Jerusalem municipal officials added fire to the already-broiling settlement controversy when they announced a plan yesterday to build 900 new homes in the East Jerusalem suburb of Gilo, a neighborhood with more 40,000 Israelis. The plan prompted an expected chorus of international criticism, and it drew an unusually sharp response from the United States. ...

The U.S. military’s three-week missile-defense maneuvers with the IDF recently ended, and the 1,000 American service members who participated in what’s called Exercise Juniper Cobra are returning home very cognizant of the cultural differences between the two countries’ forces. “The flip-flops,” U.S. Army Sgt. Delvona Maria, a chemical specialist, noted incredulously of her IDF counterparts, ...

Alumni of the Birthright Israel program, which brings young American Jews on free trips to the Jewish State, are in for an unusual keynote speaker at Birthright NEXT event set to be held in two weeks: Gordon Robertson, son of the Rev. Pat Robertson and CEO of his father’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Robertson is a ...

As U.S. diplomats urged their Iranian counterparts to accept an initial bargain on the Iran’s nuclear program last week in Vienna, the U.S. and Israeli military forces were starting a three-week joint air-defense exercise that will test their coordinated responses to potential missile attacks on Israel. The tests, known as Juniper Cobra, are part of ...

The human-rights world has spent the last month debating the Goldstone Report’s conclusions that Israel may have committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza last winter. Human Rights Watch is pointing out that the report accused Hamas fighters of potential war crimes, too. The group—which has lately been under fire for what critics call ...

Jerusalem Post Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu-Toameh, the most prominent Arab Israeli newspaper columnist, spoke at Columbia University last night and, interestingly, placed the least blame for the current stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the Netanyahu government. Instead, Abu-Toameh faults President Barack Obama and the Palestinian leadership.
“He made three crucial mistakes,” Abu-Toameh said of Obama ...