יום ראשון, כ״ד אלול תשפ״וSunday, September 6, 2026
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In a 12 year struggle, we have led the Religious Zionists deep into the ruling party. The Likud, in turn, gladly opened its gates wide.
Leading up to Israel’s Knesset elections on January 22, here are more initiatives I hope to bring to the fore in the next Knesset:
By Hillel Fendel and Chaim Silberstein / KeepJerusalem.org
We came across this startling headline in Haaretz:"Most Right-Wing Voters Support Establishment of Palestinian State and Division of Jerusalem." But Haaretz, as dovish and radical as it is, surely wouldn't lie straight out, would they? So how did they come up with such a headline?
By Daniel Pipes
It will be a long, hard road to traverse, but there is no short cut and it can succeed.
The ability to perceive and make difficult choices is fundamental to the survival of a country.
Western journalists, donors and decision-makers need to know that many Palestinian-related truths are being ignored or hidden from them.
People can lose their liberty without feeling a thing. So guard it with the greatest vigilance and do not give anyone your biometric information.
What is it about Jacob that he seemingly can’t stop the favoritism?
What Abbas is not telling the Israeli public is that he simply does not have a mandate from his people to make any form of concessions to Israel.
In another time and place, a place called America, an attack on an American diplomatic mission would have been considered an act of war.
Outside Israel, Palestinian groups meddle in the affairs of other Arab states and are punished in the extreme.
Offending Islam has become a national security issue involving all levels of government.
The glorious day of the inglorious man is here. And someone else is paying. Any someone else who isn't him.
My own experiences within the shidduch system has caused me to question it considerably.
It is amazing to see how the same people can be deceived time and again.
Mr. President, some foreign policies need to be carefully thought through a second time.
By Dov Shurin
I’m wrapping up my trip to the U.S., a visit that for the first time in many years happened to coincide with Christmas.
City officials in Englewood are hampering the development of a synagogue, but were nowhere to be found in opposing Kaddafi and the Libyan Embassy in Englewood.
The Star and Crescent flying at the World Trade Center did not prevent it from being targeted.
Crowd culture expects everyone to follow the leader, to join the meme, to move with the flow, but that is something that crazy people cannot do.
There is nothing beneficial that comes from suffering that could have not been achieved far more effectively through a positive means.
If you believe that people are basically good, then they can be trusted with an AR-15.
America is a great country, but we can be an even greater country if we just banned everything... for the children.
Fayyad wants Palestinians to boycott Israel, but at the same time is unable to provide them with better alternatives.
Challenging God in the face of suffering is not blasphemous.
Terrorism is always a crime under international law.
Last week, I detailed parts of my campaign platform for the January 22 Israeli Knesset elections. Here are more proposals:
Abbas and Hamas have decided for now to lay their differences aside and work towards escalating tensions on the ground, particularly in Judea and Samaria.
By Hillel Fendel and Chaim Silberstein / KeepJerusalem.org
With the international community barely having finished expressing its outrage over Israel's decision to build in E-1, between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim (reported at length in last week's column), two other similar decisions have been made that are sure to re-ignite the flames.
Israel this week took an important step toward strengthening Jerusalem and preventing any chance of its future division. Despite increasingly strident objections from the U.S., Europe and the Palestinians, the Jewish state is moving forward with plans to expand the capital’s Jewish population.
Both the Left and the shooters agree that the people you are shooting at should not have guns.
The Left seeks to create a society where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments.
Telling apart the right Syrian rebels from the wrong Syrian rebels is tricky. The Free Syrian Army, once hailed as a moderate secular organization, has more Al Qaeda in it than the dirt in Tora Bora.
The issue isn't really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil.
Yet the one thing I have always known, amid the hills and valleys of life: whether or not you succeed in your public endeavors, you cannot fail at your private commitments.
When Abbas says that a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 lines would lead to a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East, he is ignoring the fact that a large number of Palestinians think otherwise.
Sixty-four years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea.
What is lost in the discussion are the Biblical underpinnings of abortion and how this is not primarily a legal issue but a religious one.
Can American traditionalists quadruple their numbers in 40 years?
By Dov Shurin
I write this column with my bags packed. I’m lighting four candles in Israel and my fifth I will light Wednesday evening at about 9 p.m. in the lobby of the Avenue Plaza Hotel in Boro Park. I’ll have my guitar in hand, and everyone is invited.
