March 2013
2 posts
Parsing Obama's Speech
Algemeiner (March 28, 2013)
Anyone inclined to fantasize prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement because President Obama inspired students with his Jerusalem speech might take a deep breath and remember recent history. Especially once popular Israeli journalist and TV commentator Ehud Ya’ari enthusiastically declared that Obama was “a new Clinton.”
Intended as laudatory, the Clinton...
Bon Voyage: President Obama in Israel
Algemeiner (March 14, 2013)
In anticipation of President Obama’s forthcoming visit to Israel The New York Times published three “Op-Ed” columns in a single day (March 13) assessing the dim prospects for Middle East peace – and, to be sure – holding Israel responsible. Even if “Op-Ed” refers only to location (adjacent to the editorial page) rather than to policy (deviating from the editorial...
January 2013
1 post
Wailing at the Western Wall
For nearly twenty-five years an organization known as Women of the Wall has struggled, in the words of its mission statement, “to achieve the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray, and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall.”
Their challenge to guidelines set by the Ministry of Religious Authority, the government agency charged...
December 2012
2 posts
Middle Eastern Tunnel Vision
The Algemeiner(December 7, 2012)
Imagine: until the Holland Tunnel was completed in 1927 New York and New Jersey had not been contiguous (defined in Webster’s as “have contact with”). Who knew?
The current Middle Eastern equivalent, generating worldwide outrage, is the projected loss of “contiguity” between the northern and southern West Bank if Israel proceeds with its recently disclosed...
Israel Returns Fire
American Thinker(December 3, 2012)
One day after the United Nations General Assembly recognized “Palestine” as a “nonmember observer state” – a status that it shares only with the Vatican - an actual state responded. The Netanyahu government quickly fired a shot across the bow of the Palestinian Authority for its decision to court the United Nations rather than negotiate with Israel, announcing...
November 2012
5 posts
Palestinian Sound and Fury
The Algemeiner(November 29, 2012)
Today, November 29th, marked the 65th anniversary of UN Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab (not “Palestinian”) states. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, desperately trying to reclaim the limelight from Hamas after its fanciful claim of a Gaza “victory,” was expected to request his consolation prize from the...
Ehud Barak's Tangled Legacy
The Algemeiner (November 28, 2012)
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - heroic military commander, failed politician, and bane of Jewish settlers – has announced his intention to resign from public office after the January election. Having severed his roots in the Labor Party, and with his tiny Independence Party unlikely to win enough votes to return him to the Knesset, Barak chose to call it...
Who Won?
New York Sun(November 27, 2012)
Who won the Gaza war? According to the prevailing media narrative, besieged innocents in Gaza bravely withstood the withering weeklong Israeli rocket barrage until Egyptian President Morsi mediated a cease-fire. End of story, except for the largely unnoticed detail that under Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood before his recent ascent to power, Egypt has been...
Land for Peace - or War?
American Thinker (November 20, 2012)
The final casualty in the current Gaza war may be the endlessly repeated mantra: “Land for Peace.” For forty-five years, ever since its stunning victory in the Six-Day War, Israel has confronted insistent demands to return the conquered Sinai to Egypt, the Golan Heights to Syria, and relinquish its own biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria for a Palestinian...
Netanyahu's Settlement Jungle
American Thinker(October 28, 2012)
The issue of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, continues to roil Israeli politics. According to worldwide conventional wisdom, settlements built since the Six-Day War on land that previously had been known as Jordan’s West Bank violate fundamental principles of international law.
But conventional wisdom,...
October 2012
1 post
Who is (isn't) a Refugee?
The Algemeiner (October 3, 2012)
In December 1949, seven months after the fledgling State of Israel was granted membership in the United Nations, the UN established the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA). Intended as a “temporary” agency, its sole purpose was to provide aid to a vastly inflated number of 860,000 Palestinian “refugees.” (Their actual number, according to...
September 2012
2 posts
When is a House a Home in Hebron?
The Algemeiner (September 19, 2012)
Seven years ago New York businessman Morris Abraham, through an intermediary and after prolonged negotiations, purchased a four-story building from its owner for nearly one million dollars. With expansive views of the surrounding hills, the valley below, and the city beyond, it could be renovated to provide a comfortable residence for Jewish families.
Abraham...
Stirring the Pot on Settlements
The Algemeiner(September 10, 2012)
“Israel’s Settlers Are Here to Stay,” Danny Dayan’s recent New York Times op-ed (July 25), has provoked a revealing kerfluffle among self-appointed monitors of Israel’s moral demise.
