David Landau

Get to know the new, pragmatic, post-Gaza Avigdor Lieberman. Cold, calculating, still a hardliner, but free of the dangerous Messianic nonsense of other leaders of the right. And he might be Israel's next PM.

Honest, a stone-waller, endlessly frustrating. But also a straight-shooter, a man of his word. In this, Yitzhak Shamir brought honor to the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Is there another United Nations member-state that the British Royals have so consistently and assiduously snubbed in this way?

At a recent debate with J-Street's Ben-Ami, rightist intellectual William Kristol helped answer a question the right has been avoiding: What do you intend to happen if you do not end the occupation?

Israeli politics mirrors human life in the often arbitrary allocation of reward and punishment. Livni may yet get away with it. Still, for the record at least, here is a brief catalogue of her most egregious inadequacies – from a fan.

To him, Zionism was humanism; not a narrow, tribal fetish but a noble destiny, albeit for one needy nation but with a timeless and universal significance.

How does a society professing the noblest values come to adopt policies of discrimination and persecution?

PM says in holiday interview he is convinced int'l pressure will be effective in pre-empting nuclear program.

Middle East envoy tells Haaretz he no longer believes 'land for peace' concept is sufficient in and of itself.

He favors far-reaching negotiations (but says he understands Israel's security needs). She promotes economic projects (but believes that nothing can be done without women). He advises Ehud, she has a word for Aliza. While Haaretz spoke to Quartet envoy Tony Blair in Washington, D.C., it also met with his wife in Jerusalem. Both are fairly optimistic. The New Middle East, according to Tony and Cherie Blair.

Olmert: International Jewish groups won't back undemocratic state; talks will be complex, require patience.

British PM says Western leaders are aware of global struggle against Islamic extremism, but public less so.

Annual economic forum's publication includes article by American academic calling for 'Movement Against Zionism.'

In interview with Haaretz, Arafat says that Israelis would be granted freedom of access to all holy sites under future Palestinian rule.

Yasser Arafat 'definitely' understands that Israel must preserve its character as a Jewish state, the Palestinian Authority chairman told Haaretz in an interview this week.

Arafat is ready to sign an agreement that would give Palestinians 97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza - with the rest in a land swap, and the right of return of not all, but at least some refugees. In a free-ranging interview with Haaretz, conducted in the carefully preserved ruins of the Muqata, the PA Chairman also spoke of the historical family bonds between the two peoples.

Peres, for those in the world that wish Israel well, and for the thousands of his own friends and well-wishers who thronged the hall last night, stands for peace. And the fact that he failed to attain it, and that it seems so far off now, added to the poignancy of the moment.

The left's contempt pushed the Ashkenazi Haredim into the arms of the Likud nearly three decades ago. Now is the time for United Torah Judaism to break loose from the irrational, false theology of Bennett and Feiglin and hitch their wagon to Yesh Atid's up-and-coming political star.

Belatedly, Western governments have shed their inhibitions and are speaking out forcefully to Israel to commit to the two-state solution – rather than toward the Jewish state's extinction.

It's just possible that the unseemly political shenanigans of the last couple of days were the necessary birthing pangs for three decent politicians –Livni, Peretz and Mitzna – to found a party with one overriding aim: to save Israel from itself.

If indeed Ehud Olmert is an apostle of peace and not just another opportunist political crook plotting a comeback, the union of Likud with Lieberman provides the perfect platform for him to declare his return to politics.

It is plain silly to deny the manifest truth that Israel's state-religion is Orthodox Judaism, and visiting its holy places means respecting its rules of conduct. Women of the Wall are participating in a cynical charade designed to portray Israel as a benighted and misogynous backwater.

If ex-PM Ehud Olmert chooses to confront Netanyahu in the upcoming elections, he will have demonstrated that, confronted once more with a conflict of interest, he chose the national interest – to attain the two-state salvation for Israel.

Are Obama and Clinton taking a risky gamble in betting that mainstream U.S. Jews don't care about the ongoing detention of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard?

Between the lines, in his speech Bibi was conducting a harsh reckoning with the predecessors of the Jewish leaders cheering him in that Washington auditorium.

I am hastening to call for this boycott because I want to earn a footnote in Jewish history: He tried, Canute-like, to stand against the wave of fascism that engulfed the Zionist project.

We did not dwell on Livni's statement that these elections were about peace until it became clear that amid all the tangles of the strategic campaign, she actually meant what she said.

Kadima and Labor need to quit their petty scorekeeping over what they can achieve collectively or separately. All of that is based on surveys that only estimate the chances of one lie over another.

The moment he agreed to negotiate for the return of Regev and Goldwasser without demanding proof that they were alive, Olmert turned himself and the state into a doormat for terrorists.

Abu Ala stood on the edge of the cliff, looked into the abyss - and pulled back. In doing so, he has done us a favor, because he has given us too a momentary glimpse into the terrifying prospect that threatens both peoples.

The mass abandonment of the State of Israel over the last three years by Jewish visitors, side by side with poignant displays of solidarity and love for Israel, illustrates the complexity of a split-screen existence in which half the Jewish people live in the Jewish state and half live elsewhere.

In the same way that the separation fence, which was supposed to expedite the two-state solution (in our dreams, at least), has become a tool for perpetuating the occupation, the demographic threat, which was presumed to be the winning card of the left, could turn into the doomsday weapon of the right.

It was so easy. No stress, no voices raised. Bush just nodded to Condoleezza, Condoleezza told Weisglass, Weisglass passed the word to Sharon - and Sharon agreed to leave Arafat be, despite all the threats to have him deported or killed.

In the first days of October 2000, with the eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, 13 Arabs were shot to death in northern Israel. But in those same days, many other Arabs were shot to death in the center and south of the country. Since then, nearly 2,500 Arabs have been shot to death.

In today's anti-Semitism, aimed at Israel, advocates of unilateral action (fences, withdrawal, dismantling settlements) are cast in the role of the founders of Zionism, while the settlers and their supporters, and those chasing chimerical agreements, are playing the Jewish masses, blinded, refusing to face reality.

At the protest tent across from the Finance Ministry, people are careful to stick to poverty and suffering. Like in a normal country. As if it were possible to establish an enlightened system of social justice on the benighted foundations of occupation.

Someone said here this week, in praise of Sharon, that he caught the ultra-rightists in his cabinet with their pants down. If that is the case, it is certainly praiseworthy. But the trouble with this back-flip, admirable in itself, is that many of Israel's friends overseas have also been left with their pants somewhere around their ankles.

So sweeping is the success of the Israeli right and its allies among the Jews (and Christians) in the United States that an unchallenged political axiom has emerged, to the effect that if the president decides to push ahead with the road map, he will generate hostility among millions of voters.

The most appropriate blessing, say the cynics, is "Blessed art thou who creates diverse creatures." Ehud Olmert has indeed created a strange creature, at Sharon's behest, in mating a national religious party with a national anti-religious party.

As for the present and future, it is clear as day that the basic long-term interest of the State of Israel is to integrate peacefully into the Muslim world while zealously safeguarding its "membership" in Western culture.

The Palestinians are not rejoicing, because Israel is defining the evacuation of the outposts not as an imposed "withdrawal under fire," but as an act of policy that it has freely decided upon in order to meet certain political and diplomatic needs of its own.