Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:49:37 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Hillel Halkin :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Hillel+Halkin istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/long-walk-with-lipsky/86833/ Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Normally, if you worry that a newspaper column you write may not appear, that's because you're afraid the newspaper won't like it. It doesn't often happen that you're afraid the newspaper may not appear either. As I write this, no one knows if the Sun will continue publishing or not. I hope it does. Not so much for my own sake — to tell the truth, it's wearying to write a column week after week. I'd miss the income, but it might be nice not to have to wake up one morning every week with that... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mr-olmert-without-tears/86384/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST It is hard to feel very sorry for Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who resigned from his position two days ago. He is said to be a nice person, warm to his friends, and considerate to his staff. This may be true, just as it is true that he is a skillful politician. But he brought about his own downfall — and did it, not, as in a Greek tragedy, by blindly stumbling into it, but by courting it with open eyes. The politician who makes a habit of lining his pockets illegally because he thinks... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/israel-at-its-best/85915/ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST During the last six months, my wife and I have had more contact with health care plans, doctors, and hospitals than we ever had before — and, I hope, will ever have to have again. Medically, the story has had a happy ending. It has also given me a long, close look at Israel's unique health care system, which — like practically everything else in this endlessly self-flagellating country — is the target of frequent criticism. I'm glad to say I can't join in. In more ways than one, I've been... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tsipi-livni-for-prime-minister/85441/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST With the recommendation of Israel's police to indict Prime Minister Olmert on corruption charges, and the approaching primaries in Mr. Olmert's Kadima party that are now barely a week away, it seems an increasingly safe bet that the next prime minister of Israel will be the country's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tsipi Livni. (Or Tsipora Livni, to call her by her given name, though she prefers to go by her Israeli nickname) Although Mr. Olmert has been clinging to his office like... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/murder-in-tel-aviv/84992/ Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST It is told of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who moved from Odessa to Tel Aviv in the early 1920s, that, upon hearing for the first time of a robbery in the new Jewish city, he thanked God for having made the Jews a normal people. A similar story is attributed to a half-dozen other Hebrew writers and intellectuals of the age, which shows how paradigmatic it seemed to its contemporaries. Were Bialik still alive, one might remark with black humor that, after the events of the past days, his... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-honor-of-83rd-place/84619/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Well, the Olympics are over and the Jewish state has not been totally disgraced. You can actually find it among the 87 countries whose athletes won medals. Don't despair as you scan the list. Israel is no. 83, behind (for alphabetical reasons) Afghanistan and Egypt, but ahead of Mauritius, Moldova, Togo, and Venezuela, all of which won a single bronze. The Israeli medalist, a young wind surfer named Shahar Tsuberi, has been widely hailed for saving Israel's honor at the same time that Israeli... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-high-price-of-ransom/84165/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Predictions about the consequences of a country's behavior usually take time to come to pass. The chickens don't come home to roost from one day to the next. Not so in the case of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal held hostage in Gaza by Hamas for the past two years. Just a month ago, Israel swapped convicted a Lebanese terrorist, Samir Kuntar, who was serving a life sentence for the 1979 murder of an Israeli father and his little daughter, for the dead bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Eldad... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/untying-a-georgian-knot/83682/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been sent Googling South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Although one may always have thought that these were names invented for an old Tom Lehrer song or a Peter Sellers movie, now that Russian and Georgian tanks are shelling them, we know they must be real. But who lives there? In the past, you would have had to scour your address book for a friend with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, there's practically nothing you can't find out about the Abkhazians or the... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/a-party-without-distinction/83193/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST If the turnout for the election of a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy has ever in history been only 1% of a nation's population, I'm not aware of it. Yet this is what it is scheduled to happen in Israel on September 17 when the country's ruling party, Kadima, holds a primary vote to pick a successor to Ehud Olmert. Kadima is estimated to have some 70,000 registered voters, not all of whom will go to the polls. The population of Israel is some 6.5 million. This is an absurd situation... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/editorials/obamas-pilfered-prayer-note/82781/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The flap over the publication by the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv of a photograph of a pilfered prayer note inserted, as per Jewish custom, by Senator Obama in a niche of Jerusalem's Western Wall on his visit to Israel last week has its comical aspects. Not least of these was the claim made in its defense by Ma'ariv, a secular newspaper accused by the Western Wall's rabbi of violating the privacy of Mr. Obama's relationship with God, that it did not really matter because Mr. Obama isn't Jewish. It... