JERUSALEM, ISRAEL — Prior to October 7, the future seemed so bright for Israel.
We had just signed our sixth Arab-Israeli peace and normalization agreement.
We seemed to be on track to sign a seventh agreement with Saudi Arabia.
Our economy was booming, tourism was hitting record levels, and Israel was building increasingly close and warm ties with nations and governments all over the globe.
The Palestinians’ long-dormant application for full United Nations membership will be given a fresh look on Monday.
The United Nations Security Council is set to meet, first in closed consultations, then in an open format, to consider the 2011 application—a move officially requested in a letter from Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Mansour last Wednesday.
A 4.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the Northeast Friday morning, in what New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called "one of the largest earthquakes on the East Coast in the last century."
The earthquake was centered near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, and shook buildings from Philadelphia to New Jersey and New York City to Connecticut and Westchester, New York. It could be felt as far south as Washington, D.C., and as far north as Maine, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Iranian leadership and several senior commanders of its proxy militias were spotted attending the annual Quds Day parade in the Iranian capital of Tehran on Friday, shortly before the state funeral for seven senior Iranian officers killed in the alleged Israeli strike near Iran’s Damascus embassy earlier this week.
Thousands of marchers carried pictures of the killed officers, banners with slogans such as “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” and pictures of the Iranian regime's founder, Ruhollah Khomeini.
(April 4, 2024 / JNS) U.S. President Joe Biden demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, per a White House readout of their call on Thursday.
“President Biden emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable,” the readout stated. “He made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers.”
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia and NATO are now in "direct confrontation", the Kremlin said as the U.S.-led alliance marked its 75th anniversary on Thursday.
NATO's successive waves of eastern enlargement are a fixation of President Vladimir Putin, who went to war in Ukraine two years ago with the stated aim of preventing the alliance from coming closer to Russia's borders. Instead, the war has galvanised NATO, which has expanded again with the entry of Finland and Sweden.
In the months since the October 7th, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel, the global Jewish community has witnessed an increase in antisemitic activity, unprecedented in recent years. For many in and around Jewish communities, this period has felt inherently different, a sentiment that has raised several critical questions about the current scope, nature, and implications of antisemitism.
To explore this, the ADL Center for Antisemitism Research has collected data since October 7th related to the scale and structure of the phenomenon of antisemitism in the United States and compared results to past findings.
(March 27, 2024 / JNS) The majority of Americans now disapprove of the Israel Defense Forces’ actions against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip, according to a survey Gallup published on Wednesday.
The proportion of respondents who disapprove of IDF actions increased from 45% in November to 55% this month, while the share of Americans who explicitly back the military operation dropped from 50% to 36%.
The polar vortex circling the Arctic is swirling in the wrong direction after surprise warming in the upper atmosphere triggered a major reversal event earlier this month. It is one of the most extreme atmospheric U-turns seen in recent memory.
In the past, disruptions to the polar vortex — a rotating mass of cold air that circles the Arctic — have triggered extremely cold weather and storms across large parts of the U.S.
The scene is being set for a turbulent year in the tropics, one that could approach a record-setting pace that may exhaust the entire list of names for tropical storms and hurricanes -- and then some.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially gets underway on June 1 and runs through the end of November, and AccuWeather's team of long-range forecasters say now is the time to prepare for a frenzy of tropical systems. There are signs that the first named system could spin up before the season kicks off as the calendar flips to June, a precursor of what's to come.
What do you do when those who were considered your best friends abandon you in your greatest time of need? Unless you’re an atheist, you turn to God, knowing that all human resources have been exhausted.
While most of us, at one point or another, have found ourselves alone, feeling as if we had dwindling support, it usually didn’t impact whether or not we lived to see another day, but in the case of Israel, being forced to go it alone may be the best thing that ever happened to the Jewish homeland, because now, it demands that God enter the picture.
TOKYO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will agree next month to tighter military cooperation, including talks on the biggest potential change to Washington's East Asia command structure in decades, two sources said.
Washington will consider appointing a four-star commander to oversee its forces in Japan as a counterpart to the head of a proposed Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF) headquarters overseeing all of the country's military operations, said the sources, who have direct knowledge of the plan.
China's rapid military build-up is more expansive than anything seen since World War II, which means it's on track with its 2027 goal to be ready for a Taiwan invasion, said US Navy Adm. John Aquilino.
"All indications point to the PLA meeting President Xi Jinping's directive to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027," Aquilino wrote in a testimony to the US Armed Services House Committee.
(March 19, 2024 / JNS) An overwhelming majority of American adults think that the role of religion is contracting in public life, and a majority of the 80% who believe that are unhappy about the decline, according to new Pew Research Center data.
The 80% figure is the highest Pew has recorded to date that thinks faith is one the decline in public life.
Much has been made of recent polls that show disturbing levels of antisemitism among young Americans. It is easy to put this down to “progressivism,” “wokeism” or other ideologies inculcated in students by the professoriate regime. There is no doubt a great deal of truth to this, but there must be a reason the professoriate’s virulent systemic antisemitism has found a receptive audience.
The claim that economic factors drive antisemitism is almost a cliché. Whether it was the late 19th-century financial crises in France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, scholars have often pointed to economic deprivation as the source of antisemitic violence.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the top-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history and a top advocate for Israel in Congress, announced that he sees Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace in the country's war with Hamas. He said it was time for the country to hold new elections.
"Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel," Schumer said.
(March 14, 2024 / Israel Hayom) The United States has been engaged in secret talks with Iran in an attempt to halt Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.
These indirect negotiations, held in Oman in January, marked the first interaction between the two countries in 10 months, according to the report. The U.S. delegation was led by Brett McGurk, the White House’s Middle East adviser, and Abram Paley, its Iran envoy, while Iran was represented by Ali Bagheri, the deputy foreign minister and top nuclear negotiator.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- LGBTQ+ identification in the U.S. continues to grow, with 7.6% of U.S. adults now identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or some other sexual orientation besides heterosexual. The current figure is up from 5.6% four years ago and 3.5% in 2012, Gallup’s first year of measuring sexual orientation and transgender identity.
CAIRO, March 9 (Reuters) - U.S., French and British forces downed dozens of drones in the Red Sea area overnight and on Saturday after Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis targeted bulk carrier Propel Fortune and U.S. destroyers in the region, the U.S. military said in a statement.
The Houthis have been attacking ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since November in what they say is a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians during Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.
American fifth-generation stealth fighters touched down in a new location in Southeast Asia this month, marking another milestone in the U.S.' increased defense engagement with nations along the first island chain.
A pair of F-35 Lightning II jets, assigned to Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, operated from Brunei's Rimba air base on March 1-2 during a visit by a Pentagon official, the U.S. Embassy in Bandar Seri Begawan said this week.
