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 […]
Israel’s constitutional crisis intensified on March 26 after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who had called for a halt to his government’s draconian plan to overhaul the judiciary. He was the first minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet to propose such a plan, and he paid a heavy price for his forthright opinion. […]
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, is an embarrassment to himself and the nation he serves. He is, unfortunately, one of the new faces of Israel. Only two weeks after wantonly advocating the destruction of the Palestinian West Bank town of Huwara, where Jewish settlers ran amok late last month after the murder of two Israeli […]
Twenty years ago, on March 19, the second Gulf War in 12 years erupted as the United States launched devastating “shock and awe” air strikes in Baghdad in a prelude to its massive ground invasion of Iraq a day later. The American military campaign came on the heels of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks that […]