Ehud Barak warned on Wednesday that Israel was on a “slippery slope to apartheid” given the current state of play with Palestinians, in stark comments from the former prime minister and leader of the left-wing Labor Party. Speaking to the German station Deutsche Welle, Barak said that the growth of the Palestinian population would mean…
It’s becoming more and more obvious that there are some folks out there who simply can’t abide good news. Not just because they’re pessimists and get thrown when things are going well. No, we’re talking about the sort of people who find good news offensive. It outrages them. Their ranks are growing, and so is…
Relatives of a 19-year-old U.S. citizen killed in Israel’s 2010 storming of a Turkish-led aid flotilla are suing former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for the raid, in which nine activists died. Furkan Dogan, a dual Turkish-U.S. citizen, was filming on the flotilla carrying some 700 activists attempting to land humanitarian aid in circumvention of…
There’s a deep crack emerging in the veneer of wall-to-wall support offered by Israel’s political leadership to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his war against the Iran nuclear agreement. The crack has a name you might recognize: the Israeli security establishment. You know — the folks whose job it is to identify and address threats…
The final deadline passed this afternoon for Israel’s political parties to register for the March 17 Knesset elections. Several last-minute decisions will substantially affect the map in the weeks ahead: Kahanism Redux: Eli Yishai, the former Shas party chairman who quit in December and formed his own religious-right party, Yahad-Ha’am Itanu (“Together – The People…
More mystery and intrigue in the senior ranks of the Israel Defense Forces: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reported (Maariv, Haaretz) to be stalling the nomination of Israel’s next military chief of staff. His reasons are a topic of hot speculation, though the facts seem to speak for themselves. By law the nomination of a…
Three of Israel’s most senior ex-defense officials came out last week, almost simultaneously, with blistering attacks on the security policies of the Netanyahu coalition. Appearing in separate forums, the three — former Mossad director Shabtai Shavit, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin and former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi — each charged that the…
Israelis last week watched their defense establishment undergo its nastiest and arguably most dangerous meltdown in decades as the heads of two main branches, Benny Gantz of the Israel Defense Forces and Yoram Cohen of the Shin Bet security service, publicly traded insults and questioned each other’s integrity and professional competence. The public dispute erupted…
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