More in ‘Ariel Sharon’

Shortly before Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington yesterday, his one-time adviser Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, made the rounds to deliver a message that the Israeli prime minister would dearly love to deliver in person—but won’t. “The Israeli people have gone through a very tough time this last decade,” Gold tells ...

Last week, as President Barack Obama was in the Rose Garden announcing that he’d relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal of command in Afghanistan, about 40 people were sitting in a windowless midtown Manhattan meeting room listening to a retired Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, lay out his assessment of the security risks to the Jewish state inherent ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, columnist Seth Lipsky takes stock of Ariel Sharon’s career four years after the then-prime minister lapsed into his current coma.
One feature, no doubt, was that Sharon was an includer, a welcoming figure. This didn’t comport easily with his image through much of his career as a hawk. But one could see ...

As 2010 begins, I find myself thinking of Ariel Sharon. There has been only a bit of discussion on the anniversary of the stroke that felled him four years ago Monday and left him in the coma in which he remains. Jeffrey Goldberg had a couple of posts on his blog, while Sharon’s defenders are ...

• A controversial bill to require Knesset members to swear loyalty to “the State of Israel as a Jewish, Zionist, democratic state” came up for debate today. The legislation is supported by Avigdor Lieberman’s right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. [JPost]
• Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak reportedly insisted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that East Jerusalem be ...

• The pilfered-then-recovered “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from Auschwitz was intended for a still-unnamed wealthy British Nazi sympathizer, according to the Sunday Mirror. [Haaretz]
• Israel’s Highway 443 traces an ancient route just north of Jerusalem through the West Bank. After an Israeli Supreme Court ruling last week, it will have to be opened to most ...

Four years ago, a massive stroke sent Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister and one of the nation’s most decorated warriors, into a coma. The rapid pace of Israeli politics being what it is, Sharon quickly faded from the public’s consciousness; but now, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more mired than ever, there are those who ...

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to an undisclosed location for a few hours Monday, and a new report has it that he was in Russia engaging in secret talks over Iranian arms deals. His office says he didn’t leave the country. [ynet]
• Speaking of covert diplomacy, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s current trip to ...

A funny thing happened on the way to Benjamin Netanyahu’s predicted implosion as prime minister: he rebounded. According to a recent Israeli opinion poll, the man who couldn’t win enough votes to become prime minister without backroom coalition bartering is doing better than everyone expected. With a general approval rating of 49 percent, which is high by Israeli standards, Netanyahu has, in the first six months of his second administration, definitively outstripped all other would-be challengers, including his big rival, Tzipi Livni, whose Kadima party actually polled better than Netanyahu’s Likud in February’s election.

For years now, Amos Kenan couldn’t remember a thing. His mind gnawed by a neurological disease, he was motionless, blank, absent. When he died last week at the age of 82, the obits dryly listed his laurels: author, artist, political activist, bohemian. As is customary in such cases, most of the press reports kept the precise nature of his affliction—Alzheimer’s disease—deliberately vague. He died, they stated sotto voce, of a grave illness.