Benjamin Netanyahu
Virtually Normal
Jerusalem READ MORE >>
Virtual Reality
Benjamin Netanyahu was cited in this morning's Ha'aretz as saying that the only partner Israel had for peace talks is a "virtual partner in a virtual reality." I am afraid that he is correct, and that we shall see that very soon after everyone docks at Annapolis. Who everyone is, we do not yet know. The Saudis, for example? Without them, the virtual reality is not even virtual. READ MORE >>
Jerusalem Dispatch
When Ehud Olmert was a teenage leader of the right-wing Betar youth movement in the 1950s, he would mark May Day by tearing down the red flag that hung over the trade union building in his northern village of Binyamina. For Olmert and his friends, that flag symbolized what they referred to as "the Vichy government" of Labor Zionism, which had betrayed the land of Israel by twice accepting its partition—first in 1923, when the British created Transjordan, and then in 1947, when the Untied Nations divided what was left of historic Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. READ MORE >>
The Rejection
The Palestinian People: A History By Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal (Harvard University Press, 608 pp., $45) READ MORE >>
Odd Job
In its first week of hearings, the joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee investigating September 11 chose not to call CIA Director George Tenet to testify. Which is a good thing, since Tenet wasn't in the country. As the committee began its inquiry into the greatest intelligence failure in modern American history, the man responsible for making sure it doesn't happen again was doing his other job. He was in the West Bank as the Bush administration's de facto envoy to the Middle East. READ MORE >>
