Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, rarely a month has gone by without an upsurge of fresh fighting. These clashes have pitted Israel against Iranian-backed Palestinian factions in Gaza whose long-term goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. […]
Trips by two high-ranking Republican politicians to Israel in the past week add credence to a recent Gallup survey that Republicans in the United States are more likely to support Israel than Democrats. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a likely contender […]
Israel is a miracle by any yardstick. Resurrected after two millennia, it was reborn after the Holocaust, the greatest disaster in Jewish history, and in the teeth of bitter Arab hostility. According to the Hebrew calendar, Israel will mark its 75th anniversary on April 25. In terms of the secular Gregorian calendar, Israel reemerged after […]
Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of Iran’s deposed monarch and an Iranian opposition leader, turned up in Israel on April 17 and became the most high-profile Iranian ever to set foot in the Jewish state on a public visit. Pahlavi, whose father Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ruled Iran until the 1979 Islamic revolution, arrived in […]
Since returning to power late last December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that one of Israel’s major foreign policy objectives is to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and thereby enlarge the 2020 Abraham accords and reduce the scope and seriousness of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia — a […]
As Israelis celebrated Passover during the first week of April, Iran — Israel’s deadliest enemy — opened a new phase in its protracted struggle against Israel. The Islamic fundamentalist regime in Tehran, having long sought to bring its conflict with Israel to Israel’s borders, has promoted the idea of using Palestinian and Lebanese surrogates to […]
Judging by the most recent announcement from Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry, Israel has no right to defend itself and must grin and bear it when attacked by an enemy. Conveniently ignoring Palestinian rocket attacks at Israel from Lebanese soil, Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry announced it would file a complaint to the United Nations Security Council over Israel’s […]
Israel’s low-intensity, undeclared shadow war with Iran is intensifying as Israel reportedly prepares to launch air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities in the not-too-distant future. Since the beginning of the year, Israel has escalated its attacks on Iranian military sites in Syria — Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world — and bombed military factories […]
A deadly exchange of fire between U.S. forces and Iranian-backed militias in Syria last week underscored the reality that the United States and Iran are virtually at war today in that bloodied nation. Toward the end of March, a self-destructing drone struck an American military base in the northeastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour, killing […]
Israel and the United States are the best of friends and allies. Indeed, Israel is probably the United States’ closest, most reliable ally in the Middle East. Periodically, however, differences arise and sparks fly, creating something of a crisis atmosphere. And then the tempest subsides, as if nothing had happened. This is precisely what occurred […]