Rabbi Daniel Gordis, a popular, American-born voice of Israel’s center-right, writes in Bloomberg View that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection campaign, deemed a sure thing just days ago, has run into a “perfect storm” from which it may not recover. “It has been a steep and precipitous fall since those glory moments on the podium…
More mystery and intrigue in the senior ranks of the Israel Defense Forces: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reported (Maariv, Haaretz) to be stalling the nomination of Israel’s next military chief of staff. His reasons are a topic of hot speculation, though the facts seem to speak for themselves. By law the nomination of a…
Israel’s defense minister and the Anti-Defamation League lavished praise on U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on the day he announced his resignation. The tributes from Moshe Yaalon and the ADL on Monday were in sharp contrast with the intense scrutiny that Hagel received from pro-Israel groups when he was nominated for the post two years…
Israelis last week watched their defense establishment undergo its nastiest and arguably most dangerous meltdown in decades as the heads of two main branches, Benny Gantz of the Israel Defense Forces and Yoram Cohen of the Shin Bet security service, publicly traded insults and questioned each other’s integrity and professional competence. The public dispute erupted…
The policies of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister are starting to bear an eerie resemblance to climate change: The critics all look like a bunch of whining scaremongers prophesying an implausibly apocalyptic ruination that’s sure to come in some fuzzily distant end-time. Even if it’s true, it’s too far away to worry about. That is, until…
Israel’s attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, has called for an explanation of a proposed order that would prevent Palestinian workers from riding Israeli buses. On Tuesday, Weinstein ordered Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon to explain the new guidelines, which will effectively ban the workers from the buses they ride to their homes in the West Bank. The…
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning a massive new wave of construction in the West Bank, according to a report Sunday night on Israel’s Channel 2 News. It’s part of a deal to calm his restive allies in the settler-backed Jewish Home party. The Channel 2 report has since been confirmed independently by Haaretz,…
One of these things is just like the other: A strange new flareup in U.S.-Israeli relations erupted on Friday, after a speech by Secretary of State John Kerry drew furious objections from pair of ranking Israeli cabinet ministers. Kerry was discussing the ISIS threat before a Muslim audience in Washington. He spoke of the need…
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