Sheldon Adelson lived the American dream, a version so extreme that it could be the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster. He started far poorer, and ended up far wealthier, than almost anyone in history, and he knew it. When you met with him, which I was lucky enough to do on a very few occasions, he made a point of giving you a short speech about growing up in a two-room Dorchester tenement and sleeping on the floor with his siblings. His parents were immigrants and they were desperately poor—so don’t think the gilded office you were sitting in was handed to him, and don’t think he doesn’t know what it takes.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday that the United States had reversed a Carter administration-era State Department legal opinion calling Israeli settlements in the West Bank "inconsistent with international law." The decision, apparently long in the works, comes days after a ruling by an E.U. court requiring Israeli products made in disputed territories to carry special labels—a decision widely seen as creating a legal pretext for the E.U.'s eventual adoption of boycotts on Israeli goods.
Three leading Democratic presidential candidates recently endorsed a new policy regarding U.S. military aid to Israel: It should be conditioned on Israel embracing policies toward the Palestinians favored by American progressives.
You are not mistaken if it feels like the headlines today are the same as the headlines a few months ago, which were the same as the headlines a year ago, five years ago, seven years ago, a decade ago.
The resolution passed Thursday, nominally against all forms of hate, is a sham that no Republican should have supported. It did the opposite of condemn anti-Semitism—it offered cover for it, exonerated the guilty, drowned it in a sea of PC platitudes, and let Democrats off the hook.
There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There's no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.
Remember the neocons? Those promoters of democracy and human rights in foreign policy, adherents of Andrei Sakharov's mantra that "a country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors"? The neocons can criticize Trump today. Everyone else is posturing, and their hypocrisy is too annoying to go unnoticed.
Campus branches of the liberal group J Street have been helping anti-Israel activists gain support for student government resolutions calling for boycotts of Israel, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of BDS campaigns on college campuses during the recently concluded 2017-2018 school year.
Media coverage of Hamas's attacks on the Israeli border have been, as usual, a dumpster fire of idiocy and ignorance. Hamas itself now admits that "50 of the 62 martyrs" were card-carrying terrorists. One of the heads of Hamas just boasted to an interviewer: "This is not peaceful resistance." No facts or admissions will intrude on the media narrative, which is that Israel is diabolically slaughtering civilians because Israelis enjoy killing people.