It quickly elicited Seth Mandel’s Commentary critique of Dayan’s “Wrongheaded Proposal” (July 26); a swipe from Thomas Friedman warning (yet again) of the danger posed by...
July 2012
3 posts
Jewish Settlers and The New York Times
The Algemeiner (July 27, 2012)
Dani Dayan’s New York Times op-ed (July 26), “Israel’s Settlers Are Here to Stay,” was an eyebrow raiser. The return of Jewish settlers to Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, has long irritated Times editors and columnists. Indeed, their discomfort with the Jewish state, reflecting the Jewish assimilationist preferences of the Sulzberger...
The State of the Jews
The Algemeiner (July 19, 2012)
The worrisome state of the Jewish people these days has little to do with anything intrinsic to the State of Israel, the thriving, vibrant, and solitary democracy in the Middle East. Rather, as Edward Alexander writes in the Introduction to The State of the Jews, his selection of trenchant essays and reviews spanning the last decade, it is attributable to “the...
The Legality of Israeli "Occupation"
(New York Sun, July 11, 2012)
With startling clarity an Israeli legal commission, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy, has declared: “According to international law, Israelis have the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria.” Challenging settlement critics inside Israel and worldwide, it asserted that international laws of “occupation” are not applicable “to the unique and sui...
June 2012
2 posts
John Lennon the Zionist
The Algemeiner(June 4, 2012)
Speaking at a national security conference in Tel Aviv last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “All we are saying is ‘give peace a chance.’”
Clearly bolstered by his invulnerable 94-member Knesset majority, and perhaps psychologically liberated by the recent death of his tenaciously right-wing...
The Six Day War's Unresolved Legacy
Nearly sixty-five years ago Israel declared its independence and won the war that secured a Jewish state. But its narrow and permeable postwar armistice lines permitted incessant cross-border terrorist raids. For Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the mere existence of a Jewish state remained an unbearable intrusion into the Arab Middle East. As Egyptian President Nasser declared, “The danger of Israel...
May 2012
4 posts
What Happened to 'Close Settlement"?
The Algemeiner (May 30, 2012)
No Israeli policy is more incessantly vilified than settlement in Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. Nonetheless, ninety years of international law sustains it.
In 1920 the League of Nations, building on Lord Balfour’s Declaration three years earlier, adopted a resolution at San Remo calling for “the establishment in Palestine of a...
Where is Palestine?
American Thinker (May 13, 2012)
Palestine, variously known in history as Canaan, Judaea, Eretz Yisrael, Filastin, and Syria Palaestina, has long been a malleable geographical entity. Renamed by its successive Canaanite, Israelite, Roman, Christian, Mamluk, Muslim, Ottoman, and British conquerors, it became the revered “Holy Land” to 19th-century Western visitors.
World War I...
Religious Settlers Face Double Standard
(The Jewish Press, May 3, 2012)
For anyone with historical memory the expulsion of Jews – by the Romans, English, French, Spaniards, Nazis, and Muslims – instantly evokes tragic episodes in Jewish history. Now the state of Israel expels Jews from their homes. Something is amiss in Zion.
The current round of evictions began, not surprisingly, in Hebron. Ever since the Six-Day War Jews have...
Benzion Netanyahu and Article 80
(NewYork Sun,May 2, 2012)
Benzion Netanyahu, who died Monday in Jerusalem at the age of 102, has been widely scrutinzed this week for his myriad contributions to the history of Zionism in Israel and the United States. Yet arguably the most important one has been overlooked. After World War II, Benzion Netanyahu, along with Irgun activist Peter Bergson, nephew of Mandatory Palestine Chief Rabbi...
April 2012
2 posts
Politics and Property Rights in Israel
American Thinker (April 22, 2012)
What explains the persistent collaboration of Israeli politicians across party lines to deny the property rights of Jews where they have every historical and legal right to live?
Ninety years ago, the League of Nations, seeking to establish a peaceful new world order after the carnage of war, turned its attention to Palestine. Wrested from the defeated Ottoman...
Hebron House
New York Sun (April 4, 2012)
In the ancient city of Hebron, twenty miles south of Jerusalem, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are buried. When Sarah died, according to the biblical narrative, Abraham purchased the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite, paying his asking price of four hundred shekels of silver to remove any doubt about the legitimacy of the purchase.
Jews...
February 2012
3 posts
Litigating for Israel
American Thinker (February 12, 2012)
Ever since Moses received the Ten Commandments, the history of the Jewish people has been interwoven with law. An additional 613 commandments in the Torah were explicated in the Talmud, collected in the 16th-century Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Aruch) and interpreted and enforced over the centuries by rabbinical courts.
