Brandeis Center Blog

The “special relationship” has been restored. Not between Israel and the U.S. but between the U.S. and the UK. Obama had strained it by, among other things, dumping a White House bust of Winston Churchill. But now, there is unity of purpose around—you guessed it—a betray Israel agenda. Following the action by the Cameron government […]

Israel made great efforts to cultivate newly independent Africa starting with Ghana in 1957. But after most African countries succumbed to the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo, and broke diplomatic relations with Israel, the Jewish state upgraded relations with the Pretoria regime without endorsing Apartheid which it continued to denounce. Progressive Jews like Helen Suzman and […]

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameini called nuclear talks with the U.S. “useless.” His minion, President Rouhani, has a different view. Perhaps they are playing “bad cop”/”good cop.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to broker a truce between Aghan presidential aspirants also appears to be falling part. On Iran, see “Los Angeles Times” at […]

Barack Obama entered the presidency with millennial expectations—fed by analogies between the Great Depression and the new Great Recession—that he would be “another Lincoln” or, more often, “another FDR.” “Newsweek” even photoshopped an image of the two on its cover. I don’t think it needs much elaborating that, neither at home nor abroad, has Obama […]

Recently, the U.S. FAA broke new ground diplomatically by embargoing flights to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport in a move that did more harm to the Jewish state than thousands of Hamas rockets. Now, the FAA has had to act at home by declaring “a no fly zone” over Ferguson, Missouri, to promote unfettered law enforcement […]

No, not Palestine. Hamas–recognized by the “New Republic.” See http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119064/b-yehoshua-israel-should-call-hamas-enemy-not-terrorists Hamastan–from de facto to de jure–would become the hottest new international lawyers’ IPO, i.e., a state with all the rights and none of the responsibilities of other states. The next step would be for Israel to arm Hamas–a lucrative franchise–and also an ingenious solution to […]

Everyone who hasn’t should read President Obama’s interview with Tom Friedman of the “New York Times,” See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html Here, I translate it to an alternative universe in which Israel is the superpower and the U.S. is a small ally under existential threat, and change accordingly who gives the uncensored answers: Tommy Friedman of the “New […]

George Orwell, author of “1984” (1949), was already dead for over a third of a century when the date of that sardonic classic came and went. Yet you would not know it from contemporary broadsides about the Gaza War invoking Orwell and his ideas, pro- and con-Israel. There has been a back-and-forth in the “Forward” […]

Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Raskin was shot dead in North Miami Saturday morning while walking to synagogue by two young assailants who escaped on motorbikes or motorcycles in a crime that one would not be surprised by if it occurred in Paris. Days earlier, two cars outside a house in Miami Beach were smeared with eggs […]

President Obama has failed to give a name to his “humanitarian” mission to relieve Iraqi religious minorities, the Kurds, and possibly four U.S. soldiers sent to a mountain to give the Iraqi military Alpine lessons. I think he should name it Operation Pointless Proportionality. The U.S. airstrikes are also difficult to characterize exactly. Are they […]

Read “The Last And First Temptation Of Israel” for confirmation that blogger Andrew Sullivan is the most vicious, maybe the most dangerous American anti-Jewish demagogue since Father Coughlin in the 1930s was listened to by tens of millions of Americans for his monstrous rants against Jewish wealth, conspiracy, and power. Like Coughlin, Sullivan is a […]

New polls confirm that the Israeli public—most of whom are not fools—have come to the conclusion that Israel, though perhaps not losing the latest Gaza War, certainly has not won it. Now comes the next phase in “the long war” with a shift to diplomacy and lawfare. The odds here are really stacked against the […]

According to Erasmus, “The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.” Tacitus argued the opposite. We shall see. The year 2014 should be remembered as “The Summer of Hamas’ Terror War.” Hamas’ goals may focus on killing Israelis, but its tactics are global. According to credible reports, Hamas’ reach extends to South […]

Questions swirl about the long shadow of “the guns of August” that erupted in August, 1914. Would there have been no Holocaust without WWI? Probably yes, but that is only one lesson of many that we should consider from the WWI-WWII nexus. Would it been better if the outcome in WWI were different? Niall Ferguson’s […]