A former Dutch prime minister reportedly said that the Jewish state should have been established in Germany. “Jews need a safe place. Why couldn’t they get a safe place in Germany, at the time?” Dries Van Agt said on Nov. 8 during a seminar Nijmegen, according to the Dutch daily Telegraaf. The paper described Van…
I didn’t know Yitzhak Shamir, but he knew me – or at least tried to. In January 1989, HaIr editor Meir Schnitzer and I appealed against a Chief Military Censor’s decision to the Israeli High Court, and won. The court gave permission to publish an article I wrote on an upcoming change in the leadership…
Of all the Israelis that have led Israel since its inception in 1948, Yitzhak Shamir is the only one who was a true zealot. A modest and moderate man with infinite self-control, he was nonetheless a fanatic devotee of his vision of the Jewish people and the Greater Land of Israel. The end, in his…
Yizhak Shamir, the seventh prime minister of Israel, died Saturday at the age of 96. Shamir, who was born in 1915 in Ruzhany, served in Israel’s Shin Bet, and later on as Speaker of the Knesset as part of the Likud and Israel’s Foreign Minister before succeeding Menachem Begin as Prime Minister in 1983. In…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can rest easy after reading the results of the latest Haaretz-Dialog poll: Not only does he trounce all his rivals on the question of who is most fit to lead the country, but an absolute majority of Israelis reject the aspersions cast on him last week by former Shin Bet…
Is Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on his way out? Jonathan Tobin certainly seems to think so. In a blog post for Commentary, where he is the editor, he posits that Fayyad’s approach to governance and to foreign affairs places him outside the Palestinian mainstream. Citing Fayyad’s comments in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle…
I was last in Ramallah a year and a half ago, and the change since then is striking. The headquarters of the once-feared Palestine Liberation Organization had been on the second floor of a nondescript office building above a furniture store; now it is in a gleaming office tower adjacent to the sprawling compound of…
While former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon lies comatose in a Tel Aviv hospital, his body will be on display at the city’s Kishon Art Gallery beginning Thursday. In case you were wondering, hospital attendants haven’t carted Sharon’s body to the exhibit. The “body,” a life-size, animated sculpture replete with hospital bed, drip and blue…
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