‘Person of the Decade’

Haaretz is inviting readers to select a Person of the Decade, with the option of choosing up to five people who “have had the most impact on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world in the past 10 years.” Astonishingly, Yasser Arafat is not among the options(!), although other big-time Bad Guys like Iranian [...]

Easy rider

Inspector Gadget, your bicycle is ready. Andrew Hamilton has prepared it according to all your needs: It has an advanced battery pack to give you an extra burst for pursuing bad guys, and it folds up nice and small, too, like the impossible tools that you use to catch them. It can even survive a gunfight.

A working model

An upstart program gives the hopelessly unemployed the tools – and the motivation – to find rewarding careers In their down time, the unemployed play charades. They laugh, they mingle, they pour each other coffee. But they also dress in formal office attire and carry with them copious notes from their latest meetings. After all, [...]

While Abbas crashes and burns

While everyone is busy grilling Mahmoud Abbas these days over the Palestinian Authority’s decision (i.e. his decision) to let the Goldstone Report die, and preparing to eulogize him for all the rage that is being directed at him for it, let’s not forget who benefits from this circus — Hamas. After all, the more intense [...]

If Mahmoud were Menachem…

Ok, so, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have been born Jewish, as a report in the Telegraph claims. The knee-jerk reaction to this is to snicker at the irony of the situation. After all, what could be funnier than the greatest single enemy of the Jewish people currently living having Jewish roots? (Now that these allegations have [...]

Look who’s talking

Lizzy sure has a big mouth. And it’s dirty, too. Most of what she says can’t be reprinted here – but on YouTube, where Lizzy reigns supreme as the only animated lesbian stand-up comedienne hailing from Israel, the innocent-looking little cartoon character lets her potty mouth fly. Viewers, couldn’t you guess, love it. “Lizzy is [...]

Reaching the endgame

It isn’t often that I agree with the Jordanians and Saudis, but they’ve gone and forced my hand. On Monday, after meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh articulated his country’s complaint against the plodding pace of the peace process. “In the Middle East,” Judeh said, “there [...]

Subs in the Suez

Is Israel’s decision to send a Dolphin submarine through the Suez Canal — overtly — a message to Iran, as this Jerusalem Post report suggests? Well, duh. Let’s review why. As I wrote back in 2006: Israel’s long-range Dolphin-class submarines are reportedly able to launch nuclear-tipped Popeye Turbo cruise missiles… Since the distance from Israel [...]

The good fight

Jeff Hochman has protected America as a soldier, as a policeman, as a federal agent and as a civilian contractor in Iraq. Now he has come to settle down in Israel – and, he hopes, help the country he’s been dreaming of all along.

Explaining war

This is today’s IDF: coordinated, rehearsed, media savvy. Perhaps even more significantly, it is an army in which its spokesmen play a larger role than ever before – for better and for worse.