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 …
Binyamin Netanyahu, “Bibi” to both his friends and his ever-growing list of enemies, is running for a fourth term as the prime minister of Israel. He called the election, two years early, because the leaders of two of the parties in his coalition government had become too openly hostile to his policies. So he is …
You can see why Hamas doesn’t want a cease-fire in Gaza yet. It is continuing the fight in the hope that international outrage at the huge loss of people being killed by Israel’s massive firepower will somehow, eventually, force Israel to give it what it wants. Hamas would be quite willing to give up firing …
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said something cryptic last Friday, shortly after the Israelis began their latest round of attacks on the Gaza Strip. Condemning Hamas’s conditions for accepting a ceasefire as “exaggerated and unnecessary,” he offered his condolences “to the families of the martyrs in Gaza who are fuel to those …