The insolent defiance of the hesder yeshiva soldiers reflects the breakdown of state authority in Israeli society and a government that opts not to govern.
My sense is that the silence that has prevailed recently about Gilad Shalit indicates that a prisoner exchange is on the brink of being concluded, and his release is close.
Israeli bitterness over the Goldstone report has a great deal of justification. Immeasurably greater crimes than those the report claims to have discovered during Operation Cast Lead have been committed by other states and other groups worldwide, yet they attract scarcely any international condemnation.
Is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, which is currently proposing to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 border, about to shake up the Israeli-Palestinian paralysis in a game-changing way?
What kind of example were the military appeals court judges setting for Israel's soldiers and civilians when they annulled Moshe Tamir's sentence last week, and restored him to the rank of brigadier general?
I cried for all of us Israeli citizens, for our apparent apathy toward Lod, a city of 75,000 inhabitants, situated here in the very heart of the country, just a 15-minute drive from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv.
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