Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington shortly after President Barack Obama’s victory on health-care reform had both symbolic significance and practical implications for the Likud leader. Obama’s win was interpreted as Netanyahu’s loss, reflecting the zero-sum nature of the diplomatic clash between the right-wing Israeli leader and the liberal occupant of the White …
Continue reading “No Tea Parties for Bibi”
In January 1077, King Henry IV walked to Canossa. He crossed the snow-covered Alps barefoot, wearing a penitent monk’s hair shirt, and reached the North-Italian fortress in which the Vicar of God had found refuge. Pope Gregory VII had excommunicated him after a conflict over the right to invest bishops throughout the German Reich. The …
Continue reading “On the Road to Canossa”
It is already a commonplace to say that people who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Some 1,942 years ago, the Jews in the province called Palaestina launched a revolt against the Roman Empire. In retrospect, this looks like an act of madness. Palestine was a small and insignificant part of …
Continue reading “The Doomsday Weapon”
Some weeks the news is dominated by a single word. This week’s word was "timing." It’s all a matter of timing. The government of Israel insulted the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest "friends" of Israel (meaning: somebody totally subservient to AIPAC), and spat in the face of President …
Continue reading “Biden Brouhaha: Just a Matter of Bad Timing?”
The business is registered in the name of Binyamin Netanyahu. But the reality is different. Netanyahu has never been more than a slick patent-medicine salesman. That is a type that appears frequently in American Westerns and sells an elixir that is good for everything: against the flu and against tuberculosis, against heart attacks and against …
Continue reading “The Liebarak”
JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself embattled on several fronts as he tries – so far unsuccessfully – to ward off the enormous international pressure on Israel unleashed by the Goldstone report for its conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza earlier this year. Israel’s failure to bury the report has …
Continue reading “Netanyahu Unsure How to Contain Gaza Fallout”
While Israeli officials claimed a major win in U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to shelve his long-held demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, some analysts here believe it may yet prove a Pyrrhic victory for the hard-line government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The decision, announced at …
Continue reading “Has Netanyahu Out-Maneuvered Obama or Vice Versa?”
JERUSALEM – "Nobody can usurp the right to determine the fate of the nation on their own – not the Palestine Liberation Organization, nor anyone else. It is the will of the Palestinian people that must determine our future," declares Hamas political leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was speaking Sunday at the onset of …
Continue reading “US Pushing Beyond Settlement Freeze”
JERUSALEM — "Reckless," "cavalier," "unscrupulous," "petty politician, not statesman"…these and such epithets applied to Benjamin Netanyahu by friends and foes alike — not that he ended up with many friends — when he was first Israel’s Prime Minister back in the late 1990s. Re-elected in February, Netanyahu seemed aware of the question on everyone’s lips …
Continue reading “The Old Bibi Is Back”
Uri Avnery urges Obama to stand firm
