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
JERUSALEM – Three recent events demonstrate heightened challenges to the European Union: President Obama’s declaration that sanctions against Iran will be tightened “within weeks”; Iran’s unveiling of the newly developed Simorgh missile, a “satellite launch vehicle” that experts say can be turned into an ICBM; and President Obama’s decision not to attend the EU-U.S. summit
On January 12, George Baghdadi reported on CBS News: “Syria on Tuesday summoned the highest-ranking American diplomat in Damascus and protested Washington’s ‘unfriendly procedures’ on Syrians wishing to travel to the States, warning it would take reciprocal measures if the move was not annulled.” Think of the apocryphal murderer who kills his parents and asks
Road 443 is an east-west highway that connects Israel’s coastal “Center” with its largest city and capital, Jerusalem. For about thirty kilometers, 443 cuts through a section of the West Bank northwest of Jerusalem, connecting the major town of Modi’in, and also major Palestinian population centers Ramallah and El Bira, to the national highway grid.
The 10th of Tevet: Taking the Long ViewGoing over old clippings of news items from the beginning of the decade, I found a pessimistic evaluation by someone who was a government minister at the time. It claimed that Arafat had a “strategic advantage” in that he did not need to “win” the terror war launched
For some Israeli analysts, new strains in U.S.-Israel relations in 2009 shook confidence in the longstanding alliance. They point to the cumulative effect of several factors: missteps by the adamantly pro-Israel Bush Administration that had the effect of strengthening Hamas and, with the Iraqi decapitation, the Islamic Republic of Iran; the economic crisis with its
