Hillel Halkin
By Hillel Halkin
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Opinion No Need To Say We’re Sorry
The Israeli government indeed owed someone the apology it made recently for the incident of the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship intercepted in May 2010 on its way to blockaded Gaza, but it wasn’t the ship’s passengers or the government of Turkey. It was, first and foremost, the naval commandoes who boarded the Mavi Marmara…
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Opinion Israel’s Left Is Missing Boat on Anti-Haredi Coalition Alliance
Although there has never been much sympathy for Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community in any part of the country’s secular society, suddenly this has changed. As the prospects improve for a Netanyahu-Lapid-Bennett (or Likud-Yesh Atid-Habayit Hayehudi) coalition whose first project will making military service compulsory for the Haredi youth that has until now been exempt from it,…
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Opinion Why Can’t Jewish Settlements Remain in a Palestinian State?
“There’s no greater cliché,” I wrote in this column a month ago, “than the one that keeps insisting that the settlements are an obstacle to peace. They may have been that once, when they were few and sparsely populated enough to be removed. Now that they’ve long passed that point, any peace agreement will have…
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Opinion An Israeli Ballot With No Good Options
Israel doesn’t need to hold elections. It only needs to ask for whom I’d vote, because I’ve never voted for anyone but winners. I was for Golda in 1974, for Begin in 1977, for Rabin in 1992, for Netanyahu in ’96, for Barak in ’98, for the Sharon of the Likud in 2000 and the…
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Culture John Lennon and the Jews
John Lennon & the Jews: A Philosophical Rampage By Ze’ev Maghen CreateSpace, 296 pages, $12.50 As a rule, I wouldn’t agree to review a book with “John Lennon” in its title. I also wouldn’t review a self-published book. (Although publishing one’s own work is no crime, it does tend to indicate that no one else…
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Opinion Jewish Peoplehood Denied, While Israel’s Foes Applaud
Although there is probably no book too foolish to go un-admired by someone, there are subjects for which the market for foolishness is especially large. Any list of these would have to include “Jews” and “Israel” near its top, as has once again been demonstrated by the granting of this year’s prestigious Aujourd’hui Award to…
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Opinion New Podhoretz Reader Puts His Famed Volte-Face in Perspective
Since disclosures of interest are expected from reviewers these days no less than from politicians and financial analysts, I’ll make mine at the start. For the last three-and-a-half decades I have written frequently for Commentary, a monthly magazine that was as closely associated with Podhoretz for over a generation as was The New Yorker with…
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