Thanks to Hamas, American Jewry’s long-Silenced Majority has found its voice — putting partisanship aside

Historical analogies are always tricky, but it’s hard to avoid the thought that Saturday was Israel’s 9/11. At least 600 are dead, hundreds wounded, and possibly dozens kidnapped in a country the size of New Jersey.

The attack that led to the murder of more than 250 Israelis and the abduction of dozens more will change the way Israel manages its conflict with the Hamas rulers in Gaza. What was, will no longer be

The actual collective picture is better than the image Israelis have of themselves. Still, the identity crisis casts its shadows on Israel’s sovereign existence, and its gravity should not be downplayed.

Sooner or later Israel will discover that the future of its integration in the new Middle East remains dependent on a viable Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

This last bastion of consensus is under attack. If it succeeds, there will no longer be any text around which the State of Israel and Israeli society can unite.

A crisis such as the one we are going through in Israel is an opportunity for self-examination and soul-searching. I tended to believe that pragmatism would always win the day. I was wrong.

If we wisely gird ourselves with constitutional arrangements on the rules of the game commonly accepted in liberal democracies, we will be able to restore our covenant of fate.

As a senior US government official under Carter, I tried to synthesize policy in ways that strengthened the US-Israel relationship