Michael Koplow is the chief policy officer of Israel Policy Forum, and also serves as a senior research fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Before coming to Israel Policy Forum, he was the founding program director of the Israel Institute. He holds a doctorate in government from Georgetown University, where he specialized in political development and ideology, and the politics of Middle Eastern states.
In what has now become a weekly ritual, Ilhan Omar is once again the center of attention for her ruminations on Israel and its supporters in the United States. Unlike previous incidents for which she apologized or retracted her comments, this time Omar appears to be standing by them, and also unlike previous incidents, this…
On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already saddled with a reputation of being willing to do or say anything to keep his job as prime minister, took a step that stretched that reputation even further. In an effort to prevent right-wing votes in Israel’s April 9 election from going to waste, he brokered a…
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack at the Tree of Life shul in Pittsburgh last Shabbat, many Israelis weighed in with messages for American Jews. The responses to the attack ranged from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sympathetic condolences to Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau’s patronizing insults. But Zionist Union chief Avi Gabbay’s contribution –…
The nation-state bill that the Knesset has been debating for the past week became law this week. Since its inception, it’s left a non-stop controversy in its wake. From the noxious clause that would have enshrined state-sanctioned discrimination in one of Israel’s Basic Laws – thankfully dropped after a wave of protest both in Israel…
This weekend, the Jewish people came under threat. I don’t mean the people themselves so much as the idea that there is a single unified Jewish people, a concept that thanks to a new poll was revealed to be more of an anachronism than a truism. The idea of Jewish peoplehood has been such an…
On Thursday, actress Natalie Portman set the Jewish world on fire. Portman, an Israeli citizen who was born in Jerusalem and moved to the United States at the age of 3, was set to receive the Genesis Prize in Israel in June. The prize has been dubbed the “Jewish Nobel” and is given in partnership…
In the quarter century that has elapsed since the end of the Cold War, Israel has in many ways gained an independence and freedom of action that it did not enjoy during its earlier history. Aside from being the unparalleled military power in the Middle East, Israel and its Arab neighbors are no longer proxies…
The latest Pew Research Center survey examining the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes for unsurprising but discomfiting reading. The decades-old truism about Israel being a bipartisan issue is on life support, with a 52% gap between Republicans and Democrats on sympathy for Israel over the Palestinians. It’s the biggest…
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