By Ankie Spitzer WEST NYACK, N.Y. — At the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, eleven members of the Israeli team were murdered. For forty years their families have asked the International Olympic Committee to observe a minute of silence, in their memory. Please help us by signing our petition. I am the wife of Andrei [...]
By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM –Benyamin Netanyahu is sitting pretty with Israeli voters. Recent polls make him a sure bet to repeat as prime minister. Not so simple is his standing within his own party. While his leadership is likely to be secure, there are enough signs of right-wing opposition to provide some worry. They [...]
By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM — Years ago, at the beginning of my career as a political scientist, I learned about incrementalism. That describes the gradual changes that generally occur in government. I made my contribution to the subject by examining government spending. I found that governments that spent more or less, and were more or less [...]
By Evelyn Gordon WASHINGTON, D.C. –”Credible experts,” wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in March, “overwhelmingly” view an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities as “a catastrophically bad idea,” deeming the benefits uncertain and the consequences dire: An effective strike would require multiple “sorties over many days,” and an attack on that scale could [...]
By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM — Israeli voters appear ready to renew the lease of Benyamin Netanyahu on the Prime Minister’s Office. A poll reported in Ha’aretz shows a near majority (48 percent) favoring him as Prime Minister. The aggregate support of his three nearest competitors do not match him: 15 percent prefer Shelli Yehemovich of Labor, [...]
By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM — At one time, a mantra of American politics was that politics stops at the water’s edge. Then there was Vietnam. Long before Vietnam there was considerable dispute about entering World War I. Irish immigrants were prominent among those not wanting to risk themselves for Great Britain. When the next [...]
By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM –What some seem to regard as bad news for Israel may, in fact, bode well for its future. I’m referring to the uproar in the country and abroad following the very public criticism by Yuval Diskin, the former head of internal security, when he spoke of the “messianic” scaremongering about [...]
By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM — There’s talk of early elections in Israel. Though the government has still more than a year to go, it needs to replace the so-called Tal Law that de facto exempts the ultra-Orthodox (haredim) from military service and which some time ago the Supreme Court declared to be unconstitutional. This [...]
By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM — The continued variety of comments about Iran from the governing summit of Israel says something about this country and its society. The problem: one cannot be sure what it says. Last month, the former chief of Mossad spoke publicly on Amrican media. Meir Dagan has been described as “hard-charging” and [...]
By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM — The late Prime Minister Rabin is said to have been fond of a story about a Jew in some small East European town who was facing execution by the local squire. The Jew asked for a postponement for a year and promised that in that time he’d teach the [...]
