[Vice President Joe Biden stands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sarah, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a state funeral held on Monday for late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He died on Saturday. Image via AP.]

Eight years after falling into a permanent vegetative state, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stopped breathing this morning at Sheba Medical Centre in Jerusalem. The former IDF general and politician, nicknamed "the Butcher of Beirut" for his role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian civilians, was 85. He is survived by two sons, Omri and Gilad.

American conservatives love, love, love Israel. They also hate, hate, hate abortion and socialized medicine. American conservatives face one hell of a moral conundrum in the new year.

The War on Christmas continues—in Israel. According to the Associated Press, the speaker of Israel’s parliament rejected a request from Hana Sweid, a Christian-Arab Knesset member, to display a Christmas tree at the legislature’s building. The speaker, Yuli Edelstein of the center-right Likud party, initially cited logistical issues, but clarified today that he specifically denied the request because the Christmas tree threatened to offend the country’s majority Jewish population:

South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela secretly traveled to Ethiopia and received paramilitary training from Israeli spies shortly before he was arrested in 1962, according to a memo that was reportedly just unearthed from Israel's State Archives.

According to the Foreign Press Association, the Israeli military has intentionally targeted journalists at least ten times over the past two years. The most recent incident occurred on Friday, when the Israeli army allegedly fired rubber bullets and stun grenades at clearly-identified photojournalists covering a skirmish between the Israeli military and Palestinian protestors.

A woman has been ordered to pay a fine of $140 per day as a penalty for keeping her baby boy uncircumcised.

12. This weekend's groundbreaking multilateral agreement with Iran to shut down that nation's nascent nuclear weapons development program

This weekend's nuclear deal with Iran—the result of combined negotiating efforts between diplomats from Iran, the United States, the UK, Russia, China, France and Germany—is facing strict criticism, both in the U.S. Congress, where it has become a rare source of bipartisan agreement, and in Israel.

Israel is claiming that on Sept. 11, Israeli authorities arrested an Iranian-born spy who was carrying photographs of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Iran may be winning over doubters with the diplomatic, moderate tone of its new president Hassan Rouhani—but Israel just struck an epic blow in an even more important war: the war for social media buzz.

On Labor Day the The New York Times reported that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an “influential pro-Israel lobby group,” was pushing Congress to bomb Syria. By the time the story appeared in Tuesday’s newsprint edition, however, all references to AIPAC had been quietly excised. The websites NewsDiffs and News Sniffer show that the piece was entirely rewritten, more or less. What happened here?

Zionism is racism, says racist Zionist mayor.

After a push by Secretary of State John Kerry, Israel and Palestine have agreed to resume peace negotiations for the first time in three years.

Just two weeks after photos of female IDF soldiers in various stages of undress first surfaced online, a new sex scandal has struck Israel's military — this one involving a video showing female recruits putting on a strip show inside their barracks.

It was the laughing fit that nearly brought down an entire country.

Female soldiers serving is the Israeli military have long been lusted after in certain male-dominated corners of the web and beyond — and now four female soldiers serving is the Israeli military are in trouble for capitalizing on that very fact.

The Newseum, a gargantuan space in Washington, DC, dedicated to educating the public about the workings of journalism, unveiled a new exhibit today: a cutting-edge interactive demonstration of how pressure groups control what gets published.

Alan Dershowitz thinks Albert Einstein Award-winning physicist Stephen Hawking is an "ignoramus." Guess why.

“I hope you’ve all been doing the hanky panky,” Sheldon Adelson said to us, over the microphone. The superannuated gambling-industry billionaire, financier of right-wing vanity candidates and causes, was onstage in an enormous auditorium somewhere outside Tel Aviv: a stout little figure, well groomed but vaguely unhealthy-looking, telling us all, through wet lips, that we ought to be fucking.