1 March 2023 Israeli Pogrom By Gwynne Dyer The dictionary definition of ‘pogrom’ is “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” So there is something deeply strange about hearing ‘pogrom’ used in Hebrew to describe …
26 October 2022 Israel: Yet Another Election By Gwynne Dyer Israeli voters are indefatigable. The election on November 1st will be the fifth in just three-and-a-half years, and yet the turnout is still likely to be around 70%. That’s especially remarkable because all five elections have really been about the same question: should Binyamin ‘Bibi’ …
22 June 2022 Israel: It’s All About Bibi By Gwynne Dyer There was a rare moment of grace in Israeli politics last Monday, as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid announced they would dissolve their extraordinary coalition and pitched Israel into its fifth election in three and a half years. The coalition …
23 May 2021 First, three lies. The Gaza offensive has yielded “unprecedented military gains,” said Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz. The ceasefire on Friday amounted to a “victory” for the Palestinian people and a defeat for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, said a Hamas official. But the ceasefire brings “genuine opportunity” for progress, said US …
Israel and Hamas: Three Lies and a Glimpse of the Truth Read More »
Israel’s new two-headed government, with Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, was supposed to be sworn in on Wednesday. Then suddenly the inauguration was postponed by one day to accommodate a quick visit by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. What brought Pompeo so far for so short a time? It obviously wasn’t the declared agenda …
As British newspaper magnate Viscount Northcliffe said: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” Men don’t bite dogs every day, however, and the news media need ‘content’ every day just to hold the ads apart. So often …
Binyamin Netanyahu’s work is almost done. If he wins Tuesday’s election and forms yet another government (he is now the longest-serving Israeli prime minister), he will put a stake through the heart of the ‘two-state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was born in the 1993 Oslo peace accords. Hamas should send him a gold …
It shouldn’t have been a surprise when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Saturday, three days before the Israeli election, that he is going to annex all the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. After all, every other member of his Likud Party in the Israeli parliament (28 out of 29) had already said …
As Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote recently in the daily Haaretz: “In retrospect, it should be called the Fifty-Year War, not the Six-Day War. And judging by the political situation, its life expectancy appears endless.” This week (5-10 June) is the 50th anniversary of the brief war in 1967 that added the Old City of …
Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel, is an outspoken man, but he knows when to hold his fire. He condemned the killing of an 18-month-old Palestinian child in an arson attack in the West Bank by suspected Jewish settlers last Friday as “terrorism”, but he did not say that the suspects were from the extreme …