יום שלישי, י״ט אלול תשפ״וTuesday, September 1, 2026
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By Meir Indor
The Israeli Left is incentivizing the Palestinians to refuse negotiations and potentially use violence against Israel.
The national census for England and Wales has come out, and, as usual, this once-a-decade event has had all of its most significant points overlooked.
By J. E. Dyer
Chuck Hagel writes his own narrative, in which threats aren’t really threats and policies that actually work are just horrible.
Christians and Jews would be enjoying freedom, peace and safety in a truly Muslim State.
The American political and social divides are trickling down to our schools and placing horrific pressure on our kids.
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.
In 1948 we stood by the Jewish people but now, for the sake of oil and meat sales, things have changed.
By Steven Plaut
In 1999, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first go-round as prime minister, lost his reelection bid to Ehud Barak, much to the delight of Israel's conscripted media and of many in its judicial system.
In the arid, forsaken and violent area that we live in, if you beg for peace you get a kick in the behind and thrown out of the arena.
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.
The 26 murders at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut last Friday have triggered yet another nationwide debate over how something so horrific could happen in the United States.
The Washington buzz earlier this week was that President Obama had decided on Sen. John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and was close to settling on former Republican senator Chuck Hagel as his new secretary of defense.
Many Washington officials have long spun the story that convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard did immense harm to this country’s national security by stealing vital American military and intelligence secrets. Thus, the U.S. intelligence community has always opposed Mr. Pollard’s release.
By Gil Troy
Those who view American-Israel relations through a dualistic “are you pro-Israel or anti-Israel” lens must be confused. In one week, the United States stands virtually alone with Israel against the Palestinians’ upgrade of their status at the United Nations, then immediately condemns Israel’s settlement expansion.
It was the late Abba Eban who famously said that "the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." In his time that was for the most part true, and it arguably worked for Israel's benefit, particularly when Israel found itself in a tight diplomatic squeeze.
That Israel and the U.S. share a special relationship is conventional wisdom in the 21st century. That the roots of this relationship extend to the very founding of the United States is perhaps less known. A new book, “The Elected and the Chosen: Why American Presidents Have Supported Jews and Israel – From George Washington to Barack Obama” (Gefen Publishing), attempts to highlight this relationship by describing various encounters American presidents have had with Jews and the support they extended to Israel. Its author, Denis Brian, has published 17 previous books, including “Joseph Pulitzer: A Life” and “Genius Talk: Conversations With Nobel Laureates and Other Luminaries.”
By Ira Heller
I’ve always wondered what factors determine whether one gets a z”l suffix (zichrono leverachah) or a zt”l (zecher tzaddik leverachah) after he’s passed on. I know of no objective standard, or of any official sanctioning board that makes these decisions. In my understanding, the term zt”l is exclusively reserved for luminaries who have benefited their generation with their exemplary deeds and accomplishments.
Both the Left and the shooters agree that the people you are shooting at should not have guns.
By Meir Indor
Thoughts and proposals on the ongoing nurses’ strike in Israel.
A number of radical leftist approached the chairman of the Central Election Committee...
The Left seeks to create a society where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments.
By Barry Rubin
Obama Administration policy is to put into power yet another anti-Western regime that will oppress its own people and put a high priority on trying to wipe out Israel.
How could we have been standing those 200 yards away on this incredibly meaningful site, in the town where the Maccabees’ efforts assured Jewish continuity and be in the dark?
The EU has been following the PA line in condemning Israeli construction in E-1, calling for Palestinian unity, and voting for a unilateral Palestinian state.
By Barry Rubin
The democratic opposition—like its counterparts in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Iran—has learned that the United States will not help them.
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.
Although the wider regional implications of Assad's pending collapse remain unknown, the fall of the Alawite regime will undoubtedly strike a major blow to Iran.
Today, fewer than 4,500 Jews remain in Arab countries. Israel absorbed and integrated 600,000 of the more than 850,000 who left.
The issue isn't really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil.
By Barry Rubin
In the Middle East, secular movements are more poorly funded and more naïve about how to operate politically than the Islamists.
By J. E. Dyer
Connecticut has some of the tightest restrictions in the country and Mrs. Lanza was in full compliance with them.
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.
By Shalom Bear
Jews have an obligation to fight laws that would ban their access to guns.
By David Wilder
Seeing Israeli soldiers run from marauding, rioting Arabs is a disgrace.
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.
By Barry Rubin
The Obama Administration was using a barely disguised channel to pay for a revolutionary Islamist movement seeking to take over Syria.
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.
Sinem Tezyapar says, "Let us adopt a language of peace, a language of love. This is easy! And there is no other way."
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.
A writer of non-fiction for the general community has to know the topic well; a writer for the observant Jewish community has an additional requirement – to understand that Jewish law, halacha, informs our decisions and actions.
By Ben Cohen
The Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin was fond of the phrase “one step forward, two steps back.” In the current Middle East, we have taken many more than two steps backward – and we are repeating patterns that are more than five decades old.
The conventional wisdom about the Israeli government’s decision to allow new building projects in Jerusalem in the E1 area between the city and the Ma’ale Adumim suburb is that it was a blunder.
By Barry Rubin
What happens, then, if the regime doesn’t give in and the army doesn’t stop the demonstrations?
The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the death, at age 79, of Rabbi Mendel Weinbach, a founder of Yeshiva Ohr Someach, a leading educational institution in the ba’al teshuvah movement.
