An Israeli-owned company sells an oil tanker to Iran Lenin reportedly said of capitalists that they “will sell us the rope with which to hang them.” Israel seems to have encountered a contemporary version of this trope with the announcement by the U.S. State Department that it is placing sanctions on a large Israeli company,
Like the cliché from an old Western film where the hero squints at the horizon and says “it’s too quiet,” General Amos Yadlin, the outgoing chief of Israel’s Military Intelligence, issued a warning in his recent briefing to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He said, “The recent security calm is unprecedented but there
Watching Iranian President Ahmadinejad gallivant through hapless Lebanon called to mind the biting Hebrew saying, dating back to the first-century Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yohai, that “the work of the righteous is done for them by others.” The implication that Jews should not worry about practical matters but focus instead on fulfilling God’s desires prehaps originated as
Wars often begin because leaders misread the situation. For example, the First Gulf War, prompted by Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and the Second Lebanon War, sparked by Hezbollah attacks against northern Israel, were launched by authoritarian leaders who miscalculated the response to their aggression, with results that were even more disastrous for their own
In January 2007, Israeli historian Benny Morris published a vision of Iranian nuclear potential that is every Israeli’s nightmare: One bright morning, in five or ten years …the orders will go out and the … missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel’s half-dozen air
It is hard to recall a marathon week such as the one we just had in Israel. Visits by Secretary of Defense Gates and National Security Advisor Jones—with large delegations of senior staff, including White House advisor Dennis Ross—followed close on that by Senator Mitchell. Senior Israeli government officials are keeping uncharacteristically mum, but it