Since 1948 the State of Israel...
Jewish State, Zionist Conflict
Jewish Press (February 8, 2012)
Near the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who would wrestle with the plight of Jews amid the enticements and dangers of modernity, felt trapped. For his son’s sake he considered conversion to Christianity; to solve the vexing “Jewish Question” he even fantasized the mass conversion of Jews.
Yet Herzl also worried lest the...
Kiryat Arba
Mideast Outpost (January 30, 2012)
Kiryat Arba is connected to the ancient holy city of Hebron by the umbilical cord of Torah and a miraculous moment in modern Israeli history.
In Kiryat Arba, “which is Hebron” (Gen. 23:2), Sarah died and was buried in Ma¹arat HaMachpelah, the cave in the land that Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite for four hundred silver shekels. Meaning...
December 2011
4 posts
The American Jewish Dilemma
American Thinker (December 18, 2011)
No sooner did turbulence subside within the American Jewish community over Israeli videos and billboard ads that seemed to denigrate the quality of Jewish life in the United States than a new problem erupted.
This time, however, Israel could not be blamed. The new fracas was entirely the fault of Republican presidential candidates speaking at the ...
An Invented People
New York Sun (December 13, 2011)
Newt Gingrich has been challenged for calling the Palestinians an “invented” people. He was accused by a spokesman for the American Task Force on Palestine of “deep historical ignorance and an irrational hostility toward Palestinian identity.” To Sabri Saidam, adviser to Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Gingrich had displayed “extreme...
Israeli Ads Expose Troubled American Jewish Psyche
Jewish Press (December 7, 2011)
The recent kerfluffle over Israeli government video ads and billboard posters, designed to entice wayward yordim to return home, instead exposed the troubled psyche of American Jews.
One might say – if verbal treif is permitted – that a ham-handed attempt by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption to guilt-trip wandering Israelis into leaving their American...
November 2011
4 posts
Israel's "Divided Soul"?
The Jewish Press (November 20, 2011)
At the end of the Six-Day War, a tearfully triumphant Israeli soldier, standing at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, realized that he was “facing two thousand years of exile, the whole history of the Jewish people[.]” Suddenly and unexpectedly, the biblical homeland — east and west from Jericho to Jerusalem and north and south from Nablus...
Journey of an Academic Pariah
The Jewish Press (November 18, 2011)
In the good old days, Forest Hills, New York – where I grew up between 1939 and 1951 – was a shtetl for assimilated American Jews. Like my parents, all our neighbors were American-born offspring of Eastern European immigrants. A generation removed from their identity conflicts, we children knew that Forest Hills, liberated from Judaism, was our promised land.
...
The Eichmann Trial
Society (October 13, 2011)
The trial of Adolph Eichmann was a transformative moment for the State of Israel. Thirteen years after its birth amid the ashes of the Holocaust, the trial brought an infamous Nazi war criminal to justice. Yet even fifty years later the Eichmann trial still raises some disturbing questions that lurk beneath the horrors inflicted on Jews by Nazi Germany.
The decision by...
Palestinian Identity Theft
American Thinker (November 6, 2011)
Identity theft, in most jurisdictions, is a punishable offense. But in the United Nations, Palestinians are free — indeed, encouraged — to rob Israel of its history, heritage, and homeland.
At times the United Nations seems to exist for no reason other than to stoke Palestinian fantasies. UNRWA, its benevolent Relief and Works Agency...
October 2011
4 posts
A Nation Held Hostage
The Jewish Press (October 26, 2011)
With Sgt. Gilad Shalit safely returned in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian terrorists and murderers, celebration - propelled by wishful avoidance - spread throughout Israel.
It was said that peace in our time, even peace now, might be imminent. The disproportionate exchange could transform the relationship between Israel and Hamas, leading to a final...
Kiryat Arba Cover-Up
Mideast Outpost (October 26, 2011)
In July 1983 Aharon Gross walked through the crowded Arab market in Hebron. An eighteen-year-old yeshiva student, he had joined Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the leader of the restored Jewish community in Hebron after the Six-Day war, for morning prayers. Rabbi Levinger was holding a one-man sit-down strike in a tent near the Israeli military government building...
Remembering Hanan Porat
The Jewish Press (October 16, 2011) In May 1967 Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook spoke to his former Mercaz HaRav students at their annual Independence Day reunion in Jerusalem. Usually a festive day of celebration, this year was different. Rabbi Kook sorrowfully recalled his feeling of despair nineteen years earlier, when the State of Israel was born: “I was torn to pieces. I could not...
