The Oslo Accords and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza are now widely recognized as tragic errors of immense proportions. Now, we face an even greater danger as the Israeli government, in the wake of the Annapolis summit, is scrambling to give away parts of Israel piece by piece in the pursuit of yet another false peace. We must respond ....   more »

The True Story
EFRAIM KARSH
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally
recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only
state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of
the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose
policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the
international community; and whose right to exist is constantly
debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by
segments of advanced opinion in the West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the
Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these
educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called,
is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by
a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic
Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a
permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the
“original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words
of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved
through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its
native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent
creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem”
forms, indeed, the central plank ...   more »

The Miracles of Hanit
Image at left courtesy of Haaretz.com shows the Israeli Missile boat "Hanit" being tugged into Ashdod port after having been hit by a Hizbulla missile off the Beirut shore on July 14, 2006, during the Second Lebanon War.
 A young Israeli Naval sergeant boarded the northbound train in Tel Aviv. I was on my way to a present a lecture in the Haifa area and he was returning to his base in the Haifa port. He sat down across from me, looking at me intently while I was learning my Gemorra. I looked up at him, smiled, said "Shalom aleichem!"
He sighed deeply, as if relieved, and sheepishly asked, "Can I talk to you, Rav?"
"Of course," I answered, asking him how he knows that I'm a "rav". He said that he heard me eulogize one of his fallen friends during the recent war. The sailor had a relatively new beard, an almost new knitted kippa on his head, and the beautifully pure innocence in his eyes of a new Ba'al Tshuva. To make a long story short, he was a crewman on board the Israeli Navy ship Hanit (Hebrew for bayonet) when it was hit ...   more »

ABRAHAM RABINOVICH
Arieh Handler participated in Israel's birth on two separate occasions. The lesser event, in his view, was on May 14, 1948, when he was among some 200 persons invited to the Tel Aviv hall where David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state. Handler, 93 this month, is believed to be the only one of those present still alive.
The other occasion took place a month earlier in the auditorium of a girls' school on Tel Aviv's Rehov Frug. The Va'ad Hapoel Hatzioni, the parliament of the world Zionist movement, met there for six days to weigh the imminent departure of the British and the prospect of all-out war. Handler, a delegate of the religious Hapoel Hamizrahi movement, recalled in a recent interview the electric atmosphere at that April meeting as the participants took their places in the small hall, delegates grouped at separate tables according to party. At the front, facing them, sat Ben-Gurion and other leaders of the Labor movement, including Golda Myerson (Meir) and Moshe Shertok (Sharett).
Fighting with Palestinian Arabs was already raging around the country, Jerusalem was surrounded, and several Arab armies were preparing to invade in a month on the heels of ...   more »

By Jacob Laksin
Until recently, Barack Obama's presidential campaign was premised on the future. The senator from Illinois orated floridly about bringing "change" to the country; a New Political Man, he pledged to soothe the feuds of old and usher in a national reconciliation amid troubled times. With the emergence of divisive figures like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's longtime friend and acerbically Afro-centric pastor, the focus has shifted to the past, and with good reason. As FrontPageMag.com senior editor Jacob Laksin discovered in his recent reporting from Chicago's South Side, the predominantly black community where Obama launched his political career in the eighties and nineties, Wright may be the best known of Obama's friends and allies, but he may not even be the most controversial. In a series that will appear in FrontPage over the next three days, Laksin explores Obama's ties to the South Side personalities who helped propel him to power, but whose continuing – and reciprocated – friendship with the candidate raises troubling questions about his ability to forge a new political consensus, especially on the fractious issue of race. To evaluate Obama's campaign and its grand promises, readers must first come to know the world of ...   more »