Haredi ‘lost boys’ may find themselves drafted into Israel’s army
Netanyahu's government is in jeopardy over the military exemption for yeshiva students
Netanyahu's government is in jeopardy over the military exemption for yeshiva students
As Israel’s March 17 snap election date approaches, the electoral map continues to change faster than Taylor Swift’s outfits. The ink hasn’t even dried on the merger between Tzipi Livni and Labor’s Yitzhak Herzog that vaults them to first place in the polls, but the Likud’s reply is already in the works. According to a…
If the pre-election polls out of Israel teach us anything, it’s about the strength and weakness of pre-election polls. The strength is that they’re a pretty accurate reflection of what people are thinking. The proof of this is that the flood of polls coming every day from just about every media outlet, right, left and…
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…
Fresh from the long war with Hamas in Gaza, tensely facing down simmering unrest in the West Bank and chaos on the Syrian border, Israel’s defense establishment is now bracing for what’s shaping up to be the most bruising confrontation of all: the choosing of the next chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces….
The Israeli military has sent what amounts to a barely disguised message to the political leadership and the troops in the latest round of senior command promotions, announced April 25. With the Israeli-Palestinian peace process frozen, settler militancy on the rise and right-wing religious nationalists increasingly making their presence felt at the junior command level,…
Small minds might expect that with everything going in Egypt, Israel’s senior defense officials would have spent the last week focused on what happens next along Israel’s long, undefended southern border. But of course, that’s not how things work these days, now that Israel has Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history, as…
Must reading on Barak’s resignation from Labor: Haaretz military correspondent Amir Oren writes today about the very complicated relationship between Barak’s defection, the retirement of Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and his replacement by Yoav Galant, and the Turkish flotilla. Barak defected to save his own skin, of course. Avi Braverman and Buzhi Herzog were…
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