A presidential commission journeys into the nightmare of the past Fulfilling a pledge made on the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding, Jimmy Carter last year appointed a 34-member presidential commission on the Holocaust to develop a memorial in the U.S. to the 6 million victims of the Nazis' "final solution." Last week, as a first step in that effort, the commission toured the sites in Eastern Europe where the campaign of extermination of Jews took place in a search for ...

Perhaps it's the dignity of the office that restrains Shimon Peres. Perhaps it's personal decorum. But on the morning after Israel's Prime Minister delivered a speech that all but threw a padlock on the already shuttered peace talks, the country's President offered only the most oblique criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu — and of Israeli politics that long ago stopped being as audacious as the state Peres helped to found. "Leaders must go ahead even when moving ahead is ...

South Lebanon Sunday witnessed its deadliest day since the month-long Israel-Hizballah 2006 war when 10 Palestinian demonstrators were reported shot dead and another 112 wounded as Israeli troops opened fire on protests along the border fence. The casualties came as a massive crowd of Palestinians gathered at Maroun er Ras, a small hilltop village overlooking the border with Israel, to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when the state of Israel was established. By Sunday night, the militant Lebanese Shi'ite group ...

Next month is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride month, an international season of parades, cultural festivals and street parties celebrating gay rights. But amid all the good cheer, tensions are rising over a controversial issue that is splintering LGBT communities. Around the world, major Pride events are being used as battle grounds to combat what some pro-Palestinian, progay activists are calling pink washing: Israel's promotion of its progressive gay-rights record as a way to cover ...

I'm actually beginning to enjoy this Arab Spring, a little. You don't believe me? I like democracy. Democracy has been very kind to me. I've been elected Prime Minister of Israel twice. I made a speech expressing hope for democracy in Egypt and even made a practical suggestion — a regional Marshall Plan to put all those unemployed Arabs to work building housing and infrastructure. I really do hope for the best. But do I believe the best ...

DURING the day, the summer heat, well over 100, shimmers oppressively over the Jordan Valley. Hardly anything moves. It is only at night that the valley comes to life, for night is the time of the fedayeen, the Arab guerrilla raiders who slip toward the river for another hit-and-run slash at Israel's defenses. "We live like roaches," a fedayeen commando said last week. "I do not like this sneak war. But it is the only way for us. There is ...

In another part of the world, it would have been a straightforward public-works project. A highway was too narrow to handle the increasing flow of traffic, so the authorities brought in heavy equipment to widen it. Partway through the job, however, a road-leveling tractor uncovered the opening to a cave no one knew was there. Work came to an immediate halt, and within hours a scientific swat team descended on the site to study it. That's the law in Israel, ...

For most countries, the existence of a massive fossil-fuel deposit within its sovereign territory would be gratefully welcomed as an economic windfall. But the delight in Israel at the recent giant gas discovery off its northern coastline is tempered by the knowledge that it could provide the spark to ignite the next war between the Jewish state and its mortal foe to the north, Lebanon's militant Shi'ite Hizballah. The stakes are enormous. Both Lebanon and Israel currently have ...

The Israeli government has ruled out setting up an independent investigative body that would interview Israeli military personnel about allegations that the military committed war crimes during its offensive against Hamas earlier this year.

Israeli President Shimon Peres rejected a United Nations report on his country's incursion into Gaza as "one-sided" and "unfair" in an interview with CNN. The U.N. Council for Human Rights last week approved the report, which accuses both Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas of "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity" during the three-week offensive which ended in January. Peres insisted that Israel had a right to defend itself, and said the United Nations was in danger ...