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/dangers-worse-than-clintons/82326/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Senator Obama's visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which began yesterday and ends tomorrow, is unlikely to have any surprises. Mr. Obama is at that stage of a presidential campaign where every word is carefully scripted. When it comes to Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs, his main concern right now is to offend no one, whether in Jerusalem, Ramallah, or the American Jewish and Arab communities. His coaches and speech writers can be counted on to paddle him safely through the rapids... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/skeletons-in-israels-cabinet/81849/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST 'The strongest reason why Ehud Olmert should resign," said a friend to me the other day, "is that he doesn't understand why he should resign." I agree. More scandalous than any of the financial shenanigans of which Mr. Olmert stands accused is his failure to realize the difference between being a private citizen and a prime minister. Although in both cases he would be legally innocent until found guilty, the legal innocence that would have entitled him to continue living his private life is not... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/blurry-vision-of-gabriel/81384/ Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The so-called "Vision of Gabriel," an 87-line, three-foot-tall stone tablet written on in faded ink that has been dated to the late first century B.C.E. and is said to shed dramatic new light on Christianity's origins in Judaism, has at last, so to speak, come out of the closet. Although the tablet was found, apparently on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, eight years ago and has been known of in scholarly circles for some time, it was only this week, at a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/israels-lonely-last-resort/80539/ Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST So now it's official. Israel's air force is in an advanced stage of training to attack Iran's nuclear installations. If the massive overflight of the eastern Mediterranean by Israel's jets earlier this month was indeed the "dress rehearsal" for such an attack that it has been called, it was a rehearsal to which the public was invited — or at least, the intelligence agencies of the countries that tracked the operation on their radar screens. You don't, of course, conduct such an operation when... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/both-sides-striving/80125/ Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Suppose, for an improbable moment, that on a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, Secretary of State Rice had given a speech in which she declared that the high birthrate of Arab women in the West Bank and east Jerusalem was having a "negative effect on the atmosphere" of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. And suppose she had added that so many Palestinian Arab babies is "not what we want" and that "the issue is to try," by having less of them, to "get back to a place where there is... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/whither-thou-goest/79639/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST This week the Jewish holiday of Shavu'ot (or Pentecost, as it is known in English) is being celebrated and it is an ironically fitting time for the renewed debate that has broken out in Israel, with perhaps more passion and rancor than ever, over the subject of Jewish conversion. It is on Shavu'ot that Jews in their synagogues traditionally read the Book of Ruth, which tells the story of the most renowned conversion in the history of Judaism, that of the widowed Moabite woman Ruth, who tells... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/election-echoes-in-israel/79149/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST It's been a fast clip of a week in Israel. Although it was already clear a week ago that Prime Minister Olmert's days were numbered, it was uncertain when or how the ax would fall. Would Mr. Olmert resign or suspend himself from office of his own volition? Be brought down by a revolt within his Kadima party? Lose his coalition in the Knesset and be forced to agree to new elections? And if the latter, when would these elections take place? A week later, the picture has clarified. There will be... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/holding-onto-the-golan/78629/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST I can't remember how many columns I have written, in The New York Sun and other places, against the idea of returning the entire Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a largely worthless peace treaty. The first of them was published back in 1994, when Yitzhak Rabin gave the Syrians his renowned "deposit," an advance promise, which has haunted all subsequent Israeli governments, to cede the whole Golan if all other issues were resolved. Every few years another supposed Israeli-Syrian deal of... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/unprepared-for-bushs-praise/76716/ Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 EST George W. Bush's extraordinarily supportive 60th Independence Day address to the Israeli Knesset last week may not have been a rhetorical masterpiece, but it was well-crafted and had its moments of eloquence. Above all, it was a demonstration of why Mr. Bush's feelings about Israel have been not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively, different from those of any American president before him. These feelings have to do with his Christian faith, as was already made clear in the opening... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/in-lebanon-a-bitter-lesson/76351/ Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The chickens of Israel's botched 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon are coming home to roost. Only now are we beginning to see the full consequences of the campaign's failure. It would be an exaggeration to say that Hezbollah's taking over the streets of Beirut these past few days has been an armed challenge to Lebanon's government. Lebanon does not have a government. It has not had one since its civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. It has a prime minister, a cabinet, and a parliament, none of... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/israels-case-of-the-chickenpox/75931/ Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 EST When I was five years old, two days before my sixth birthday, I came down with the chickenpox, ruining the party that was planned. Something similar has happened this week to Israel. A fine 60th birthday present the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, and his police investigators have given it! Just when the country was dutifully trying to forget its troubles and gearing up to celebrate six decades of Jewish independence next Thursday, it was notified in rapid succession that: • Its prime... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/carters-folly/75507/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Is Jimmy Carter a racist, as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman labeled him last week after his trip to Damascus to meet Hamas head Khaled Meshal? Well, no. Although he has never given the impression of liking Israelis, Israelis do not constitute a race. Is he gullibly ego-driven? Easily manipulated? A diplomatic shill? Well, yes. Mr. Carter's meeting with Mr. Meshal was not a disgrace because it took place. Although there may be good reasons for refusing to meet with the... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/gaiety-in-the-face-of-enemies/75106/ Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Reading the Passover Haggadah at the Seder the other night, I broke involuntarily into laughter at one point. It was a seemingly odd place to do it at, for it came in the middle of the hi sheamda, the passage that goes, wine cups raised as it is recited: "It is this [promise of God to safeguard Israel] that has sustained our ancestors and us, for not just once have there been those who arose to destroy us; rather, in every generation there are those who arise to destroy us, but the Holy One... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/israel-opens-door-and-shuts-it/74729/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The last, last act in a drama that was never meant to last so long finally seems about to end. In early June, the Israeli government has announced, the curtain will come down on the saga of Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel when a final group of several hundred Falashmura, Christian descendants of Ethiopian Jews baptized generations ago, will fly to the Jewish state. An estimated 10,000 or more Ethiopian Christians claiming to descend from Jewish families will be left behind in Ethiopia... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/shelve-the-shelf-agreement/74314/ Tue, 8 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST A recent cartoon in an Israeli newspaper showed Prime Minister Olmert making a hole in a kitchen wall with an electric drill while the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, stands behind him, ready to hand him a board and some brackets. "Shelf Agreement," said the caption. A "shelf agreement" is now being touted as the most feasible next step toward an ultimate resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea is a simple one. On the one hand, Israel and the Palestinians... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/bet-el-and-ramallah/73955/ Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST A few days ago I had some business in the West Bank settlement of Bet-El, a 20-minute drive across the flat, rocky plateau north of Jerusalem. Bet-El, which means "the house of God" in Hebrew, is a settlement of religious Jews founded in the late 1970s near the Palestinian village of Beitin, which is apparently the site of the biblical Bethel, where Jacob, according to tradition, dreamed in his sleep of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven. It was my third visit to Bet-El. The... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/america-stay-strong/73585/ Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST I returned to Israel last Friday after two weeks in America to find that several things had changed. An unofficial truce with Hamas has taken hold along the border with Gaza. An early summer has arrived, with temperatures soaring into the nineties. And as the thermometer has risen, the dollar has continued to drop. Worth 3.67 Israeli shekels on the day I flew to New York, it was worth 3.43 when I returned. This only begins to reflect the strengthening of the shekel, which briefly reached a... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/profile-of-the-profiled/73106/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST I may as well admit it: I'm a suspected terrorist. That's what U.S. Homeland Security thinks of me, anyway. For a while I lived in denial. The first time I was told at an American airport, a couple of years ago, that I had been selected for a special security check, I put it down to coincidence. The second time, too. It was only the third time that the quarter dropped. I was, if I remember correctly, flying to John F. Kennedy International Airport from Austin, Texas. "You've been selected for... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/kookian-vision/72668/ Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Israel is a small country. When Israelis are killed in terror attacks, everyone waits fearfully for names of their relatives and friends to be announced. In my own case, which probably is typical, this fear has been justified more than half a dozen times. It happened again last week, in Thursday's attack on the Merkaz Ha-Rav Yeshiva in Jerusalem. One of the boys killed was the 15-year-old grandson of a man I know well. He was the third generation in his family to study at the Merkaz Ha-Rav... