On the eve of his most testing American visit since he becamePrime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu was humiliated, live on prime-timetelevision, last Monday by the least likely of dissidents — theblue-collar ward party bosses of the Likud central committeeconvention.
\”Soleil\” will debut here at the Director\’s Guild on Oct. 28, the gala opening of the second annual Los Angeles Sephardic Film Festival, sponsored by the Sephardic Educational Center.
Israeli reporters are no slouches. They have better sources and tend to understand more than their foreign brethren.
The botched assassination attempt on a Hamas official in Amman onSept. 25 has turned into a security, as well as a diplomatic,disaster for Israel. Commentators are calling for the resignations ofboth Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and chief of the Mossadexternal security service, Gen. Danny Yatom.
Manasreh\’s tale is part of a pattern of official intimidation, physical and financial, that has silenced almost all criticism of Arafat\’s regime in the mainstream Palestinian television, radio and newspapers.
Earlier in the week, Irving Moskowitz had stood in that gritty, neglected urban village on the flank of the Mount of Olives, hammering a mezuzah on a door post and telling the world\’s TV cameras that this was where \”we\” are making \”our\” home. Yet the truth was that as soon as he had signed a face-saving deal with the government of Israel, he was on the plane back to Florida in time for Shabbat.
Madeleine Albright left behind a Middle East that\’s more fearful than when she arrived on Sept. 10 to salvage the peace process. In her first official visit, the secretary of state failed to restore even a modicum of trust between Israelis and Palestinians, or to coax the Syrians back to the negotiating table.
\”When\’s our luck going to run out?\” my wife asked after last week\’s triple suicide bombing on Jerusalem\’s Ben-Yehuda shopping street. \”They\’re getting nearer every time.\” It was one of those days when people phone around to count their friends.
Since the beginning of this year, 103 Israeli soldiers have died in, or on their way to, war in Lebanon. Twelve lost their lives in a botched marine commando raid last week. The total death toll since the 1982 \”Peace for Galilee\” invasion nowstands at about 1,200, and since the pullback to the South Lebanese security zone in 1985, some 500 soldiers have died.
One month after two Palestinian suicide bombers killed 14 Israeli civilians in a Jerusalem market, Bethlehem is the only West Bank town still cut off from both Israel and its neighboring Arab communities.
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