As Israel celebrated its 7oth anniversary on April 19 by the Hebrew calendar — the day the doomed but heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising erupted in 1943 — it grappled with a paradox. Never has Israel been as militarily strong, yet so insecure. Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East, with a humming […]
The United States is torn by indecision in Syria, and recent events illustrate this pattern of confusion. On April 7, Syrian government forces launched a chemical attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, and it immediately placed the United States on the horns of a dilemma. President Donald Trump was reluctant to intervene, in line with his […]
Mission Accomplished, U.S. President Donald Trump boasted in a triumphant Twitter post on April 14, resorting to a discredited phrase appropriated by President George W. Bush in May 2003 to declare victory in Iraq after the controversial American invasion. Trump, hardly concerned by the negative comparison it would inevitably evoke, trotted it out less than […]
What now? What should the Israeli government do with about 35,000 Africans who have sunk roots in Israel and want to stay but who are being pressured to leave? Whether they’re described as migrant workers or asylum-seekers, the Eritreans and Sudanese who have entered Israel illegally since 2005 have become an embarrassing problem for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. […]
Round two of the Palestinians’ March of Return, which took place on April 6, unfolded almost exactly the same as the first one on March 30. Twenty thousand Palestinians Arabs converged on a tent encampment in the Gaza Strip adjacent to Israel’s border fence to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza and to call for the […]
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently surprised and angered millions of Arabs when he implicitly recognized Israel’s existence and indicated that the establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel could be mutually beneficial. Prince Mohammed, the 32-year-old heir to the Saudi throne, made his views known in an interview with The Atlantic while […]
The March of Return, which unfolded on March 30 along Israel’s border fence with the Gaza Strip and resulted in the deaths of 15 Palestinians — the biggest Palestinian death toll in a single day since the 2014 Gaza war — was exploited by Hamas to exert diplomatic pressure on Israel and to highlight the […]
When people like Ronald Lauder publicly worry about the political and social direction in which Israel is heading, it is high time for Israeli leaders, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to pause and take stock. On March 18, The New York Times published a thoughtful op-ed piece by Lauder, the president of the World Jewish […]
Israel’s embassy in Jordan — one of only two Arab countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations — still remains closed, eight months after the Israeli ambassador and her staff fled Amman following an eruption of shooting during which two Jordanians were killed. This incident brought Israel’s important relationship with Jordan to a virtual standstill […]
Canada’s only overseas “representative office” is located in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority, and is headed by a Canadian diplomat who joined the Department of External Affairs 31 years ago. Douglas Scott Proudfoot, the Representative of Canada to the PA, has been in charge of the Representative […]