Piling On: The New York Times and Israel
American Thinker (October 1, 2011)
In last week’s run-up to the U.N. General Assembly theatre of the absurd, The New York Times could hardly restrain itself. Fulminating about what was best for Israel, it repeatedly berated the Jewish state and Prime Minister Netanyahu for not acceding to its editor’s wishes.
The fusillade began on September 11. The Times graciously conceded...
September 2011
30 posts
Syria: Where is the Outrage?
American Thinker (August 28, 2011)
Like father, like son: it is well documented, by now, that there are no limits to the brutality that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is willing to inflict upon his subjects. Even in a region known for the cruelty that rulers wreak on their people, Assad may be rivaled only by President Ahmadinijad of Iran, his ideological inspiration and military patron.
...
The Altalena Remembered
American Thinker (August 14, 2011)
Ever since 1836 Texans were taught to “Remember the Alamo,” the San Antonio siege where two hundred fighters for freedom and independence from Mexico (the legendary Davy Crockett among them) defended their mission fortress to the last man.
Now Israelis of a certain persuasion are remembering the Altalena, the ship packed with more than nine...
Inventing 'Palestine'
The Jewish Press (August 10, 2011)
If the UN should decide to recognize a “State of Palestine” in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people it would endorse a bizarre irony.
Why?
Because Palestinian national identity borrows so extensively from Jewish and Zionist sources as to virtually constitute historical plagiarism.
“Palestine” emerged as an abbreviation of...
'Palestine' in the Land of Israel?
The Jewish Press (June 29, 2011)
Would the creation of a Palestinian state by vote of the United Nations General Assembly, expected in September, be illegal?
Yes, according to a recent letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Signed by an array of lawyers, law professors and international law experts, it asks him to block the forthcoming resolution, promoted by the Palestinian Authority,...
Remembering the Altalena
Jerusalem Post (June 21, 2011)
Israel is confronting increasingly virulent worldwide challenges to its legitimacy. An expanding chorus of politicians, journalists and academics relentlessly denounces the Jewish state as a racist, apartheid abomination. The resemblance between their shrill diatribes and the rhetoric of anti-Semitism during the past 2,000 years is not coincidental. Few people...
9/11 Commemoration Revisited
The Jewish Press (September 14, 2011)
Commemorating a national tragedy requires integrity. Memorial Day is not observed with proclamations of pacifism, nor should it be. December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, is properly remembered as the day that will “live in infamy,” not as a plea for international sensitivity.
As Americans prepared to remember the loss of nearly...
Another UN Folly?
The Jewish Press (August 31, 2011)
Later this month the United Nations General Assembly is likely to recognize the state of Palestine (which the United States is expected to veto in the Security Council). This diplomatic charade will ignore long forgotten, but far more consequential, international decisions.
At the San Remo Conference ninety-one years ago the victorious Allied Powers...
Here Comes Another Flotilla
American Thinker (June 12, 2011)
One year ago the Mavi Marmara, cast by its sponsors as the Palestinian Exodus, led a “Gaza Freedom Flotilla.” Its goal was not to condemn the ruling Hamas government in Gaza, sworn to Israel’s destruction, but to breech the Israeli blockade. Its “humanitarian aid” cargo included ballistic vests, gas masks, night-vision goggles,...
Netanyahu's Victory Lap
American Thinker (May 28, 2011)
Within a remarkable ten-day span Prime Minister Netanyahu forcefully articulated peace terms for Israel and the Palestinians. In speeches to the Knesset and Congress, he thwarted President Obama’s proposals for Israeli capitulation while marginalizing Mahmoud Abbas for as long as the Palestinian Authority remains wedded to its new partnership with Hamas....
The Struggle: Obama, Abbas and Netanyahu
The Jewish Press (May 25, 2011)
It is a compelling story: a thirteen-year-old boy, whose family was forced from home as wartime refugees, still yearning more than six decades later to return. It is also a familiar story: exile and the yearning for return, after all, are embedded in the memory of the Jewish people. Precisely that yearning framed Zionism and the birth of Israel. Indeed,...
What Should Netanyahu Say?
American Thinker (May 20, 2011)
Next Tuesday, four days after he meets with President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu will address Congress. With Israel now confronting a triple-security threat that leaves the country more vulnerable than at any time since the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, it is imperative for the Israeli leader to stand firm. Netanyahu’s planned...
