When it comes to Israeli-Palestinian relations, there’s much to be cynical about lately. The 50-day long carnage resulting from Operation Protective Edge this summer, the frozen peace process, the dueling speeches by Netanyahu and Abbas at the U.N. — and then there’s the festering issue of Israel’s minorities. This week, Israel’s new president has come…
Reuven Rivlin, who drew criticism before becoming Israel’s president for his broadsides against non-Orthodox Jewish streams, told a group of Conservative Jews that Jews are “one big family.” “We cannot agree on everything, but we are brothers and we are one big family,” The Jerusalem Post quoted Rivlin as telling the delegation Wednesday from the…
Mahmoud Mansour and Morel Malka on their wedding day, August 17, 2014 / Haaretz (Haaretz) — To disrupt a wedding celebration and spoil the joy of two young people joining their lives together, one needs a very good reason. Racism clearly does not qualify. There’s an easy way for even the most tribal and anti-assimilationist Jew…
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo noted New Yorkers’ deep ties to Israel during a one-day solidarity visit there. Cuomo, who is running for re-election this year and considered a likely contender for president in 2016, met Wednesday with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the meetings, he was slated to meet…
In a scarcely noticed series of political maneuvers, Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud party lost its primacy as the largest party in the Knesset last Wednesday. It’s now equal in size to Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party at 19 seats each. Moreover, don’t be surprised if the prime minister finds himself dropping to 18 in the fall….
Martin Indyk, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian peace, will formally resign this afternoon and return to his think-tank job at the Brookings Institution, the Associated Press reports. If there was talk of a renewed American effort to reignite peace talks, this is probably a bad sign. It’s probably just coincidence that the news…
Newly elected Israeli President Reuven Rivlin with Benjamin Netanyahu / Getty Images Is Reuven Rivlin’s ascendancy to the post of president good news for left-wing Israelis? Yes, but not for the reasons most left-wing commentators are suggesting. Progressives should cheer Rivlin’s election not because he supports equal rights for Israeli Arabs or because he wants…
Israel’s newly elected president Reuven Rivlin / Getty Images For some reason, whenever a Palestinian (or an Arab American, for that matter) expresses one-state views, he’s accused of threatening Israel’s existence. When an Israeli voices the exact same view, he’s labeled a hawk, a Zionist hard-liner. That’s precisely what happened when Reuven Rivlin, the former…
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