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/is-hamas-copying-hezbollah/72447/ Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST In more ways than one, the current fighting between Israel and Hamas is taking place in the shadow of Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon against Hezbollah. In fact, it can be said with a large measure of truth that it is taking place in the way and at the time it is taking place in because of the war against Hezbollah. On the one hand, Hamas has clearly been inspired both by Hezbollah's tactics and by its successes. Its mobile Kassam and Grad rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/confession-of-impotence/71871/ Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST In the end, it was an ordinary day. The dire predictions that the Hamas demonstration in Gaza would turn into an attempted storming of the Israeli border, similar to the mass breaching of the Egyptian frontier that occurred several weeks ago, did not come to pass. All that happened was that five Kassam rockets, close to the daily average, landed in the town of Sderot, one wounding a 10-year-old boy whose arm was saved from amputation by the surgeons. It's clear that Israeli policy toward Gaza... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/death-in-damascus-2008-02-19/71440/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST We spectators of the shadowy war between terrorist organizations and governmental intelligence agencies do not yet know exactly who killed Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyeh in the Syrian capital of Damascus last week. It could have been just about anyone, starting with the Syrians themselves. Improbable? Perhaps. But how can we be sure that Mughniyeh was not romancing some Syrian general's wife, or muscling in on some Syrian politician's drug turf, and that this was not the reason a bomb... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/take-it-as-a-compliment/71132/ Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST It is certainly possible to understand, as an instinctive reaction, the objection of Jews to Christians praying that they see the light and accept Jesus as their savior. For long centuries, Jews were reviled, discriminated against, persecuted, and sometimes murdered for the crime of not seeing the light. A Christian prayer for a Jewish soul can trigger some scary reflexes. Still, I must say that I find 21st century Jewish protests against such prayers, or other expressions of the Christian wish... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/baraks-broken-promise/70735/ Tue, 5 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST As a hypothetical case, it would be an interesting one for a textbook on politics and morality: A high-ranking politician promises his fellow countrymen that, under specified circumstances, he will resign from his position in government. These circumstances come to pass. Yet by the time they do, the politician regrets his promise because he now sincerely believes that his remaining in office is so crucial to the welfare of his country that he would be shirking his responsibility by leaving it... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/olmerts-own-doing/70331/ Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST As far as Prime Minister Olmert is concerned, late is not better than never. Tomorrow will bring, at long last, the release of the final report of the Winograd Commission, appointed to investigate the government and army's conduct of Israel's war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. This is not a day that Mr. Olmert has been looking forward to. No one thinks that the prime minister, who had been in office for only a few months when he ordered Israel's army into Lebanon, will look good in the... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obama-gets-israel-wrong/69899/ Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Even before the recent brouhaha about Barack Obama's membership in a church whose minister is openly pro-Farrakhan and anti-Israel, I found the thought of his becoming the next president of America unnerving — and not just because his rhetoric, general outlook, and location in the Democratic Party did not encourage one to think that he would tend if elected to be a particularly strong backer of Israel. Perhaps I've grown cynical and jaded, but I've never been able to understand what the... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fate-of-american-muslims/69613/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST One night last week I was asked by an American Jewish organization to play host to a group of young visitors from America, and I chose a good, though non-kosher, local restaurant to do it in. Once we were gathered around the table, the restaurant's owner, an acquaintance of mine who had been briefed in advance about the group, came to our table and, instead of handing out menus, told us what he had in his kitchen. It seemed a nice personal touch, but when he skipped the one pork dish that I... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/operetta-in-two-acts/69117/ Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST President Bush's brief visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories tomorrow and Thursday will be staged as an operetta in two acts. In Act One, the president will meet with Prime Minister Olmert in Jerusalem, where he will be told of Israel's determination to conduct successful peace talks with the Palestinians, to remove illegal outposts, and to ease up on military checkpoints, and where he will in turn assure the prime minister that America is behind him. In Act Two, Mr. Bush will meet... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/paradox-of-happiness/68811/ Wed, 2 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Although New Year's Day is not a holiday much celebrated in Israel, where it is an ordinary workday, it does produce the usual journalistic taking stock of the year that has passed. To judge from the morose moods of the Hebrew newspapers, 2007 hasn't been a good year for Israelis. This may seem surprising to anyone who has been following the statistics out of Israel. The economy is doing well. Economic growth rates are among the most vigorous in the developed world. Unemployment is at its... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/stopping-the-kassams/68266/ Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST What is Israel to do about the Gaza Strip, from which Kassam rockets continue to be fired regularly at Israeli towns and villages (Twenty-three of them at the town of Sderot on one day alone last week)? Apart from the consensus that the current situation is intolerable, no one really seems to know. Five basic options have been put forth: 1. Carry on as at present. Keep up the moderate military pressure being exerted on Gaza in the form of pinpoint air and ground attacks that have been taking... