Gideon Levy

Obama's impressive and exciting ability to get elected is not a guarantee of his ability to lead and make the right decisions.

You and we really do deserve a different kind of politics, and it will never be different if you continue in your corrupt habit of not saying what you really think, and not really thinking what you say.

Israeli statesmanship needs at least one Beilin at the side of a daring leader who will also know how to implement his agreements.

Israel Harel complains that Israeli society is angry at the settlers as a collective. Unfortunately, he does not get out enough, for their enterprise is flourishing.

No peacemaker is considered a hero here the way a warmonger is. One doesn't talk to Devils, whether old or new ones, not during the Holocaust and not now.

Never, it seems, has a government with such low - justifiably - expectations been formed here.

Provocation? God forbid. What do Israeli artists have to do with provocation? After all they're good children, submissive and obedient.

Almost 50 years later I'm still with the same bank and the same account. The tiny, modest branch of yore has been replaced by a two-story structure on the other side of the plaza.

The left's ideas are now expounded by the majority; after all, everyone knows that it is either two states or we are finished.

Only in Israel are Dagan's past activities still censored. He is responsible for much of the blood that was shed in Gaza in the 1970s and Lebanon in the '80s.

If the new government is headed for peace - and this is extremely doubtful - it must start with actions, not talks.

We once had a different kind of television. It consisted of intelligent, challenging, inoffensive language and conversation, sometimes even subversive.

The media storm surrounding Prof. Eyal Ben-Ari for harassment and alleged rape of his students is now all over.

Like the court Jews of the Diaspora, there are our court Arabs. They give a bad name to opportunism and a worse name to their own people.

Your Mofaz is also one of the Israelis who generated the second intifada. Do you want him to bring upon us a third one, and perhaps most terrible of all, the bombing of Iran?

A civil society striving for economic and intellectual growth must be weaned from its worship of those in uniform, whose role in benefiting or damaging the state remains controversial.

No idea or ideology crosses their minds, only money, family and being a stylist.

In the absence of rational criteria, the "Rose affair" has turned into a tasteless national exhibition of voyeurism, intrusion, gossip and self-righteousness with only a loose connection to the fate of the girl from France.

Will we have rockers like Joe Cocker a generation from now? I doubt that very much.

No prime ministerial candidate has so much as mentioned a single idea, aside from battered recitations about the Iranian threat and the armament of Hezbollah and Hamas - but was it too much to expect something more of Barak?

Self-respecting journalism must be present at every significant international event, even if there are no Israeli tanks invading at dawn.

For the West, everything goes, from placing missiles on Polish soil to discussing Georgia's joining NATO. But Russia is not even allowed to respond?

According to Netanyahu's declared ideology, he supports a one-state solution, an eternal apartheid state. But how the devil is he different from the others?

It is time to tell the public: No more - don't give in to the insufferable invasion of our lives.