesser of two evils: “Israel has lost the argument, and we should all breathe a sigh of relief [that] pragmatism… has prevailed.” [more]