Even hardened Israeli pundits called Ivanka “a member of our People” and applauded her for her quiet moment at the Western Wall.

US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka bared her Jewish neshama (soul) on her visit to the Western Wall Monday.

Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have come under a lot of scrutiny in the American media for their involvement in the White House’s day-to-day doings. In the Israeli and Jewish media, the scrutiny is often about something else: Their religious observance. Continue reading

The Right has been in power for most years since the Likud won its first election… So why do many on the Right complain that they still don’t run the country?

Ladies and gentlemen, revolution,” legendary anchorman Haim Yavin famously said of the May 17, 1977, election that brought Menachem Begin and the Likud the premiership and Israel its first government that wasn’t led by the socialist Mapai Party or its successor the Labor Party.

But was it, really? The Likud has spent about three-fourths of the subsequent 40 years in power, and yet the Right is constantly complaining that it doesn’t truly run the country. Google “the Right doesn’t know how to govern” in Hebrew, and you’ll get over 86,000 results, with articles from a variety of publications including the phrase over the years. Continue reading

Israel’s cabinet, meeting in a location that was forgotten for decades, decided to take the Old City.

On June 5, 1967, Menachem Begin rushed into the Knesset on the way to a cabinet meeting in which he had been declared minister-without-portfolio in the new national unity government.

Begin bumped into then-prime minister Levi Eshkol by the entrance.

“We should discuss liberating the Old City,” Begin suggested.

“Das a gdank,” Eshkol said sardonically in Yiddish, “That’s an idea.”

By 11 a.m. two days later, Paratroop commander Motti Gur announced: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”

What happened in between is well-documented and the Jerusalem battlegrounds of the Six Day War are well-trod and retraced by thousands each year on Jerusalem Day.

But there’s one stop on the way that’s not on the regular Jerusalem Day tour – a bomb shelter-turned-broom closet in the Knesset, where the cabinet decided to reunify the capital city. Continue reading

The Knesset’s summer session begins Monday under the shadow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal troubles and with a host of other fiery topics on the agenda.

Whether it’s because of the climbing temperatures or the fact that it’s only about three months long, the Knesset summer session, beginning Monday, is generally considered a slow time of year. This year, however, lawmakers won’t be getting in some lazy summer days, with plenty of subjects on the docket that will undoubtedly lead to heated debates and maybe even political upheavals.

Continue reading

The prime minister called on Mahmoud Abbas to stop the payments, two days before the PA president is scheduled to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office would not say whether the premier supports Israeli legislation in the Knesset to block funding to the Palestinian Authority that goes to paying terrorists and their families, just hours after he condemned the payments on Monday.

“How can you speak about peace with Israel and at the same time pay murderers who spill the blood of innocent Israelis?” Netanyahu asked Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his speech at a Memorial Day ceremony at Mt. Herzl for victims of terrorism. “Fund peace, not murder.” Continue reading

While the consensus seems to be that Fillon is the candidate with the most support in Israel by far, whether it’ll be expressed in votes is unclear.

As voting in the first round of the French presidential election began outside of France on Saturday, French citizens in Israel also prepared to go to the polls, with observers saying the local voting trend will be very different than that in France.

Just as in 2012, when the vast majority of French voters in Israel chose Nicolas Sarkozy, they’re expected to once again mostly vote for the conservative candidate, this time François Fillon of the Republicans.

Yet in recent polls of the French electorate, Fillon usually comes in third in a field of 11, after center-left candidate Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front, and, in some polls, fourth, after far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Only two candidates can make it into the runoff in two weeks.

The attendance at two campaign events held in Israel in the last week seemed to show which way the French-Israeli electorate was trending: About 60 people showed support for Macron on Tuesday, while Fillon backers nearly filled an auditorium in the Tel Aviv Art Museum that seats 450 on Thursday evening. There are some Le Pen backers in the mix, but they’ve kept their expressions of support on social media and didn’t organize anything official in Israel.

“Most French Jews are conservative,” a French journalist living in Israel, who asked to remain anonymous, observed. “They’re traditional Jews who lived among Muslims in North Africa, and don’t trust [Muslims].” Continue reading

For now, Israelis who feel that elections and their aftermath take too long can only look at the UK with envy.

When British Prime Minister Theresa May announced a snap election recently, some Israelis looked on with envy.

In the election season of 2015 and the three that preceded it, some five months passed from dispersion of the Knesset until a new coalition was formed, disrupting the work of government for nearly half a year.

In the UK it will likely take about two months. Continue reading

Facing bereaved families, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found himself in an impossible situation in the Knesset State Control Committee.

Prime Minister rime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found himself in a lose-lose situation in the Knesset State Control Committee on Wednesday – and his attack dogs from the Likud only made it worse.

Faced with crying, bereaved parents who pleaded with him to accept State Comptroller Joseph Shapira’s criticism of his performance during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, Netanyahu had two options: demonstrate complete empathy, which would look like an admission of guilt, or argue with the parents, making him look heartless. Continue reading

Women’s March co-organizer Linda Sarsour said in her speech to a Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Chicago on Sunday that she’s “providing a service . . . that I’m allowing the Jewish community to have the real hard conversation that it always needed to be having” about whether it should support Israel.

Thanks! Let me return the favor and encourage Sarsour to have a hard conversation about how she is preaching hatred while claiming to be fighting for equality, and putting women down while saying she’s trying to lift them up. Continue reading

Trump said “hold back on settlements,” but Netanyahu’s coalition is clashing over what that means.

President Donald Trump’s request of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their joint press conference last month that he “hold back on settlements for a bit” has undergone Talmudic levels of parsing by everyone from seasoned diplomats to late-night hosts in Israel and the United States. The debate on what exactly “holding back” and “a bit” mean is creating tensions in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, where many are calling for annexation.

A poll last week indicated that 55 percent of Israelis think Trump will allow settlement construction, while the opposition, which ranges from centrist to far-left, is focused more on “hold back” than “a bit.” Meanwhile, the debate in the coalition came to a head when Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman said he “received a direct message—not an indirect message and not a hint—from the United States” that annexation talk could launch a crisis. Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, however, said that never happened, and anyway, the United States can’t tell Israel, a sovereign country, what to do. Continue reading