In Persis Knobbe\’s sweet, semi-autobiogrpahical short story, \”Highlights,\” Morris, an octogenarian, describes his exodus from the oppressive old country, on the holiday that commemorates the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt.
Of all the Likud loyalists who have walked out on Binyamin Netanyahu, last week\’s defection of Gen. Yossi Peled is arguably the most damaging.
Even the weather suggested mourning; at the Jordanian Embassy in northwest Washington, a cold drizzle turned the adjacent construction sites into mud holes, and a large portrait of King Hussein, who died on Sunday, was streaked with rain.
Israel mourned King Hussein this week as one of its own. The government ordered flags flown at half-mast on all public buildings.
Every so often, the cultural gap between Israelis and American Jews yawns open so wide, you could almost fall in and break your leg.
Whatever others may say of it, Jewish history will surely record 1998 as the Year of Bill and Bibi.
The existential dangers to Israel posed by Iraq and Iran were major reasons Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians and pursued peace with Syria.
Last January, when the world first learned of Lewinsky, the presidential sex scandal triggered a sudden mood swing in U.S.-Israel relations.
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.
For Arafat, it was an admission of unmitigated weakness, a move that was clearly borne out of dire necessity.
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