Sometimes, in complex military calculations, truth is counter-intuitive. In essence, the persuasiveness of Israel's nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis Iran will require prospective enemy perceptions of retaliatory destructiveness at both the low and high ends of the nuclear yield spectrum. Ending nuclear ambiguity at the optimal time could best allow Israel to foster precisely such needed perceptions. This point is very important and possibly overriding.
The main junction from which the different opinions on most issues in Israel diverge is the question of identity. Israel does not have clear borders because it does not have a clear identity. The dispute is not really over peace or security. The dispute is about identity. The more solid our Jewish identity, the stronger the connection between our land and us. The stronger the desire to retreat from our Jewish identity, the stronger our desire to retreat from the land. When we connect to our identity, we will connect to our land and we will merit clear borders and peace.
By Hillel Fendel and Chaim Silberstein / KeepJerusalem.org
International opinion has it that the new planned Israeli neighborhood between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim will prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state. Unfortunately, though, that is not true.
The Salafi political victories, militia victories and terror attacks are all part of the same phenomenon, and it is about time that we confronted it for what it is.
Rice was part of Bill Clinton’s National Security Team whom in 1994 refused any intervention whatsoever in the Rwanda genocide that left 800,000 dead.
Chanukah commemorates the physical and spiritual resistance that is required of us sooner or later in all times.
Americans weren't ready for a reversal after four years. Will Egyptians be ready to cast down Morsi after a much shorter period?
Steadily, Israel is strengthening its plans for ballistic missile defense, most visibly on the Arrow system and also on Iron Dome, a lower-altitude interceptor that is designed to guard against shorter-range rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza.
As one Hamas official put it, "In the next war with Israel, Israelis will be forced to flee not only their homes, but the whole country."
Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses.
To the Muslim world, democracy did not mean individualism, it meant majority rule.
They did not celebrate out of support for the two-state solution peace with Israel.
The government middle class is the most hopeless middle class in all of history. It aspires to nothing and it dreams of nothing.
The government class is being led by liars and fools who see it as a lever for upending and taking over a working class society.
Israel has a simple option: Immediate withdrawal from the United Nations.
After the Pillar of Defense cease-fire, many now understand what we understood after the Zo Artzeinu demonstrations: The Israeli crisis is not on the continuum between Right and Left. It is on the continuum between Israelis and their Jewish identity.
By Dov Shurin
As I write this, Defense Minister Ehud Barak has just announced, during a televised press conference, his decision not to run in the coming elections and to leave politics.
Abbas was one of the first Arab leaders to congratulate Hamas on its "victory" over Israel during the recent eight-day confrontation.
America needs a foreign policy that is bigger than its defensive needs but smaller than progressive ambitions of global citizenship.
Israel's final decision concerning what to do about a nuclear Iran will depend on answers to certain core psychological questions. Is the Iranian adversary rational, valuing national survival more highly than any other preference, or combination of preferences? Or, on even a single occasion, is this enemy more apt to prove itself irrational, thereby choosing to value certain preferences more highly than the country's indispensable physical security?
Without the individual, the ballot box is only a tool for collectivist impulses and identities.
Is Hamas really on its way to moderation and pragmatism, as some Western political analysts and diplomats have come to believe?
Only by resisting the noose, can Israel survive. Only by fighting to free its hands, can it resist.
When Jacob is fooled into marrying Leah, he accepts her as a partner and eventually the mother of his children. But his yearning is for Rachel.
The difference between victory and defeat often comes down to morale.
When my daughter first made aliyah she was a student at Hebrew University. After a year she called me and told me she was enlisting.
If the targeting of innocent civilians by terrorist organizations is not wrong, then morality has no meaning.
Hamas is not interested in being engaged. Its goal is the destruction of Israel.
Unless the U.S. clarifies its position regarding King Abdullah and reiterates its full backing for his regime, the Muslim fundamentalists are likely to step up their efforts to create anarchy and lawlessness in the kingdom.
By Hillel Fendel and Chaim Silberstein / KeepJerusalem.org
For probably the first time since the Yom Kippur War nearly 40 years ago, air raid sirens sounded this week in Jerusalem and environs. The sounding of the sirens occurred about two minutes after sundown on Friday, such that Sabbath-observers had no direct way of ascertaining where, what, how many, or who, if anyone, was hurt.
What is the solution to the constant missile attacks in southern Israel? Those with a solution are the people who warned against signing the Oslo Accords in the first place. These people continue to be sidelined. Clearly, the Oslo advocates have no intention of giving up the profits and perks of the “peace industry” that they have created.
