While visiting my mom, I took in a fine talk on U.S. dilemmas in the Mideast by Retired Ambassador William A. Rugh. The talk was sponsored by a local peace group and was remarkable to me for the use Rugh…
The Forward has a great editorial this week that makes the 1973 analogy. The humiliation to Israel of the 1973 Yom Kippur war led to the peace treaty with Egypt, and the humiliations to Israel of this latest war might…
Chris Matthews is on fire these days. Joe Lieberman’s loss has freed him to offer pitiless critiques of Democrats who voted for the war. Last night he said that they knew it was a bad decision in 2002 but went…
The death the other day in Lebanon of Uri Grossman, 20, an Israeli soldier and the son of the novelist David Grossman, who has been a peace activist in Israel, underscores a big difference between Israeli society and ours: In…
The abduction of Jill Carroll in Baghdad in January, along with the murder of her interpreter, Alan Enwiya, was an important event. Her ordeal demonstrated that the Islamic world has friends in the WestÂpeople like Jill Carroll, people who went…
In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel’s Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid…
I’m freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I’ll begin with the personal. The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full…
Two nights ago on CNN, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dore Gold in Jerusalem and identified him as Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. The polished Gold offered, as usual, an articulate statement of Israeli attitudes toward the war effort. “Well for…
Lauren Likkel If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau…