Columns

During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to Israel, his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, emitted the following pearl of wisdom: “The peace treaty with Egypt saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides.”

We’ve just read the Torah portion about Pinchas, an amazing tzaddik who performed an unusual act instinctively and for the sake of Hashem and His honor.

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The world has become used to hearing and watching stories about massacres against civilians in Syria. But until recently, almost all the victims were Syrian citizens.

Jewish Press Columnist Yishai Fleisher is joined by alternative peace activist Baruch Widen. Together they discuss the findings of the Plesner Committee and discuss a recent piece from NPR.

Jewish Press Columnist, Yishai Fleisher, is joined by Knesset insider Jeremy Man Saltan to discuss the current situation in the Knesset along with a discussion talking about Jewish Americans living in Israel voting in US elections.

Yishai and Malkah further discuss Germany's ban on ritual circumcision along with discuss the Levy Report.

Abbas is not interested in reaching any deal with Israel: he knows that such a move would require him to make concessions. Abbas knows that Israel will never give him 100% of his demands; that is enough for him to refuse to sign any historic agreement. Like Arafat, Abbas does not want to go down into history as the first Palestinian leader to make concessions, especially on sensitive issues such as refugees and Jerusalem.

Those who read my book, Where There Are No Men, already know that no real struggle can be conducted by the Yesha Council. We understood that the hard way when we established the Zo Artzeinu movement, and we have since explained how we reached this conclusion in detail.

For Israel, and also its cross-pressured U.S. ally, there would be very difficult problems to solve if an enemy state such as Iran were permitted to go fully nuclear. These problems could lethally undermine the conceptually neat, but probably unrealistic, notion of balanced nuclear deterrence in the region.

We left Reno, Nevada, early Sunday morning and decided to take the scenic route to Salt Lake City, rather than travel by super highway, but Route 50 turned out to be not very scenic as we crossed Nevada and Utah. We stopped at a roadside table at noon, where the men heated and ate LaBriute meals while the women enjoyed their cottage cheese, peanut butter sandwiches, fruit and vegetables. We have followed this pattern of meals ever since the women decided not to eat the packaged meals.

Mourning, repentance – and love of the Land of Israel. These are arguably the major themes of these Three Weeks of Mourning over the destruction of the Holy Temple. The first two are well known and require little elaboration. But how does love and concern for Eretz Yisrael fit in to the picture?

Thousands Of Radicals Poised To Fight Assad At least 5,000 global jihadists are positioned near Syria’s borders with Turkey and Lebanon attempting to infiltrate Syria...

Yishai is joined by Hillel Ma'or, an instructor at the Caliber 3 range outside of Efrat to discuss his journey to Judaism and also Israel.

Ordinarily, an attack by the political hack of one party about a mega-contributor to another party would not merit attention or comment. But what made Harris’s vitriol most unfortunate was that it was one Jew deriding the two foremost private supporters of Jewish identity and the State of Israel in the entire world.

In March last year, thousands of Palestinians, inspired by the "Arab Spring," launched their own protests in the West Bank to demand reforms, democracy, and regime change. But the Palestinian revolt was short-lived. Abbas's security forces, backed by Fatah thugs, attacked the young men and women who were protesting in the center of Ramallah, torching their tents and beating them with clubs and rifle butts.

There are few choices as personal and important as the educational environment in which our children are immersed for most of their waking hours. Yet in the United States, unless parents want to risk bankruptcy just to afford tuition, they are given no choice.

Yishai Fleisher presents a talk that he gave to the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem about why the concept of internationalizing the city is not a good idea.

Yishai and Malkah talk about a recent beauty pageant for Holocuast survivors along with contrasts between new German and Israeli Laws. They also discuss a gift that was recently delivered from a fan.

Finally, after many years of effective disregard, a core irony in the matter of Iranian nuclearization can be acknowledged: For President Ahmadinejad, and also his clerical superiors, any prospect of hastening the Shiite apocalypse – a decidedly “sacred” prospect linked to war with Israel and/or the United States – could be welcomed. Naturally, this religion-driven view of a "terrible beauty" would contrast starkly with senior leadership attitudes in both Jerusalem and Washington. In these plainly more secular circles, of course, any thought of a conscious encouragement for Final Battle must always be rejected.

The photo of homosexual soldiers on the IDF’s official website should have set off many alarm bells for many public figures. But they were all afraid. The heavy-handed politically correct code paralyzes our representatives. They prefer to remain silent and let somebody else fend off the arrows that are sure to come. MK Uri Ariel (National Union) deserves our appreciation and admiration, as he was the only MK to courageously state the simple truth by calling on the IDF to conduct itself on this issue as it has in the past.

Let me tell you how special it is to live in Eretz Yisrael. The other day I decided it was time for me to say the entire Book of Psalms – Tehillim. I’m the father of ten children and fifteen grandchildren (b’li ayin hara), so the power of Tehillim is where I turn, for my family’s needs.

I came to know Mr. Shamir quite well when I hosted him at the University of Oxford in the mid-90’s. He seemed all but forgotten even then and told me that his dramatic drop in popularity in Israel had been due to the euphoria over the premiership of Yitzchak Rabin and his dramatic overtures for peace. He told me this with a touch of resignation. It seemed he did feel underappreciated. More importantly, he seemed to divine the coming catastrophe.

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Yishai Fleisher is joined by Alternative Peace Activist Yehuda HaKohen to discuss the roots and life of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Had Mark Zuckerberg been told that the Jewish people have a mission to rebuild a Jewish state, and that his creative talents are needed, he may have harnessed his mind in that direction. Had he been offered an opportunity to take part in the most exciting project of the Jewish people in two-thousand years, he probably would have taken it.

Democracy without a legitimate constitution and a Bill of rights, especially protecting the rights of minorities, can become a very scary thing. What you get is a tyranny of the majority. So the United States, as the world’s foremost democracy and sole superpower, must insist that elected regimes be restrained by a constitution that safeguards against a gravitation toward tyranny.

The Genocide Convention criminalizes not only various acts of genocide, but also (Article III) conspiracy to commit genocide and direct and public incitement to commit genocide. Articles II, III and IV of the Genocide Convention are fully applicable in all cases of direct and public incitement to commit genocide. For the Convention to be invoked, it is sufficient that any one of the state parties call for a meeting, through the United Nations, of all the state parties (Article VIII).

It is impossible not to notice the similarity between the Ulpana situation and the Sharon-led Expulsion from Gush Katif. In both cases a prime minister elected by the Right, whose ideology certainly does not endorse destruction in Israel’s heartland, veers sharply left and compels his ministers and coalition to support a Peace Now move – a move completely against their will.

Just 15 miles to the north of Jerusalem, the Jewish effort to return to the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria (Yesha) suffered a severe blow this week – or did it?