For the most part, we Jews have always accepted the obligation to ward off disaster as best we can. For the most part, we generally understand that all humans have free will. Saadia Gaon included freedom of will among the most central teachings of Judaism, and Maimonides affirmed that all human beings must stand alone in the world “to know what is good and what is evil, with none to prevent him from either doing good or evil.”
Israel is a sideline in a regional struggle by fractured populations who are divided by ethnicity and religion, language and natural resources, to unite into a single commonality.
Scenes of jubilation over the rocket attacks on Israel were also reported in several Palestinian cities in the West Bank, including Ramallah, the center of Palestinian "pragmatism and moderation."
Once upon a time it was the objective of the military to win wars. Now the objective of the military is to avoid incidents.
So long as we obsess over abortion, gay marriage, and contraception to the exclusion of any other values, we cannot fix our problems.
By Daniel Pipes
If Hamas knows it cannot defeat the Israel Defense Forces and will get a bloody nose for its efforts, it obviously has motives other than victory in mind.
Obviously, the Palestinians have been radicalized to a point where they are not ready to hear about any concessions to Israel or tolerate the presence of an Israeli businessman in a Palestinian city.
Not long after Qatar's leader paid a visit to Hamas, this latest war began.
By Dov Shurin
On the Shabbat when we read the portion of Chayei Sarah, Chevron residents are joined by thousands of people from all over Israel and around the world in celebrating Father Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah and its surrounding fields as a burial place for Sarah Imeinu.
Israel, with an understandable desperation, still seeks to discover some discernible correctness and reassuring clarity in the theatre of world politics. However, the polite diplomatic meanings with which it is pressed to "make peace" remain squalid and elusive. Ominously, these meanings continue to seethe menacingly.
It is morning and my car glides down the mountains of the Shomron into the smog of greater Tel Aviv. Another crazy day of running in the primaries is about to begin. My cell phone rings. A young, determined voice is on the other end.
The key to winning the game is in the numbers. Demographics.
If only my city were to treat me with the same courtesy they accorded Kaddafi.
Are we going to be Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians or Jacksonians? The question is what do we want?
Come right in and step right up. See the bright lights and the oddities of nature. Inside folks, for the low price of twenty-two trillion dollars, you can see Binders of Women, Team Big Bird and entire reams of green windmills and fields full of bayonets and horses. Here lies become the truth and everything is full of sugar. And the highlight of the show with be Barack, the Exotic Prince from the Wilds of Indonesia and Kenya, with a special appearance by Oprah and a hologram of JFK. Here in the Carnival of Fools, the party never stops and no one ever has to pay the bill.
Petraeus seems to have resigned over marital infidelity. And if so, did he have to leave his position? Why, because he displayed personal weakness? But this was a public, as opposed to a private, position. And years of counseling unfaithful husbands and wives has taught me that private failings do not necessarily indicate public faithlessness.
Now that we have lost the election of 2012, where our champion, a third-rate imitation of Ronald Reagan, without either his charm or his principles, who believed in absolutely nothing except being the best salesman he could be; let's pause to reflect on all the things we lost out on through his defeat. When we lose something, a relationship or a job, the grief comes from what we thought we had and what we imagined it was, not from what it truly was. Perspective means getting a true sense of what we had and what we never had to begin with. So let's look at what we might have had with President Mitt Romney.
The ritual of rockets that periodically pummel Israel’s southern communities includes numerous media interviews with the important people. The journalists attempt to extract from anybody who thinks he is somebody some piece of a resolution for this crazy situation that is unparalleled anywhere in the world.
All things move in the midst of death, even nations and civilizations. From 1948 to the present day, certain of Israel's prime ministers, facing war, terrorism, or even genocide, have been deeply reluctant to admit core national vulnerabilities. Indeed, rather than acknowledge the plainly exterminatory intent and (increasingly) the corollary destructive capacity of determined enemies, these leaders have sometimes opted for (1) so-called terrorist exchanges; 2) utterly inexcusable deals of land for nothing; and (3) endlessly assorted surrenders of power.
By Hillel Fendel and Chaim Silberstein / KeepJerusalem.org
Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Fatah wing of the Palestinian Authority, was forced last week to retract some controversial remarks and in the process only succeeded in thoroughly confusing much of the Israeli public.
September 4, 2026 
