Opinion

• Opinion

  To Starve Or Feed the Beast

  Surely Nashat Aqtash has one of the more improbable jobs in the world: He is public relations adviser to Hamas; his job is to portray the new majority party of the Palestinians as kinder and gentler than its charter and its history have convinced most of the world it is. Before last week’s elections, Aqtash…

  By Leonard Fein

  4 min read
• Opinion

  You Wouldn’t Know

  Watching President Bush deliver his annual State of the Union address to Congress and the nation this week, it was hard not to notice the subdued, almost chastened tone of his delivery. Gone were the trademark winks and expansive body language that have characterized his public appearances for years. He was, like his message, restrained,…

  Feb 3, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Movement Cannot Feed Society on Resistance Alone

  Painful ironies mark the new political landscape of the Middle East, following the shattering defeat of the Fatah movement in last week’s Palestinian Legislative Council elections. One symbolic moment tells the story. As many of their countrymen watched in shock — one Palestinian scholar, who met a group of visiting French Parliamentarians on that very…

  By Eran Lerman Feb 3, 2006 | 4 min read

Columnists View All

• Alyssa Katz Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors

  

• Rob Eshman Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews

  

• Dan Perry How Israel became a country where teenagers murder each other in cold blood

  

• Emily Tamkin American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt

  

• Jay Michaelson Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here’s what Jewish organizations should do about it. 

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  Europe Should Leverage Aid To Coax Islamists to Moderation

  As Hamas considers what to do with the majority of seats it won in last week’s Palestinian Legislative Council elections, one would expect it to listen particularly well to what the European Union and its member states have to say. After all, they are the ones primarily bankrolling the Palestinian Authority. Last year alone, Europeans…

  By Eric Frey Feb 3, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Whither Hamas, and With It the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

  The day after Hamas’s “Reform and Change” list swept last week’s Palestinian Legislative Council elections, two 20-something Palestinian women staffing our international observer delegation from the National Democratic Institute started peppering me with questions. How quickly could the United States pull the plug on the democracy assistance provided by the National Democratic Institute, the International…

  By Mara Rudman Feb 3, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Is Olmert a Man Of Action?

  George Orwell taught us that the words used by political leaders may not mean what the same words mean in conventional discourse, what they mean according to our dictionaries. (So did Lewis Carroll.) Accordingly, it is worth noting a potential transformation in Israel — where three phrases, it seems, have begun overnight to mean just…

  By Leonard Fein Jan 27, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  In Praise of ‘Civilian’ Leadership

  Can Ehud Olmert fill the vacuum left by the mighty Ariel Sharon? This is the question that Israelis, and indeed, people all around the world, are currently asking. After all, Acting Prime Minister Olmert, likely winner of the upcoming March 28 elections, has no serious military background. And in a country besieged by terrorist, guerrilla,…

  By Uri Dromi Jan 27, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  …Then They Came for Me

  The Justice Department’s investigation of two pro-Israel lobbying officials in Washington, shrouded in mystery for much of the past year and a half, is rapidly gaining some clarity as the case moves toward trial. As the fog lifts and the facts of the case become clear, some of the more paranoid conspiracy theories that have…

  Jan 27, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Love and the Pope

  In a world where religion and progressive thinking seem too often to be hopelessly at odds, there was a fresh breeze this week out of that most forbidding of citadels, the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI, greeted at his coronation eight months ago as an archconservative, issued his first encyclical on Wednesday, and it contained more…

  Jan 27, 2006 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  The Skewering Of Jack Abramoff

  From George Clooney to Orthodox rabbis, the list of those who have scathingly denounced Jack Abramoff seems endless. Given the admission of guilt by this Orthodox Jew and former super-lobbyist for Indian gambling tribes, is it possible to discover any grounds for sympathy with him? Actually, yes. But first a disclaimer. As I wrote in…

  By David Klinghoffer Jan 27, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  The Purse and the Sword

  Iraq is beginning to sound like a rerun of the Vietnam War, and not just because presidential critics again are crying out that the United States has fallen into a quagmire. Opponents of the American presence in Iraq are arguing that a wartime president has overstepped the Constitution and that, if Congress’s constitutional role in…

  By John Yoo Jan 27, 2006 | 6 min read