InDepth

JERUSALEM – Four U.S. congressmen took a Friday tour of eastern Jerusalem earlier this month and received a strategic briefing, courtesy of the Im Eshkachech-Keep Jerusalem organization.

The coalition that Iran built, whose center is Syria, is currently undergoing a tremendous jolt. The fall of the Syrian regime - which the Arab world is stabbing in the back - is only a matter of time estimated at a few weeks.

There was a disturbing lack of balance in the reporting on the recent controversy concerning bus drivers being asked to work on Thanksgiving to transport Lakewood yeshiva students scheduled to attend school that day.

We always bristle at the preachments of even Israel’s few friends that it should rely on agreements and international good will as significant elements in its national security planning as it negotiates its final borders.

These are the generations of Yaakov, Yosef being seventeen years old…. Seventeen years old? We are struck by this information. Why would the Torah deem it necessary to inform us about Yosef’s age?

Anti-Semitic and other criminal worldviews received greater legitimization in the European Union with the recent inclusion of the Laos (The Popular Orthodox Rally) Party in the Greek government.

A nephew of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, zt”l, Rabbi Meiselman learned Torah on a daily basis with his uncle for more than a decade. Rabbi Meiselman has just finished writing a book (as yet untitled) on Torah and science due to be published in the next few months.

Earlier this year Israel passed a law that would strip Israelis of their citizenship if convicted of espionage or treason. Condemned for this by countries all over the world, almost all of whom have far harsher anti-treason laws than Israel, the Israeli government has yet to apply the law to anyone.

Even if Iran and the Arab enemies of Israel were not in a declared condition of belligerence with the Jewish state, Israel's preemptive action could still be entirely law-enforcing.

Most Israelis understand that the funding of Israeli organizations by foreign governments is a way to enable these governments to advance their agenda of delegitimizing Israel.

No one knows what will replace the brutal Assad regime: a Jihadist junta, a drawn out civil war or, or even the eventual rise of a freedom loving society. But it is certain that breaking the Syria-Iran axis will benefit Israel and the world also stands to gain through any weakening of the ambitious Iranian war machine.

I don’t expect that all of us present agree on all issues. To the contrary, certainly we don’t. But the Sheikh represents an alternative to the Palestinian Authority

An open letter from an IDF reserve soldier serving on the Egyptian border.

After an eight-month-long battle in which more than 3500 people have been killed, there’s no telling who will be ruling Syria when the dust settles, or even when the dust will settle.

Several years ago, on the anniversary of the liberation of Hebron in 1967, I was interviewed by a journalist who queried me about various problems facing Hebron’s Jewish community. His concluding question/statement was, “Well, I guess you’re not celebrating today?”

Good news in Yerushalayim: The government is expected to grant final approval next month to the first new neighborhood in the capital's liberated areas in 14 years.

Is Israel preparing to attack Iran? According to media reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to convince his ministers to go on the offensive. If that is true, Netanyahu will go down in history as the prime minister who saved the State of Israel from destruction – not necessarily nuclear.

At the conclusion of the recent [Editor’s Note: the first] Gulf War [Operation Desert Storm], the Bush administration announced plans to sell Saudi Arabia, a country of six million inhabitants, an arms package including over 500 tanks, 48 F-15 fighter planes, Apache helicopter gunships, more than 30 Patriot batteries, tens of thousands of armored vehicles, multiple rocket-launchers and command/control systems.

For a brief moment last week, the world got to peek behind the diplomatic curtains and catch a glimpse of what the American and French presidents really think of Israel’s prime minister.

We were encouraged by the statement of Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes that he will not agree to any plea bargains and will seek the maximum jail sentence of up to fifteen years in prison for anyone convicted in last week’s Flatbush firebombings. Several cars were destroyed and swastikas and anti-Jewish slurs were painted on nearby park benches in the early morning attack.

The muted reaction from Tehran to the mysterious explosion at an Iranian missile base over the weekend that killed 17, including a key figure in Iran’s missile program, strongly suggests that Iran’s continuing bellicosity regarding possible Israeli or international military action or sanctions is just so much empty bravado.

In the good old days, Forest Hills, New York - where I grew up between 1939 and 1951 - was a shtetl for assimilated American Jews. Like my parents, all our neighbors were American-born offspring of Eastern European immigrants. A generation removed from their identity conflicts, we children knew that Forest Hills, liberated from Judaism, was our promised land.

The Irgun is famous; Lehi – the other Jewish underground that fought the British in the 1940s – less so. With only 1,000 fighters, as opposed to the Irgun’s 5,000, Lehi is sometimes thought of as the Irgun’s “kid brother.”

Israel can put an end to phenomenon of death in the desert immediately by hermetically closing the border with Egypt

I had just finished reading The Prime Ministers (Toby Press) and enjoyed every one of its 700-plus pages. Yahuda Avner’s “fly on the wall” account spans the governments of Levi Eshkol (Six-Day War), Golda Meir (Yom Kippur War), Yitzhak Rabin (Entebbe, Oslo), and Menachem Begin (peace treaty with Sadat, attack on Iraqi nuclear reactor, Lebanon invasion), describing sensitive, frightening and sometimes hilarious events, mostly of the kind you will never read in a newspaper.

Over the past several weeks the media have been enamored by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s push to obtain United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state. The media coverage has exclusively focused on the political aspects of Abbas’s effort and its relationship to the so called peace process involving the Israel and PA.

With Israel just having observed a memorial day for slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, this is a good time to debunk a myth that has recently gained great currency: that Israel’s population has become increasingly right-wing, constituting a major obstacle to peace.

I wasn’t sure if I should write something about the petira of Rebbetzin Kanievsky, z"tl. My first reaction was who am I to write about such a great person? How could I possibly describe who she was? She was so great that mere words cannot do her justice.

Cousin Leo Schreiber was the son of my grandfather's brother David. He came from a family of Rabbinic giants of Europe; the Europe that does not exist anymore. His family was loving and righteous and they were destroyed by Hitler, yimach shemo. But Leo survived.

We have now lived in Israel for more years than we lived in the USA, and our joy in living in Israel knows no bounds. We are living in our homeland with our people. We loved America and are proud to be American citizens, but Israel is our home. We strive each day to keep our focus on the wonderful things that life in Israel offers. We are happy that Israel and the USA are allies and help each other. Unfortunately, we are often upset and concerned by the political situation and by the attitude of the world to the Jews.