Early this week it appeared the end could well be in sight to the ordeal of Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jewish businessman from Brooklyn jailed in Bolivia without being charged for a year and a half on suspicion of money laundering.
The Hamas bluster about having bested Israel in Operation Pillar of Defense should not be dismissed as typical Arab hyperbole.
By Jason Maoz
Ehud Barak may or may not be out of Israeli politics for good, but his recent resignation announcement reminded the Monitor of just how much the man had been willing to give up to Yasir Arafat at the tail end of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
By dvora
Hannah and her seven sons; Judith and the Greek commander she beheaded; the outnumbered but fearless Maccabees; the Jews who refused to give in to the decrees of the wicked Antiochus – Chanukah is a time for recounting historic deeds of self-sacrifice in the name of the God of Israel. The most recent one occurred in Israel on Dec. 1, a Shabbat.
It is striking to see that within the EU there is but one country courageous enough to stand with Israel: the Czech Republic.
By Rachel Weiss
Whatever the state of world affairs or shift in political winds, one thing remains a constant in our lives: the quest for shidduchim. There is no family or individual among us who does not know at any given time of someone in search of his or her destined life partner; yet too often the hunt is fraught with complexities and accompanied by sleepless nights and a furrowed brow.
By Meir Indor
Israel has become the paradise of Arab intelligence analysts.
By J. E. Dyer
At least we can probably count on the Muslims Brotherhood to refrain from making bunny-snuff videos.
By Amin Farouk
The genie will be let out according to the strategic needs of Sunni Islam.
The constitution, as important as it may be, is not a cure for the genetic illnesses of the states of the Middle East.
By Daniel Pipes
Ideologues are dictators on steroids who don't moderate upon reaching power but dig themselves in.
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.
She concluded her starvation protest after the Iranian dictatorship acceded to her main demand
By Barry Rubin
Living well, as the saying goes, is the best revenge, even if it comes at the cost of international criticism.
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 highlights the moral-high-ground of Jews in their ancestral land.
By J. E. Dyer
One of the key lessons from a career in Naval Intelligence is that if you can imagine it, someone is trying to do it.
By Barry Rubin
Middle East expert, Barry Rubin discussed the region, prospects for peace and revolutionary Islamism.
Chanukah commemorates the physical and spiritual resistance that is required of us sooner or later in all times.
By J. E. Dyer
Missile tests popping up all over Asia should be seen in this light. Everyone’s arming up, starting with Russia
Dealing with the material needs of the Egyptian people is not high on Morsi's agenda.
Americans weren't ready for a reversal after four years. Will Egyptians be ready to cast down Morsi after a much shorter period?
By Barry Rubin
Satire but Very Close to Actual Experience.
It should take just one visit to the Middle East to understand what America is all about.
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.
The UN General Assembly’s resolution granting nonmember-state observer status to “Palestine” – a document drafted by the Palestinian Authority – and the worldwide negative response to Israel’s reaction to it is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s classic 1871 poem “Jabberwocky,” which depicts a world filled with illogic and nonsensical speech.
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."
Jonathan Pollard’s long incarceration has taken its toll and he is now seriously ill. While he is not the first inmate to suffer in this manner, most are given consideration for compassionate early release. It in no way diminishes the severity of his crimes to suggest he should be sent home. His sentence was Draconian, as attested to by a growing number of former senior federal officials, including several from Congress and the intelligence community.
The strength and numbers of Orthodox Jews in America have never been greater, and yet those of us concerned with Judaism’s future must admit we confront a future no less frightening than the future that was evident to Hannah’s noble sons in Modi’in all those centuries ago.
By Zev Golan
They are in their 80s and 90s now, but when the British ruled Eretz Yisrael they were teenagers, or maybe in their 20s. Their faces were on “wanted” posters and those who were caught went to prison or were exiled to Africa. They are the remnants of the most feared Jewish militia that fought the British – Lehi, commonly known as the Stern Gang. Every Chanukah they met in Tel Aviv, lit candles, shared some doughnuts and watched their numbers dwindle.
The festival of Chanukah celebrates two miracles – the military victory over the Syrian Greeks and that one small cruse of oil, good for one day, providing light for eight days. The miracle of the light, however, is the main focus and central theme of this festival.
By Morton A. Klein and Dr. Daniel Mandel
The United Nations General Assembly’s vote to make “Palestine” a “non-member state” of the UN has done no less than legitimize the two Palestinian regimes that promote terrorism and Israel's destruction. How can the world claim to be fighting terrorism when it has just declared that two terrorist regimes should enjoy sovereignty?
As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book The World Turned Upside Down, Northeastern University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), paralleling the moral incoherence of anti-Israel activists demonstrating elsewhere in American and European cities, sponsored a November 15 Boston rally in support of Gaza and, presumably, its genocidal thugocracy, Hamas.
Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses.
Had Mitt Romney won the presidential election, Tevi Troy would be director of domestic policy on his transition team.
“Israel has bad public relations.” This is the perennial cry. “Israel must improve its image to convince the world of the justness of its cause.”
By Barry Rubin
We must understand how Clinton's mind and that of a large portion of the Western elite works.
Muslim Turks' attitude for centuries has demonstrated that Turks and Jews have continued to help each other in times of great crises.
By David Wilder, Tazpit News Agency
Three thousand new apartments should be transformed into 30,000 new apartment buildings.
Mahmoud Abbas spent his speech claiming that this was the last chance for the peace process. In reality, it was simply the last chance for Abbas to remain in charge.
August 28, 2026 
