Israel and its Arab neighbors are still feeling the effects, militarily, politically and psychologically, of the coordinated Egyptian-Syrian surprise attacks and of the desperate Israeli struggle to drive the invading forces back across the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights.
In a unique effort to redefine the future relations between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, 14 Israeli 10th-graders arrived last week to participate in what may be the first student-exchange program between Israeli schools and a non-Orthodox Los Angeles Jewish day school.
Israel\’s 50th anniversary celebration has brought forth a stream of reminiscences.
What the Israeli right likes to call \”the battle for the Land of Israel\” is in danger of turning into a war of the ultras, Arab extremists vs. Jewish extremists.
Binyamin Netanyahu\’s crises never come singly. One, of prime interest to American Jewry, was put on hold this week. Another, which hogged the headlines for Israelis, ended with blood on the saddle.
Binyamin Netanyahu recently suffered the most wounding parliamentary defeat of his two-year premiership. It left the Likud leader more dependent than ever on the pro-settler right, which has threatened to bring him down if he hands any more of the occupied West Bank to Yasser Arafat.
If the pursuit of peace in the Middle East will not unite the parties concerned, then one life-sustaining element may. Israeli, Arab and American researchers and engineers have come together to find ways to produce more potable water for agricultural use, as demands for supplies of Middle Eastern and Californian freshwater continue to increase.
For Arafat, it was an admission of unmitigated weakness, a move that was clearly borne out of dire necessity.
The prime minister also seems to have underestimated the degree to which the United States, the European Union and other interested bystanders are watching every move in his contorted quest for \”peace with security\” — and increasingly concluding that the Palestinians are right to suspect him.
First they made the desert bloom. Now they want tomake it pay eight-to-one in the fifth.
