Biden, Show Bibi How to Fulfill a Promise

It was an unadulterated pleasure, a true delight, to watch Benjamin Netanyahu standing there like a scolded child, reluctantly having to listen to the...

The Ben-Gvir Method: Hit Them Harder

Omer Bar-Lev missed the opportunity. He should have come to the scene of the terror attack in Jerusalem’s Neveh Yaakov neighborhood on Friday night,...

The Tragicomic Gendarmes of Israel

It happened some years ago. A friend of mine was driving down a narrow street in Tel Aviv and accidently scraped a parked car. The owner, who was...

Caving Again, Smotrich Reveals His New Façade

Last year ended with inflation of 5.3 percent, and labor leaders signaled to the finance minister that their patience has run out. They are demanding...

Sancho Panza as Finance Minister

Watching the finance minister at his news conference this week was a rather sorry sight. Bezalel Smotrich looked like a junior aide to the prime...

Has Smotrich Learned His Fiscal Lesson?

It was an assault that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich did not expect. Benzion Mutzafi, a well-known arbiter of Jewish law associated with the...

Israel’s First anti-Zionist Prime Minister

It feels like a year, but in fact it has only been a week since the government was established, a week that proved we are dealing with the first...

Smotrich Failed His First Test as Finance Minister

As in relations between people, so in politics “There’s no second chance for making a first impression,” and Bezalel Smotrich has failed this...

Israel’s Unwarranted Inflation Panic, Fueled by Media Hysteria

Newspaper headlines Thursday shrieked in red and black: Electricity rates are spiking, as are food prices, with more hikes as well as austerity...

A Plea Bargain, Even Without Moral Turpitude

As most Israelis were fast asleep at home last Friday night, a bunch of criminals sliced up and stole 300 meters of railroad communications cables in...

Awarding Israel's Finance Ministry to Religious Coercion

What kind of finance minister will Bezalel Smotrich be? According to an interview published Thursday in the ultra-Orthodox weekly Mishpacha, he'll be...

Two Years? How About Weekly?

It is going to be a particularly bad government. Too big, too unwieldy, hobbled by the division of ministries and the rotation of ministers. It will...

Tel Aviv Metro: The Height of Folly

It’s happening again: The launch of the Tel Aviv Metro’s Red Line has been postponed for the seventh time (!), to April 2023. So says a harsh...

Prepare for the State of Judea

The long, convoluted negotiations to form the government prove that Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its...

Israel's Far Right Lives in a Fantasy of Victimhood

MK Orit Strock (Religious Zionism) isn’t happy with the media. She complains that it has devoted too much attention to the marginal disturbances...

One Day, Secular Israelis Will Revolt

The excessive restraint of the Haredim is hard to understand. Why are they wiling to make do with only doubling the monthly stipend for a yeshiva...

Israel’s Five Candidates for Finance Minister Are Horrid

Finance minister is one of the three top cabinet posts, so it’s no surprise that a battle is raging over it. The treasury chief influences every...

The Arab Leaders Who Brought Bibi and Ben-Gvir Upon Themselves

Is it possible that the Arab parties were actually working for Benjamin Netanyahu? It sounds absurd, but the fact is that for an entire year, MKs...

Not Voting Is the Same as Voting for Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir

I’ve never understood people who don’t vote. It’s hard to grasp how they are willing to let their upstairs neighbor, whom they consider a total...

Israel’s Labor Party Is Responsible for Its Own Failure

It’s no coincidence that Labor is floundering about, hovering around the electoral threshold. In the 1992 election it won 44 Knesset seats and...

Lieberman Deserves More Than Six Seats

Israel Is on the Road to an Iran-style Theocracy

The upcoming election will be a fateful one. This election will determine whether we go on living in a liberal democracy or slide toward an...

New York Has Woken Up to Haredi Chutzpah. What About Israel?

For many years we thought that only in Israel did the Haredim make a mockery of education laws. We believed that in New York they do teach their...

A New Haredi Boss Redefines Chutzpah

The killings this week of two soldiers, 18-year-old Noa Lazar at the Shoafat checkpoint in Jerusalem and 21-year-old Ido Baruch next to Shavei...

Two States: A Reckoning

The Real Difference Between Netanyahu and Lapid

For many years the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim, have refused to teach their children the core curriculum. The issue took on a political twist when...

Israel's Inflation-busting Ministers Should Be 'Men of the Year'

This year too, when we sit down with the family for the Rosh Hashanah holiday meal, the apple and honey will be too expensive and the price of the...

Head of Israel's Labor Party Has a Dangerously Stiff Neck

Division and separate campaigns are a cornerstone of our rotten political culture. Every little bitty leader is convinced of their own uniqueness, and...

Rent Control in Israel? No Thank You

There’s nothing the public loves more than price controls. Whether it’s the cost of cheese or the cost of housing, everyone wants oversight. We...

The Cost of Living Is Not the Story

Recent public opinion polls say that the cost of living has become the most acute and important issue in this election campaign. People are saying...

No One Will Forgive Michaeli

The results of Monday’s 103fm election poll says it all: The joint slate of the extreme right parties (Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and...

Lieberman’s Mad Money for Teachers

Yair Lapid could have ended the teachers’ pay dispute long ago. All the prime minister needed to do was to go out and tell the media: “The...

Lapid, Don’t Interfere

The tactics of Israel Teachers Union chief Yaffa Ben David are obvious. She wants Yair Lapid to intervene in the wage negotiations and force Avigdor...

This New Labor Party Will Bring Israel to Ruin

It wasn’t just ageism. The political elimination of veteran ministers Omer Bar-Lev and Nachman Shai is also a symbol of the revolutionary change...

No Longer Mr. Security, Netanyahu Reinvents Himself as a Social Populist

Our world is one of images. It doesn’t matter what you really are, only what your image is. Once it’s set, that’s it. It can’t be changed....

Lapid Proves the Power of a Preemptive Strike

The rule is that politicians shouldn’t take any step that could prevent a major disaster. It’s not because politicians are bad people who want to...

Why Is Everything So Expensive?

The Israeli consumer won. Last week, the three major importers surrendered and did not raise prices. They gave in when faced with heavy pressure from...

It’s Not 1985, but It’s Worrying

So it’s true that the price of gasoline was cut significantly on Monday, but that of electricity went up, and price-controlled bread is becoming...

A One-state Solution Means an All-out Jewish-Arab War

People on the radical left didn’t like Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. “Why did he even come?” they asked. “Why does he have to visit Yad...

It's More About the Ballot Box Than the Bread

It’s all political. Around a hundred days before the polls open, Yair Lapid figures that rising bread prices will hurt him at the ballot box, so...

Electricity, Yes, but Not in My Backyard

It seems that no lessons have been learned in Israel from Europe’s electricity crisis. Even the rising price of power has failed to make any...

Netanyahu, Learn From Sri Lanka’s Economic Chaos

Is the price of electricity going up? Not in Benjamin Netanyahu’s world. He is promising he will bring down the price of electricity the moment he...

Israel’s ‘Oppressed’ Public Sector Workers Are Actually the Oppressor

A few days ago, with typical belatedness, the annual report on public-sector wages for 2020 was released. The event passed by quietly, maybe because...

Netanyahu, Learn From Sri Lanka’s Economic Chaos

Is the price of electricity going up? Not in Benjamin Netanyahu’s world. He is promising he will bring down the price of electricity the moment he...