"Israel has no better friend than the U.S.," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed to a joint session of Congress in 2011, "and the U.S. has no better friend than Israel." As recent events have once again confirmed, Bibi is only half-right. As the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, Netanyahu's government not only worked around the […]

Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, is a fixture on American television screens and op-ed pages. His defense of the Netanyahu government and its military campaign in Gaza is full throated. Just 8 days after proclaiming in the Washington Post that "to guarantee peace, this war must be given a chance," […]

In their controversial 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt proposed a dramatic change in American financial aid for Israel currently amounting to $3 billion annually. "It is time to treat Israel like a normal country," they argued, "and make U.S. aid conditional on an end to […]

With the overlapping crises in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Republicans trying to pin the blame on President Obama are singing the same sound bite in unison. As Mitt Romney put it earlier this year: Our esteem around the world has fallen. I can't think of a major country, it's hard to think of […]

Last week, the Pew Research Center released the largely predictable findings of a survey measuring how Americans feel about the nation's various religious faiths. While adherents unsurprisingly gave their co-religionists high marks, one factoid stood out. White evangelical Protestants love the Jews, giving them an impressive 69 on Pew's 100 degree thermometer. Alas, that love […]

With the body count growing daily in Gaza, the conservative commentariat has predictably circled the wagons around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud government. "Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity," Charles Krauthammer declared this week and repeating Bibi's mantra about his Hamas enemies. "We're using missile defense to […]

The ugly picture in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is rapidly getting uglier still. After the collapse of U.S. sponsored peace talks, the Netanyahu government quickly retaliated against the President Mahmoud Abbas' unity government with Hamas by announcing 1,500 new settlement units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This week, the slaughter of […]

According to the Daily Beast, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned a closed-door meeting on Friday that Israel risks becoming "an apartheid state" if a two-state peace deal with the Palestinians is not reached soon. While many of the usual suspects among Israel's hardline supporters in the United States will be apoplectic, any rage […]

As Condoleezza Rice reminded Americans this week, nothing succeeds like failure for the members of George W. Bush's national security team. Addressing a $15 million dollar Republican fundraiser, Bush's former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State blasted the Obama administration's handling of the Ukraine crisis, declaring "When America steps back and there is a […]

Mitt Romney may be the happiest man in America today. After the recent documentary Mitt, some people concluded that there was more to Romney than the image of the cold, calculating parasite who pioneered schadenfreude as a wildly successful business model. And with Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea, Mitt has taken to the airwaves and […]