What do Israel’s assault on Gaza and the American War of 1812 have in common? Much more than meets the eye. The stated purpose of the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s military leader, which provoked the conflict in Gaza, was to impede the group’s rocket firings on...
A short interview broadcast by CNN late last week featuring two participants — a Palestinian in Gaza and an Israeli within range of the rocket attacks — did not follow the usual script. For once, a media outlet dropped its role as gatekeeper, there to mediate and...
How did it start? Stupid question. Conflagrations along the Gaza Strip don’t start. They are just a continuous chain of events, each claimed to be in “retaliation” for the previous one. Action is followed by reaction, which is followed by retaliation, which is...
When the late Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was engaged in a heavily one-sided battle against a robustly-armed Israel in 2000, he admitted the Palestinians were completely outgunned by the Israelis. As the the U.S.-supplied...
“What have you learned in school today, my son?” “There was no school today. There is an emergency!” “And what have you learned from that, my son?” Actually, quite a lot. This week’s “round," as the army likes to call it, followed a well-established pattern, as formal...
Two boats full of courageous passengers were on their way to Gaza when they were intercepted on Friday, November 4, by the Israeli military in international waters. We call the passengers courageous because they sailed from Turkey on November 2 with the knowledge that...
He looks at the camera with bright eyes and the beginning of a smile, wearing a miniature dark blue zipper sweatshirt, the cuffs folded up a bit to make it fit. I can imagine his mother dressing him that morning, making sure he would be warm enough. I wonder if she’s...
My co-passengers and I of the U.S. boat to Gaza have now gone from “High-Seas Hippies,” according to the right-wing Washington Times, to participants in a flotilla full of “fools, knaves, hypocrites, bigots, and supporters of terrorism,” says Alan Dershowitz in his...
BEN GURION AIRPORT, Tel Aviv — Confused foreign tourists arriving at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport on Friday would be forgiven for thinking that a terrorist attack was about to take place. Hundreds of armed Israeli soldiers and police spread throughout the...
Instead of high-fiving each other for their success in thwarting the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Israeli officials should be throwing overboard the propaganda hacks who catapulted the flotilla into headline news for weeks and left Israel smelling like rotten fish. Last...
