Tensions along Israel’s tense border with Lebanon have been escalating of late. Over the past four months, Hezbollah — the Lebanese Shi’a militia which has repeatedly confronted Israel in armed clashes since its founding in the early 1980s — has grown increasingly bolder and dangerously overconfident. Hezbollah, a proxy of Iran and an ally of […]
Six months after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to overhaul Israel’s judiciary, thereby setting off recurring nation-wide protests, the debate over his contentious and controversial plan is still boiling over furiously and has yet to be resolved by compromise. The ongoing turmoil has split the country into two warring camps. This does not […]
The Syrian government recently revoked the British Broadcast Corporation’s media accreditation after it published a disturbing report delineating the incriminating links between the illegal Captagon drug trade, President Bashar al-Assad and his family, and Syria’s armed forces. The Syrian Ministry of Information denounced the BBC report as “biased and misleading … based on statements from […]
Israel’s brief offensive in Jenin, its biggest military intervention in the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002, was months in the making. Jenin and its adjacent Palestinian refugee camp, one of 19 such camps in the West Bank, were targeted because they are bastions of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation of […]
Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his chief foreign policy objective in the Middle East is to normalize bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia and thereby expand the membership of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which currently consists of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. The Israeli prime minister claims that Saudi Arabia’s inclusion would effectively […]
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 […]