January 6, 2015

The Politics of Dead Children

Say what you will about palpably biased New York Times coverage of Israel, so glaringly obvious in its news, opinion, and editorial pages. But the Times rarely undermines its professed commitment to “all the news that’s fit to print...

January 4, 2015

The Brandeis University Debacle

“Truth Even Unto Its Innermost Parts” has been the inspirational motto of Brandeis University ever since its founding in 1948. A self-described non-sectarian secular Jewish university, it was named in honor of the great liberal jurist Lou...

December 7, 2014

Anti-Semitism at Wellesley

Once again anti-Semitism has roiled Wellesley College. The recent abrupt firing of the Hillel director and chaplain, and the relentless denigration of Israel by Muslim students and supportive faculty, have triggered concern about festering prejudice ...

November 22, 2014

Obama's Immoral Embrace of Moral Equivalence

In a recent appalling surge of innovative terrorist violence, Palestinians have driven cars into Jewish civilians whose only crime was walking or waiting near the light rail that runs through Jerusalem. In late October a Hamas fanatic murdered a thre...

May 7, 2014

The Blame Game

In two articles within the past week, Nahum Barnea, respected columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth and winner of the Israel Prize for his distinguished writing, has lacerated Israel for diplomatic failure in the recent collapse of Israeli-Palestinian negot...

March 27, 2014

Who is a Refugee?

As the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks stagger toward their likely collapse, it is worth scrutinizing the most intractable issue: the claimed right of return for Palestinian refugees to their abandoned homeland in what is now the State of Israel....

December 26, 2013

Jewish Rights in the Land of Israel

Diplomatic negotiations are invariably accompanied by rumors fueled by a combination of inside knowledge, leaks, and vivid imaginings that anticipate their outcome. So it is with current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which seem to limp along in l...

November 17, 2013

The Kerry Fiasco

Who could have imagined it? Secretary of State John Kerry is making his predecessor James Baker seem like Israel's best friend. Back in 1990, Baker complained that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was thwarting Bush administration efforts to launch Isra...

October 17, 2013

The New York Times vs. Netanyahu

The political culture -- or bias -- that pervades the New York Times now seems to require a weekly statement of hostility toward Israel's prime minister. Since the beginning of October, the Times has repeatedly displayed its discomfort with the leade...

September 7, 2013

Life and Death Memories

There is irrefutable evidence that the government of Syria has used chemical weapons to murder its own citizens. The wrapped corpses of children provide grisly testimony that President Bashar al-Assad, following the horrific precedent set by his fath...

July 21, 2013

Netanyahu's Surrender?

Last week a white flag seemed to be waving over Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, known for his proclivity for yielding to American pressure was reported to have accepted the surrender terms dictated by Palestinian Authority President Mah...

December 3, 2012

Israel Returns Fire

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 th...

November 20, 2012

Land for Peace -- or War?

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 Egyp...

October 28, 2012

Netanyahu's Settlement Jungle

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...

May 13, 2012

Where is Palestine?

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, an...

April 22, 2012

Politics and Property Rights in Israel

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 peacefu...

February 12, 2012

Litigating for Israel

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...

December 18, 2011

The American Jewish Dilemma

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...

November 20, 2011

Israel's 'Divided Soul'?

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, th...

November 6, 2011

Palestinian Identity Theft

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 fo...

October 16, 2011

The Gilad Shalit Dilemma

In Haifa eight years ago, Asaf Zur was returning home from school.  Along the way, his fellow bus passenger, a Hamas suicide bomber, blew himself up and killed seventeen Israelis, mostly school children like 17-year-old Asaf. The  bomb belt...

October 1, 2011

Piling On: The New York Times and Israel

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 a...

August 28, 2011

Syria: Where is the Outrage?

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, ...

August 14, 2011

The Altalena Remembered

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 Israel...

July 24, 2011

Israel Will Remain Jewish and Democratic

Palestinian terrorism -- in homes, schools, restaurants and buses; on airplanes, streets and beaches -- ravaged Israel for more than half a century. Between 1954 and 2006, forty-five horrific attacks killed at least ten Israelis. They reached their c...

June 19, 2011

Remembering the Altalena

Israel confronts increasingly virulent worldwide challenges to its legitimacy.  An expanding chorus of politicians, journalists, academics, and Israel-haters relentlessly denounces the Jewish state as a racist apartheid abomination.  Any re...

June 12, 2011

Here Comes Another Flotilla

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 "hum...

May 28, 2011

Netanyahu's Victory Lap

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 margin...

May 20, 2011

What Should Netanyahu Say?

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...

April 24, 2011

Palestinian Baby Killers

For demented cruelty there are no precedents, even among Palestinian terrorists, for the recent slaughter of three Israeli children (and their parents) in Itamar. Their targets, 11 and 4 year old brothers and their 3-month-old baby sister, were stabb...

April 17, 2011

Hebron Besieged

Passover, 1968: several dozen Jewish families returned to Hebron to celebrate the holiday of Jewish memory.  They remembered slavery in Egypt, the exodus to freedom, and the journey to the promised land.  But they also remembered the unique...

April 6, 2011

The Rising Challenge to Israel's Legitimacy

Israel confronts a looming legitimacy crisis carefully promoted by its enemies. In September the United Nations General Assembly intends to recognize a Palestinian state in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, the ancient homeland of the Jewish people w...

March 13, 2011

Gilad Farm and Middle East Peace

Where is Gilad Farm and why should anyone care? A tiny community of twenty families living in a cluster of shacks and tents, it is located on a barren hilltop near Nablus in the northern West Bank. Established in 2002 on land privately owned by Moshe...

January 23, 2011

In Israel, Is Demography Destiny?

For Israel, pundits incessantly proclaim, demography is destiny. There are endless warnings that unless the Jewish state relinquishes control over the West Bank, Muslims soon will outnumber Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Israel ...

December 31, 2010

Baseball Judaism

The wondrous moment of my boyhood ­(and surely not only mine) came in late September 1945.  Newspapers prominently displayed the photo of a jubilant baseball player crossing home plate to accept handshakes from his ecstatic teammates. He had...

December 25, 2009

My Friend in Kfar Saba

Whenever I visit Israel -- most recently, last month -- I spend a day with Haggai. We have shared a deep friendship for thirty-five years, ever since I taught American history at Tel Aviv University as a visiting Fulbright Lecturer. To my surprise an...