HAIFA — “I’m going to tell you something that might surprise you,” novelist A.B. Yehoshua said over coffee in his hometown this past Monday. “I think this was a successful war.” This was indeed surprising. Three weeks earlier, Yehoshua, one of Israel’s most iconoclastic liberals, had joined with fellow novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman…
Virtually everyone on the Knesset’s prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee wants a state commission of inquiry into this summer’s war in Lebanon — everyone, that is, but members of Ehud Olmert’s ruling Kadima party. City council members in missile-shattered Kiryat Shmonah demanded of Prime Minister Olmert that he establish a state inquiry when he…
In the wake of the Lebanon war, influential policy makers in Washington and Jerusalem have begun pushing for a major diplomatic opening to Syria. Four members of the Israeli Cabinet, including Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter, have called publicly in recent days for negotiations with Syria, which is seen by…
TEL AVIV — With Israelis already angry over their government’s handling of the crisis in Lebanon, Israel has been hit by a wave of scandals involving several top government and military officials. Justice Minister Haim Ramon, an architect of the ruling Kadima party, resigned Sunday after being indicted for allegedly having kissed an 18-year-old female…
JERUSALEM — When Israel went to war against Hezbollah on July 12, the nation seemed united behind its leaders in a common sense of mission the likes of which had not been seen in decades, all observers agreed. Five weeks later, after 157 Israeli deaths, 1000 Lebanese deaths, 4,000 Hezbollah rockets and one United Nations…
WASHINGTON — Staunchly pro-Israel conservatives with close ties to the Bush administration say that Jerusalem is hindering America’s global war on terror by failing to wage an all-out war to eliminate Hezbollah. In interviews with the Forward and in recently published opinion articles, conservatives slammed Israel’s reluctance to launch a comprehensive ground-war against the Lebanese…
After the disaster came a revamped, harder-fisted approach to fighting. Those words describe what happened at the start of this week, when a Hezbollah missile fell among army reservists at Kibbutz Kfar Giladi near Israel’s northern tip, killing 12 men. But the same words could equally describe the way the war began almost four weeks…
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