Under the especially revealing title "Suicidal Lies" (31.3), Thomas Friedman of the New York Times gives his distorted version of Middle East realities. Friedman's short essay is full of flaws, but since he shouldn't be taken all too seriously, I won't...

First it was the Pope coming out against Israel's "humiliation" of the Palestinians, then, a day later, the President of the United States calling on Ariel Sharon to pull back his tanks. But don't think that Israel's Amen Corner didn't see it coming. You...

Al Jazeera TV footage showed the bodies of five Palestinian men executed when Israeli soldiers found out where they'd hidden in a building in Ramallah on Sunday. They had feared for their lives and apparently had good reason to do so. Four were shot with a single...

A rash of particularly vicious anti-Semitic attacks in France – the burning of a synagogue and the beating of a French Jewish couple – has brought condemnation from the government of Lionel Jospin and, notably, from the Palestinian Authority representative...

As the violence escalates in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians, the pressure for intervention by the United States or some other force increases as well. I listen mostly to NPR while driving, but the experts they have on repeat a drumbeat similar to...

The situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank territories deteriorated into virtually all-out war in the past week, with both sides escalating the rhetoric and the violence. The continued leadership of PLO Chairman Arafat seems doomed. The administration now finds...

Is the statement, 'America's position as pre-eminent world power will not last indefinitely' a truism? That is to say, is this a statement too obviously true to be worth making? It was not blindingly obvious to Nately, Catch-22's embodiment of east coast rectitude and...

Sorry to disappoint some of my readers: terrorists haven't got me yet. Yesterday (Saturday) in Tel-Aviv they were close, but no cigar. A minute ago, my parents called from Haifa saying they just survived another attack. "May they move next to your home", an American...

The leering ugliness of the Israelis' Easter blitzkrieg is darkly illustrated by the news that, having marched into Ramallah, the IDF prepared a special Easter television broadcast for this historically Christian city: "Porn movies and programs in Hebrew are...