In two weeks, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee will host its annual confab, the AIPAC Policy Conference. As one of the largest pro-Israel lobbying organizations in the United States, surpassed only by Christians United for Israel, AIPAC often works as a stand-in for perceptions of American Jewish power. In the decade that I worked…
The bushfires raging through Australia could soon receive aid from Israel in the most Israeli way possible – the coming together of minds of the startup nation. Last Thursday, some 150 Israeli developers and activists gathered in Tel Aviv for an all-night hackathon aimed at relieving the dire situation in Australia. Called #StandWithAus, the event…
The peace plan proposed by the United States has been praised and damned in line with political affiliation. But no matter what plan is put forward, the Palestinians must change their strategy. Otherwise, the pattern of recent decades, in which every new offer is worse than the last, will be repeated. LONDON – I have…
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of the bestselling book Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. The Trump plan for Palestinian-Israeli peace will almost certainly go the way of all the other failed blueprints to resolve our 100-year conflict. With leaders across the Arab…
OSWIECIM, Poland — The head of the Muslim World League, Mohammed al-Issa, along with an entourage of prominent Muslim religious leaders, on Thursday joined counterparts from the American Jewish Committee on a landmark interfaith tour of the former Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The world had to ensure that “these kinds of horrible crimes” will…
It was in the first week of December 2017, almost a year to the day after being elected President of the United States of America, that Donald Trump officially agreed with Congress to formally recognise Jerusalem as the Capital of the State of Israel. The decision was greeted by jubilation within Israel and Jewish communities…
For most of the left, both in Europe and the United States, support for the Palestinian cause is something of a shibboleth. As Israel moved away from the politics of the 1960s, when the left was often in power and kibbutzim were a national symbol, to the right-wing nationalism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the…
A leading United Nations expert has said antisemitism is “toxic to democracy” as he reported his findings on the rise in Jew-hate to the General Assembly. Ahmed Shaheed, UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, noted that antisemitism was rising on both the left and right. “I am alarmed by the growing use…
As I write this foreword to Clyde Holding’s 1975 Sam Cohen Memorial Lecture, this country is embroiled in an election campaign made bitter and divisive by extraordinary and undemocratic actions never before known in Australia. I take no smug satisfaction from prophetic words I used towards the end of the 1971 Inaugural Sam Cohen Memorial…
Here in Jerusalem, I acknowledge the first Australians, whose culture we honour this evening as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. So we gather at Yad Vashem. I have been to this place before and so has my wife Therese. We have been here not as the representatives of any government; we have…