When residents of the Middle East woke up on the morning of Oct. 7, the Palestinian cause was in a sorry state. Seven hundred thousand radical Israeli settler-colonists and sealed-off "military zones" occupied 60% of the occupied West Bank, which was blockaded by a Berlin-style border wall, so much that the United Nations human rights... Read More

It is a truism bordering on a cliche that the Israeli state and Palestinian resistance organizations have inflicted violence upon each other, claiming the lives of thousands of innocent people on both sides. Media coverage of the carnage has been anything but evenhanded, however. Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Western... Read More

The Left is doing something right. And it's something that I initially disagreed with, even though I didn't comment in a public space. When Israel overreacted to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar activists... Read More

Victimhood or vengeance: choose one. You can't have both. Israel is about to learn that. Supporters of Israel's government (as opposed to Israel writ large, which includes millions of Israelis who distrust their government) ask: Why are so few people still talking about Oct. 7? "It is striking and in some ways shocking that the... Read More

I talked to a lot of people in Afghanistan, where I reported about the fall 2001 U.S. invasion. Young or old, urban or rural, no matter their ethnicity, they all expected the victors to work miracles after the Taliban's defeat. "America will build roads, schools, buildings, everything." "Now Afghanistan will be beautiful." "We will have... Read More

A few weeks ago, from an international and domestic-U.S. public relations standpoint, Israel might have been able to bring its war in Gaza in for a hard landing. Now it has painted itself into a corner. Gaza has been destroyed. By this time next year, so will Israel — not its physical plant, but its... Read More

It is useful when you feel stumped to step back and ask yourself: What if I were coming to this person/situation/decision fresh, without precedents or historical baggage? Inertia is a powerful and insidious force. How many times, working in an office, when you ask why something is done a certain way, do you get the... Read More

"Israel has a right to defend itself and its people," President Joe Biden said on Oct. 7, hours after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,400 Israelis. "Thou shalt not kill" is probably the oldest and most widespread moral and legal edict in human civilization, common to nearly every culture. However, there is one universal exception:... Read More

In the days and weeks and months and years after 9/11, when you questioned how the Bush administration responded to the terrorist attacks by al-Qaida, right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats alike answered with a passive shrug. "Well," they said, "we had to do something." Then you pressed about Bush's specific responses — those somethings. Invading... Read More

Six weeks after 9/11, I thought I perceived a "new American thoughtfulness" in response to the attacks against New York and Washington, D.C. "For the first time in memory, Americans are reconsidering the wisdom of supporting an Israel whose reactions to Palestinian terrorism is itself increasingly indistinguishable from terrorism," my syndicated column for Oct. 23,... Read More