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Bezalel Smotrich

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Sep 5, 2026, 12:46 PM

Gaza: Voluntary Relocation in Name Only

Displacement produced through coercive circumstances This week, within days of each other, two members of Israel's government put new institutional weight behind something that has been implicit in Israeli policy for more than a year. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir...

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Aug 24, 2026, 11:02 AM

Netanyahu Can Lose and Still Win

Illustration by Yochanan Schimmelpfennig. Concept and composition: Yochanan Schimmelpfennig, 2026.

Israel is approaching the October 27 election under conditions of unusual political uncertainty. Likud is under pressure, Netanyahu has no guaranteed path to a majority, and the governing bloc depends on partners whose interests are increasingly difficult to reconcile....

Aug 18, 2026, 11:15 AM

Bezalel Smotrich: The Methodical Radical

Few figures in contemporary Israeli politics provoke as immediate a reaction abroad as Bezalel Smotrich. Israel’s finance minister, a minister within the Defense Ministry, and leader of HaTzionut HaDatit — the Religious Zionist Party — he is routinely portrayed...

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Jul 27, 2026, 10:10 AM

The Agreement We Were Never Shown

Three days before the Knesset formally dispersed, Bezalel Smotrich announced that the security cabinet had approved NIS 1.3 billion for the establishment of 34 West Bank settlements. He also pointed to a further NIS 1.075 billion for settlement roads—the...

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Jul 22, 2026, 5:46 PM

If We Decide Smotrich’s Grammar of Absolute Victory Bezalel Smotrich has defined absolute victory. Not as a general promise to defeat Hamas or as a formula attached to a continuing war, but as a specific sequence of actions. Israel is to...

Jul 20, 2026, 4:42 AM

Treasure Trove: Don’t Forget the Justice Part of Zionism (A Note for Tisha B’Av)

From the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, Toronto (www.herzlcollection.com). Photograph by Kevin Viner, Elevator Digital, Toronto used with permission.

There is a Jewish story told about Napoleon. He once travelled through a Jewish small town in Europe and entered a synagogue where he witnessed men and women sitting on the floor weeping. Napoleon asked what terrible misfortune had...

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Jul 1, 2026, 7:55 AM

Judea Is Not a Footnote

Judea Is Not a Footnote Naftali Bennett and Israel’s Unfinished Return The debate around Naftali Bennett is usually misread when it is reduced to another chapter in the history of Israeli right-wing rhetoric. That reading is too small for the matter...

Richard Diamond

Jun 24, 2026, 8:54 PM

The Deterioration of American Jewry’s Unconditional Solidarity with Israel

image by Google Notebook

The Grief of Estrangement There is a particular kind of grief that has no clean name — the grief of loving something so completely that you never thought to examine the conditions of that love, until the day you realize...

Andy Blumenthal

Jun 14, 2026, 10:08 AM

Be Bold and Settle Our Entire Land of Israel

This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government moved forward with one of the most significant Zionist initiatives in decades, allocating over $350 million to authorize and establish 61 new Jewish communities in the ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria....

Jun 11, 2026, 4:35 AM

Did The Sinai Deal Really Work?

For decades, Sinai has been treated as the crown jewel of the land-for-peace argument. Oftentimes, in the argument surrounding “land for peace,” opponents will claim that Israel exchanging land for peace has never historically worked or held up. Those in...

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