Norman A. Bailey

Israel’s new so-called unity government is an obscenely expensive monster inadequate to deal with the challenges it faces. Well, it appears that Israel will have a government finally after months and months of shoddy political maneuvering. That is the good news–all of it. The bad news is that this “coalition” government is a hunchbacked, three-legged…

Coronavirus lockdowns will themselves cause fatalities. There are braver and better approaches. This newspaper has published the comments of Prof. Yoram Lass, who was Director-General of the Ministry of Health when that government department was headed by people competent in the area which they were in charge of administering. Prof. Lass indicated that due to…

Ideas are circulating in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that indicate a tectonic shift. During recent months, pubic and media concentration on viruses and politicians (I will refrain from commenting on the similarities between the two) has caused little attention to be paid to other significant developments, such as the Turkish-Russian confrontation over the…

Drawn up by a demented cartographer, the plan, however, does bury the Oslo agreement and demonstrate that Arab Israelis don’t want to be Palestinians. Now that the famous “Deal of the Century” has finally been unveiled, enough time has gone by to see past the praises and the condemnations and examine calmly what it’s all…

The Alaskan Native Corporations are an example of how we should use gas revenues to give all Israelis a greater share in their country’s wealth. In recent days two spectacular events took place, both, for a change, positive. Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated by a US airstrike, which event elicited an enormous amount of…

Term limits for heads of government and electoral districts are just two vitally needed reforms. When the current Israeli political circus is finally over with some sort of government installed in Jerusalem, it will be high time, indeed way past time, to decide what to reform in an obviously broken political system and how to…

OP-ED: There’s a pathway to a unity government, but first we need to know what ‘unity’ means, and then we need to create a new (Likud) party When we were small, we used to play a game called pick-up sticks. The object of the game was to collect as many sticks as you could, without…

In recent years, Israel has been establishing itself as the principal geopolitical counterweight to Iran in the southwestern portion of the Middle East. With its overwhelming scientific, technological and military superiority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (with the exception of Qatar) are increasingly accepting Israeli leadership. Now, however, after years of extensive defense…

The entire region between the Mediterranean Sea and India is a seething cauldron of threats, counter-threats, plots, conspiracies, economic sanctions, and military movements. At any moment, an incident, misunderstanding, or accident could cause the cauldron to boil over into open interstate war.

Faced with mounting internal and external pressures, Iran’s leadership could decide to ignite Israel’s borders.