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/nies-threat-to-israel/67822/ Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Practically every aspect of the National Intelligence Estimate report on the Iranian nuclear program raises questions about its methodology and conclusions, and many of these questions have already been aired. Were the report's framers politically motivated? Were they taken in by Iranian counterintelligence, which may have planted some or all of the "evidence" interpreted to indicate that the Iranian nuclear weapons program was suspended in 2003? And if it was suspended, why was it suspended... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/lighting-up-enemies-homes/67443/ Tue, 4 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The legal case now before Israel's High Court of Justice involving the supply of Israeli electricity to the Gaza Strip is by international standards a weird one. It helps explain why there is a war currently raging between the High Court and the minister of justice, the rights and wrongs of which cannot be painted in black and white. The case came before the court when it agreed to hear an appeal from several Israeli humanitarian organizations asking it to constrain Israel's government from... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/their-deepest-difference/67022/ Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST As the Annapolis conference takes place today, there are Israelis who hope that it won't be only a press performance and Israelis who hope that that's all it will be. These two groups can be identified, of course, with the political Left and the political Right, and it's time it was understood just what, in terms of the "peace process," the deepest difference between them is. It's not the territories. Neither the "undivided land of Israel" diehards of the Right nor the "1967 borders are sacred"... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/unpopular-child/66755/ Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The once much-vaunted Annapolis conference has been reduced, a few days before its convening, to the dimensions of a birthday party for an unpopular child at school. Everyone now agrees that the parents were foolish to think they could improve their child's social standing by staging an event in its honor with lots of food, fun, games, and a special magic show, but the invitations have already gone out and it's too late to call the party off. All that can be hoped for now is that enough... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/israels-electric-revolution/66367/ Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST A small country running almost entirely on electric cars 10 or 15 years from now and serving as a model for the world? Or the pipedream of an overambitious businessman dragging his government into an expensive boondoggle that may make it the world's laughingstock? This is a question that Israeli economists are asking this week after a government decision to support, at least on an initial basis, the revolutionary plan of hi-tech entrepreneur Shai Agassi to turn Israel into a pilot project for... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/case-of-yigal-amir/65944/ Tue, 6 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST It is probably a coincidence that the public commemoration of the anniversary of the death of Yitzhak Rabin came out this year on the same day as the circumcision ceremony of the newborn son of Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir. Married three years ago to a Russian Jewish immigrant, Larisa Trembovler, and allowed conjugal visits from her, Amir could in all likelihood not have planned things this way even had he, for symbolic reasons, wanted to. Nor is the question of whether Amir should have been... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/what-to-expect/65508/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had had his feelings hurt. Israel, he stated earlier this week, did not consult him before its September 6 bombing of a Syrian nuclear installation. Nor did it share with his agency any of the evidence of the nuclear nature of this facility said to be collected by it. "To bomb first and ask questions later," Mr. ElBaradei said, is "unhelpful." One can understand his frustration. After all, wouldn't he have taken immediate... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/dj-vu-at-columbia/65067/ Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Attics, as everyone knows, are places in which curious things can turn up. Cleaning out our own last week, I found an interesting article. It was in one of several boxes of my father's papers that I had taken from his apartment after his death in 1990. My father, though he taught various other Jewish subjects as well, was primarily an Arabist with a specialty in medieval Judeo-Arabic philosophy. His academic teaching career, which ended with a full professorship at New York's City College... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/olmerts-shaky-act/64633/ Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Democracies that run on a prime-ministerial system, as do most European ones, have a major drawback and a major advantage when compared with presidential democracies like America. On the one hand, they are less stable, since a prime minister can be made to resign by his own party or by parliament at any time. On the other hand, they are more flexible, since such resignations are routine. Heads of state do not tend to remain in office when they are extremely unpopular or discredited, as do... HILLEL HALKIN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/removing-the-time-cap/64189/ Tue, 9 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The Israeli-Palestinian-Arab-American summit conference, originally scheduled for late summer or early autumn, has now been set for late November in Annapolis. Its postponement, caused by insufficient progress in pre-summit Israeli-Palestinian talks, is a discreet way of admitting that it should never have been scheduled at all. Summits, as is well known in the diplomatic trade, should never be counted on to negotiate anything: When such demands are made of them, the likelihood of their failing...