Americans for Peace Now (APN) today sounded the alarm over the imminent appointment of Israeli serial provocateur and extremist firebrand Avigdor Lieberman as Israel’s new Minister of Defense. APN's President and CEO Debra DeLee commented: 

“Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is today once again showing the world that he puts politics and personal political survival above the national security of Israel and its people.

“Avigdor Lieberman has a long and ugly track record of irresponsible, reckless, and deliberately inflammatory rhetoric and actions. As foreign minister in Netanyahu’s previous government, he caused severe damage to Israel’s foreign interests, creating crises in Israel’s relations with regional and global allies.

Recently, APN Director of Policy and Government Relations Lara Friedman was invited to speak at two events for the American University in Cairo (AUC), organized under the auspices of AUC’s Prince Alwaleed Center for American Studies and Research, part of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The first lecture, entitled “The Middle East and the 2016 U.S. Elections,” took place on March 13, 2016 at AUC's historic Oriental Hall on the Tahrir Square campus. The second lecture, titled “A Conversation with A Washington Insider: Americans for Peace Now's Lara Friedman,” took place March 14, 2016 at AUC's campus in New Cairo.

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 Rabbi Rachel Miller Solomin is a Jewish educator, writer, life coach, and mother living and working in California’s Silicon Valley. She was ordained from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in 2001.

Several years ago, on a bright California Sunday, I had a car accident involving pedestrians.  By maneuvering my car, I had avoided hitting them head-on. The family involved incurred only minor physical damages, but they were traumatized.

Since then, I have been struck by the relationship of these events to the Jewish laws of monetary damages. This week’s Torah portion, Emor, contains the biblical origins of these laws: “If anyone maims his fellow, as he has done so shall it be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The injury he inflicted on another shall be inflicted on him” (Leviticus 24:19-20, my emphasis). This formula, known variously as the lex talionis, reciprocal or retributive justice, assigns penalties appropriate to the injury. In the Torah, “an eye for an eye” is intended to limit consequences to proportional justice rather than permitting vengeance killings in response to minor injuries. When the accident happened, I ran out of my car and collapsed, sobbing apologies, beside scared, crying children in their stroller. The children’s mother suggested I move away from the kids -- ”If my husband sees you, he’ll kill you.”

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

This week, Alpher discusses the State Comptroller’s report on conduct of the summer 2014 war with Hamas in Gaza and its significance; why, unlike Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon appears to remain highly reticent to engage Israel militarily again; impressions and insights that are relevant to Israel in his travels in Canada and New Zealand; and why Israel is, relatively speaking, smug about dealing with BDS and even the EU boycott of settlement goods.