Jerusalem is now Israel’s largest city, larger than Tel Aviv and Haifa combined, but it’s decrepit, with a high poverty level, population growth mainly in the Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish sectors, and young professionals steadily leaving it. It is, after…
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis By Bat Ye’or (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 384 pages, $23.95) Europe baffles many people. Why does this continent of democracies persistently favor Arab dictatorships while pouring vitriol on the United States and Israel? Why, in the…
A recent Jerusalem Post story by Matthew Gutman called “Hamas, Fatah Battle for Soul of a Town” describes a situation in the West Bank town of Bidya in which the newly elected Hamas mayor, Ramadan Shtat, is vying with Fatah…
JERUSALEM — Reports from Iraq last week said a senior anticorruption police official was killed by a suicide bomber in Mosul who used a fake identification card to enter his office. Later that day insurgents fired on his funeral procession,…
The other day at my post office I saw Yossi, who has some kind of managerial job there, and Ahmed, one of the delivery men, clowning around in the room behind the room where the clerks sit. Though both in…
JERUSALEM — Last week Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs, Natan Sharansky, sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon requesting that he demand that the Palestinian Authority stop executions of suspected “collaborators” with Israel. Such “collaborators” are generally Palestinians…
JERUSALEM — It will take time before we know the real implications of the Iraqi elections and how things will work out in that troubled country. At least we know, though, that the elections weren’t won by a radical, anti-Semitic,…
Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos By Dore Gold (Crown Forum, 308 pages, $25.95) Hopes were high for the U.N. after the Cold War ended. People said what had hamstrung the organization was the U.S.-USSR…
JERUSALEM — My life has, in a sense, been bracketed by acts of political appeasement. In March 1938 Germany, beneficiary so far of British appeasement, invaded Austria and announced its “Anschluss” (Annexation) into the German Reich. That autumn both of…
Someone making a film of Kitty’s life could well call it “The Birds.” They give her no peace. Mainly at early morning or at dusk, when they make an agitated din from the trees in the courtyard, but at other…