Donald Trump hailed it as “an incredible outcome,” alluding to the U.S.-sponsored ceasefire that appears to have ended the fighting between the Turkish army and the Syrian Kurds in a broad swath of northern Syria. Trump’s self-serving analysis of the truce, brokered by U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence in a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip […]
Israel’s increasingly close economic ties with China, its third largest trading partner, pose a problem for its chief ally, the United States. The Trump administration, currently locked in a trade war with China, has warned Israel in recent months that its pivotal relationship with the United States could be adversely affected unless it scales back […]
President Donald Trump’s momentous decision to pull more U.S. forces out of Syria has unleashed a chaotic and confusing roller-coaster of events in the Middle East that could well be detrimental to American interests in the region. Trump, after phoning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, withdrew some 50 U.S. troops from outposts in […]
A top-level Iranian official conveyed a stark New Year’s greeting to Israel as Rosh Hashanah got underway. General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, declared that Iran now possesses the capability to eradicate Israel. “We have managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the impostor Zionist regime,” he boasted. “This sinister regime […]
Two major Middle East leaders addressed the United Nations General Assembly this week and spouted a litany of lies. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey suggested that Israel has been deliberately grabbing land from the Palestinians and likened Israel’s policy on the Gaza Strip to the Nazi mistreatment of Jews during the Holocaust. President Hassan […]
Donald Trump’s bark seems worse than his bite. Having accused Iran of being behind a recent air attack that heavily damaged Saudi Arabia’s petroleum industry, the U.S. president threatened military retaliation. He warned that the United States was “locked and loaded” to respond to the devastating September 14 drone and cruise missile assault on the […]
Israel’s second election in five months has opened the door to the prospect of a legislated program of liberal reforms that could nudge the country toward greater secularization and grant the disaffected Arab minority a far more tangible stake in Israeli society. With the September 17 general election having ended almost as inconclusively as the […]
The timing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to annex the Jordan Valley and the adjacent northern portion of the Dead Sea — areas of the West Bank that Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War and that Palestinians view as an integral part of a future Palestinian state — was hardly accidental. He issued […]
Shortly after Israel’s relatively brief exchange of cross-border fire with Hezbollah on September 1, the prime minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, claimed that Hezbollah is not “a Lebanese problem” but “a regional problem.” In effect, Hariri admitted that Lebanon is powerless to control Hezbollah, an increasingly potent Lebanese Shi’a militia aligned with Syria and Iran, […]
It’s a truism that Hamas is a thorn in Israel’s side. Hamas, an implacable enemy that rejects Israel’s very existence, has fought three wars and countless skirmishes with the Jewish state in the past decade, causing untold hardship to Israelis living near the border and misery to the Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Israel, […]