In an exhausting two-hour speech before the PLO Central Council on January 14, 2018, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) provided the morning papers with many headlines. Abbas laid into Trump saying Yehreb Beitak, a common insult which translates…
Article Author: Ben Efrat, Yacov
The Iranian threat is in danger
Far from the capital of Tehran, and without warning, the first demonstration took place in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city and one of the Ayatollah’s strongholds. Could this portend the return of the Arab Spring? Mashhad, like Sidi…
Teva: Between Zionism and reality
Teva, a pharmaceutical company that started in Israel and went global, is collapsing and threatening to cut thousands of jobs here and abroad. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is attempting to intervene in this decision to save the plants in…
Trump decides: One state
In February 2017, at a joint press conference before the first official meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump made a typical slip of the tongue: “I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both…
Labor’s new leader on being Jewish and Moroccan
”The Left has forgotten what it is to be Jewish,” says Avi Gabbay, and with some justification. After the Right established a monopoly on Judaism and cloaked it with support for all sorts of evil, such as the occupation and…
The Saudis and the Arab spring
The entire world was astonished when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman embarked on a sweeping crackdown and purged some of the kingdom’s most important princes and businessmen. Within a day, he announced the creation of an “Anti-Corruption Committee.” Saudi Arabia’s…
Israel is being dragged into the Syrian war
“The government is dragging us into war,” cautioned Maj. Gen. (res.) Amiram Levin in Yediot Aharonot (October 22), warning that “any person with eyes in his head must mobilize to end this government’s term before we reach a disaster.” It seems that…
Going with the wind
Hurricane Irma, rapidly approaching the coast of Florida, is a meteorological phenomenon. But its political implications are equally far-reaching. At this writing (September 8, 2017), the world is watching with horror as Irma, with winds of up to 175 miles…
The line linking two films: Foxtrot and The Attack
I have not seen Shmulik Maoz’s film Foxtrot, nor his earlier one Lebanon, but that won’t prevent me from talking about them because after all, we are dealing here exclusively with politics. Nor have I seen the last two films by Lebanese…
Our pal Mohammad Dahlan returns to the fray
The humanitarian situation in Gaza is on the verge of exploding in our faces. But commentators continue to reassure us that Hamas has no interest in another round of war. In Israel, we want this summer to pass quietly. At…