Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Heads up, Bibi: this is where American Jewry seems to stand. The pollsters did not make breakdowns by age, which would have been more interesting.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010


Finally, something light: Sacha Baron Cohen plays an Israeli tour guide named Jacob (funny, not Yaacov) and Homer pretends to be the Messiah, incurring the wrath of a united mass of Jews, Muslims and Christians. Sounds like a peace plan that could work.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Nir Hasson and Avi Issacharoff report in Ha’aretz:

Israel’s decision to approve new East Jerusalem houses effectively prevents any peace negotiations from taking place, the Palestinian Authority said on Tuesday, following an Interior Ministry statement released earlier authorizing 1,600 new housing units.

This arrives on the heels of Barak’s decision to approve 112 new Jewish homes (referred to as “apartment units” in one of the reports) in the West Bank, which came exactly one day after the PA finally agreed to “indirect” talks on the eve of V.P. Joe Biden’s visit, in which he made pains to assure a nervous Israeli public of his credentials as some kind of born-again Zionist.

Barak also declared that, for now, Iran does not pose “an existential threat” to Israel; during the vaunted Herzliya conference last month, he made some waves when he spoke of Israel’s possible future as “an apartheid state” if no peace can be made with the Palestinians.

Rumors of war by the end of spring are flying around. Yoel Marcus does not want to keep the military option—aerial attack—off the table; meanwhile, Iran has test-fired a new missile from a destroyer. Step by step both nations seem to be walking toward the abyss, but hopefully that is not the case.

UPDATES (Mar. 11): According to Ir Amim, plans are underway to create as many as 50,000 new units in E J’lem; at TAU, Biden declared current state of affairs “not sustainable,” which should be obvious to all reasonable people.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, writes a moving tribute to the lessons he and his family learned from Yad Vashem this past January.