Israel told the United States on Thursday Kurdish independence in northern Iraq was a “foregone conclusion” and Israeli experts predicted the Jewish state would be quick to recognize a Kurdish state, should it emerge. Israel has maintained discreet military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, seeing in the minority ethnic group…
Israel’s population increased to nearly 8.2 million, according to figures released just ahead of Israel Independence Day, or Yom Ha’atzmaut. The population grew by 2 percent, about 157,000 people, according to the report released Thursday by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Jews make up 75 percent of the population, or 6.135 million people. Arabs are…
Two years ago, as the fragile beginnings of free expression swept through the Arab world, Arab media was compelled to reinvent itself. Messages sent through Twitter and other social media, videos uploaded to YouTube, blogs and photographs produced by “citizen journalists” — all served to bring energy and populist force to the uprisings and challenged…
Some 65 years after a band of foreign volunteers took to the skies to ensure Israel’s birth and survival, filmmakers are racing to bring their exploits to the screen before the last of the breed passes away. Among the competing producers and their financial backers are such famous names as Spielberg and Lansky. And though…
Former Democrat Joe Lieberman used his last speech on the U.S. Senate floor on Wednesday to call for bipartisanship and get in a last dig over the controversial result of the 2000 election, when he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Lieberman, 70, announced in January 2011 that he would retire when his fourth term…
During his 30 years in the clubby confines of the U.S. Senate, Arlen Specter never lost his acerbic prosecutorial zeal, friends and associates say. The insistent questions, the commitment to independence that made the longtime Pennsylvania senator a critical player in recent U.S. history, ultimately did in his career. In his 2010 bid for a…
If months have personalities — April the cruelest, May the very merry, Adar the time for “increasing joy” — then July is the month of revolution. In this one month we mark the anniversaries of three historic political cataclysms that shook the pillars of human society. On July 4 we celebrate the American Revolution. July…
Jewish federation officials in Chicago have fired the head of the University of Chicago’s Hillel and the Hillel’s entire board in a bitter governance dispute that could result in two umbrella Jewish student groups dueling it out on campus. The dismissed Hillel leadership wanted independence from the Chicago federation, which controls all Hillels in Illinois…
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