InDepth

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.

Unfortunately, Israeli governments have not taken the correct line from the beginning. By not vehemently opposing Arab claims, insisting that the territory was disputed rather than occupied, and asserting Israel’s own rights under the Mandate, they allowed the PLO — with the willing connivance of anti-Zionist forces throughout the world — to make its point of view part of the conventional wisdom.

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.

Because of political reasons and especially due to the ideological monopoly of certain forces over Western institutions, most of the academics, analysts, journalists, and politicians who speak on these issues get away with pushing the moderation thesis. They are virtually never asked to provide proof. This wrong idea thus sets current U.S. policy and creates a great risk of future crisis, instability, repression, and severe damage to U.S. interests.

Though still a minority, many women are changing the landscape and breaking new ground for future female leaders. Pro-Israel organizations StandWithUs and The Israel Project both were established by females.

The Tumultus Post-Americanus is now well underway. There is no initiative on our collective part – we have done nothing but react in the last three years – and possibly even less appreciation of how the world is changing. The forms of international discourse – the processes of the UN, the G-8 and G-20, the IMF – are being adhered to now because they are a convenience, not because they produce anything useful.

Whenever the Muslim Brotherhood are asked if Sharia law will be imposed, the response is that their intention is to build a "democratic and civil state" that guarantees freedom of religion and the right to peaceful protest.. But anyone who traces the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists over the past decades -- in Egypt, Tunisia or anywhere else in the Arab world -- will see that their intention is to further Islamize their societies, not to create civil alternatives.

Jordan has managed until now to remain untouched by these problems, and King Abdullah II knew how to navigate matters of the kingdom in a way that the waves of the revolution washing over the rest of the Arab world did not yet wash over his kingdom. But in the past few weeks - mainly since the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco - a different sort of problem is now becoming apparent: the problem of radical political Islam.

Forty-five years after the Six Day War, declassified transcripts of the Israeli cabinet and government committee meetings in the days after war that ended on June 10, 1967 were released this June. The documents provide a breathtaking insight into the efforts of Israeli leaders to reach a peace settlement with the countries and groups which had been at war with Israel.

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.

I am a Democrat and do not agree with many of Sheldon Adelson's political views, but I think it's outrageous for the National Jewish Democratic Council to level unfounded allegations against Adelson. I don't know who Harris purports to speak for as President of the National Jewish Democratic Council, but his partisan gamesmanship is an embarrassment to many Jewish Democrats.

The half-life of Polonium-210 is 138 days. This means that after 8 years, only about 4.3 x 10-7 — 0.00000043 — of the original amount of Polonium would be left. So even if Arafat’s iconic underwear had been loaded with the stuff after his death, it would be undetectable, or at least at much lower levels than the Swiss laboratory found.

Brown Lloyd James, according to its website, "is managed by an elite group of distinguished former news executives, top-level White House and Downing Street political advisors, high-profile entertainment industry executives and experts in international affairs. Our staff have been at the right hand of presidents, prime ministers, media barons – and yes, even The Beatles."

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.

Yasir Arafat is dead. I sat across from him in his Gaza office. He even had a copy of my history of the PLO on his book shelf so he must have been of sound mind at the time. But it’s not my fault. I told him to start jogging and cut down on sweets.But he didn’t listen.

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.

The Jewish Press sat down in its Brooklyn offices with Republican State Senator David Storobin.

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.

The UN Security Council has not managed to have a discussion about Syria since April, but President Obama has finally figured out how to have the Council "briefed" on the subject by Navi Pillai – a renowned Israel-basher: give up Israel for Syria. As a veto-wielding member, the U.S. could have nixed the program, but instead insisted only that the Syrian meeting be held in the morning and the Israel-bashing in the afternoon; Ms. Pillai will have time in between for lunch.

It's strange that it took more than a week for State to notice, and that the statement was not made by Secretary of State Clinton. After all, since June 26, Ms Clinton had time to comment on the Solomon Islands’ and Venezuelan independence days, the national days of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and Burundi, and of course Canada day; speak at the Climate Clean Air and Green Embassy event in Helsinki, Finland; and much more.

Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir passed away last weekend. In the course of my career as a correspondent for The Jewish Press at the UN and in Israel, as well as a parliamentary aide and spokesman for Israel’s first science minister, Professor Yuval Ne’eman, I met with dozens of world leaders, ministers, high-ranking officials and ambassadors. None of them left as indelible a mark on me as did Shamir.

Ten years ago, If you had asked a victim of sexual abuse what he or she wanted most, the answer would have been, “I want my abuser to apologize, to acknowledge that it was his fault and not mine.” Today, if asked that same question, the victim would speak of prosecution and justice.

“If you put Google, Apple, and Microsoft together, it still doesn’t compare to the miracles of Jewish renaissance I have witnessed in this country,” I said to two reporters from The New York Times and Moscow Times.

The victory of the Zionist movement was won despite long odds, desperate hardships and grievous costs in blood. The men and women who battled those odds did so in the face of the conventional wisdom of their day that told them they had no chance of forcing the British Empire to make good on its promise to create a National Home for the Jews or to defeat an Arab and Muslim world determined to crush the newborn state of Israel. They needed not only courage but also an iron will and the patience to bear great suffering while never losing sight of their goal.

The Swedish rescuer Raoul Wallenberg was born 100 years ago this summer, and his centennial is being commemorated with events in many cities across Europe and North America. On July 26, a symposium in his memory will be held at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem.

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The Jewish Press joins Jews around the world in mourning the death, at age 96, of Yitzhak Shamir, a key leader in Israel’s fight for independence who later served as a top Mossad official, speaker of the Knesset, foreign minister and prime minister.