Lev Paschov, an Israeli soldier who immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return from the Former Soviet Union, was killed while on active duty in Southern Lebanon in 1993, and buried twice. He was first interred in a regular Israeli military cemetery, but after it was discovered that his mother was not Jewish, his body was exhumed, and Paschov was buried a second time, in a cemetery for non-Jews. For many Israelis, the macabre end of Paschov’s brief life journey was deeply disturbing. How was it possible that someone could be welcomed to Israel under the Law of Return, serve the Jewish state’s army, and die defending his adopted homeland, ...

I still recall the day, some 40 years ago, when my mother told me that she remembered vividly the moment that she’d heard that FDR had died. I was stunned. She’d been so young. How could she possibly remember it at all, much less so clearly? Gradually, I came to understand that there is a certain kind of moment when something so important transpires that, even years later, we remember not only what happened, but where we were, who spoke, how we felt. Each of us has a different list. Mine includes Anwar Sadat’s arrival in Tel Aviv, and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. The Challenger explosion. Ariel Sharon’s stroke. Many more. Two weeks ago, there was another. I woke ...

FOR decades Shimon Peres, now Israel’s president, has spoken of his country’s yearning for a “new Middle East,” one in which Israel is at peace with its neighbors, regional economies cooperate and the conflict with the Palestinians is finally set aside. Now, with Egypt’s government on the edge of collapse, Israel is suddenly faced with a “new Middle East” — and Israelis are terrified. Many Westerners believe that the events in Egypt are a disaster for the Jewish state. Its most important regional ally faces possible chaos and an Islamist takeover. Add to this King Abdullah II’s recent dismissal of his cabinet in Jordan (the only other Arab country that has signed a peace treaty ...

The Jerusalem Post; January 28, 2011 The creation of Ehud Barak’s Independence faction, with its collateral damage to the already hemorrhaging Labor Party, puts Israel into that rare category of First World countries without a social-democrat-like party of any significance. Yet even Labor’s opponents ought not breathe a sigh of relief. Our ossified government, with no opposition to goad it into action, is passively presiding over the demise of much of what we have toiled to build. True, the blame for the demise of Israel’s Left really lies with Yasser Arafat. When he unleashed the second intifada (more aptly called the Palestinian terror war) after Camp David sputtered, he proved once and for all that the Palestinians ...

When our kids want to tell us that we're totally out of touch, they stare at us with a look of complete exasperation, and then say, with utter derision, "You're so American." They don't mean that there's anything fundamentally wrong with America or with Americans. They simply mean that the categories that we grew up with as the products of liberal, democratic-voting, civilrights- engaged, suburban American Jews cannot always apply to life here. This past Shabbat, I asked our son, Avi, about someone with whom I was thinking of doing some work, but about whom I was also worried. I knew that Avi knew him, and so I asked, "Is he a racist?" Avi looked at me, ...

It took only a few minutes of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's nauseatingly self-congratulatory impromptu press conference on Saturday night to confirm what we all knew too well this country is in infinitely worse shape than we might wish to admit. The prime minister had every right to list the many countries he'd called upon for help, to exult in the number of planes that would soon be joining the battle to snuff out the Carmel Forest flames, and to assure Israelis that soon this country would soon have its very own airborne firefighting force, just as real countries do. It would have been nice, ...

Not long ago, relatively few Jews around the world could name Canada's prime minister. Today, there are many hundreds who, though they did not know his name just weeks ago, now do. That is because the text and YouTube version of Stephen Harper's extraordinary speech at a recent Canadian Conference on Anti-Semitism have gone viral, making their way onto Facebook and countless websites and parking themselves in thousands of in-boxes. In the speech, Harper made clear that he, unlike many, understands that the new anti-Israel rhetoric now taking the world by storm is nothing more than anti-Semitism repackaged. As Harper noted, Harnessing disparate anti- Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western ideologies, [the attack on Israel's legitimacy] targets the ...

Summarizing the stalemate in the Israeli- Palestinian talks, a CNN anchor reported earlier this week that as soon as the settlement building freeze ended, Israel sent in bulldozers to renew the building. The claim is patently false, of course, for Israel did no such thing. Groups of people, most of them living in the settlements, did begin building again, as the law permitted them to. So why did CNN portray the story that way? Most reasonable people understand that any eventual peace settlement will involve the creation of a Palestinian state on some significant portion of the West Bank. Some Israelis are in favor, some are desperately opposed and others are pained by the prospective ...

In August, two pieces of news about Iran's nuclear ambitions were revealed almost simultaneously. The first was that Iran had fired up its first nuclear reactor. The second, delivered in an ostentatious leak to the New York Times, was that the Obama administration had determined that Iran was at least a year away from a dash necessary to complete a working nuclear weapon and that the White House had succeeded in convincing Israel that there was no imminent threat. The reactor news suggested the seriousness with which Iran was pursuing its nuclear ambitions. The story suggested the degree to which the United States was determined not to view the working Iranian reactor as a ...

Our dear, sweet Gilad: Abba and Ima, Yoel and Hadas very much want to hear from you and hope that you are healthy and are feeling well, as well as is possible in your situation. Who among us could have imagined, back on June 26, 2006, as a rapt Israel listened to the radio and heard those words and the letter from Gilad Schalit's parents that followed, that more than four years later he would still not be home? That some 1,540 interminable days and lonely nights later, his captors would still not have permitted him a single visit from the Red Cross. Or that with five birthdays now marked in captivity, ...