The brief rebellion staged by Wagner mercenary warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in Russia on June 24 has probably weakened Russian President Vladimir Putin and tarnished his reputation as a paragon of stability and continuity. But it will probably have no discernible effect on Russia’s foreign policy, particularly its rapidly expanding relations with Iran, Israel’s chief enemy. […]
Olive trees, a major component of the Palestinian agrarian economy in the West Bank, have figured prominently in Israel’s perennial conflict with the Palestinians. Since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank during the 1967 Six Day War, some 800,000 olive trees have been destroyed and damaged by the Israeli armed forces and Jewish settlers, affecting […]
China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, believes that the balance of power is changing in its geopolitical favor. Convinced that “time and momentum” are on China’s side and that its rival, the United States, is losing stature and influence, Xi is expanding its footprint in the Middle East, a region still largely under the sway of […]
Ever since the United States’ precipitous withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran has flagrantly violated its terms and forged significant progress in assembling a nuclear arsenal. When Donald Trump, the then U.S. president, announced in 2018 that he was unilaterally pulling out of the JCPOA, which had […]
The landmark Iran nuclear agreement signed and sealed in 2015 during Barack Obama’s presidency appears dead and buried and resistant to resuscitation. This assumption, however, is called into question by periodic reports that the United States is trying to revive it, much to Israel’s chagrin. Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, unilaterally withdrew from the […]
To no one’s surprise, Israel has stepped up its efforts to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank, thereby undercutting the already slim prospect of a two-state solution and thumbing its nose at its chief ally, the United States. Israel has been building settlements and roads in the West Bank, populated in the main by […]
Despite an upsurge of anti-Christian incidents in Israel of late, Israel’s Foreign Ministry reportedly intends to boycott an academic conference on that topic scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on June 16. The conference, to which clerics, foreign diplomats and scholars have been invited, is the brainchild of Yisca Harani, an expert on Christianity who […]
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is back in the saddle again after winning his third five-year term as president of Turkey. In a runoff election on May 28, widely regarded as a referendum on his 20-year reign as Turkey’s dominant politician, he handily defeated challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu by a margin of 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent. “We […]
A day after former finance minister Avigdor Liberman warned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would grant ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel grotesquely excessive subsidies in the interests of keeping his coalition intact, Netanyahu proved his point. On May 21, Liberman charged that Netanyahu was “willing to sell out on all values in exchange for power.” What […]
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, distorted reality in an unwise speech he recently delivered at the United Nations marking the 75th anniversary of the nakba, the dispossession of the Palestinians from their lands and homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Speaking at the UN’s General Assembly’s first-ever commemoration of this traumatic event, […]