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 […]
Palestinians in the West Bank have soured on the notion of a two-state solution, says a prominent Palestinian researcher and student of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Palestinian public opinion has hardened against Israel to such a degree in recent years that only one-third of Palestinians endorse such an outcome, according to Khalil Shikaki, the director of […]
It seemed like a bolt out of the blue, but it was actually the end result of arduous negotiations. A day after The New York Times published a story setting out Saudi Arabia’s conditions for making peace with Israel, Saudi Arabia reestablished diplomatic relations with its rival, Iran, after a hiatus of seven years. The news […]