Call him, if you will, Mr. Asterisk. Within a period of only four months, Benjamin Netanyahu has earned two asterisks next to his name, one of which he would dearly like to delete from the record. Last summer, he surpassed David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Netanyahu won his first election in 1996 and […]
Nothing good can come out of the announcement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on November 18 that the United States no longer considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be in breach of international law. Washington’s shift, the latest in a series of announcements by President Donald Trump’s administration reconfiguring U.S. policy on […]
Prior to his meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House on November 13, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan explained that the purpose of his visit was to “start a new era over common security issues” with the United States. “We are in agreement with Trump to solve problems and develop our ties despite the […]
The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg issued a fair and judicious ruling on November 12, which, predictably enough, was immediately denounced by annexationists in Israel who equate sovereign Israeli territory with Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Golan Heights. In a decision upholding a 2015 ruling by the European Commission, the court’s […]
In recent weeks, Israel has issued a slew of warnings concerning the possibility of an attack from Iran, its arch enemy. Iran, which once had diplomatic relations with Israel, turned against the Jewish state in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution. In the past couple of years, Iran’s hostility has spiked under the impact […]
Israel is facing a sobering reality in its bilateral relations with the United States, its most important ally. Several of the candidates running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination have expressed a willingness to withhold U.S. military aid to Israel should circumstances warrant such a drastic decision. For the past three years, Israel has received $3.8 […]
As hundreds of American troops hastily withdrew from bases in northeastern Syrian late last month on orders from U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian military police almost immediately took over these installations on behalf of Russia’s chief ally in the Middle East, Syria. Shortly afterwards, Russian and Turkish forces began patrolling a former Kurdish enclave in […]
Five years after announcing the formation of a caliphate in Iraq and Syria from the pulpit of the Al Nuri Grand mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. Baghdadi, with a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, died of self-inflicted wounds on October 26 when […]
The 25th anniversary of the historic peace treaty between Israel and Jordan went unnoticed in both countries in a telling admission of their increasingly frosty relations. Implemented on October 26, 1994 in an upbeat ceremony in the Arava desert about a year after Israel and the Palestinians announced the Oslo accord, it was Israel’s second […]
Israel is wallowing in a state of political paralysis. For the past six months, in the wake of two inconclusive elections, the country has been adrift, bereft of a stable government. It’s a reflection of the deep divisions in Israeli society. The current situation began when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to form a […]