It was a visit like no other in Israel’s history. Forty years ago, on November 19 at 7:59 p.m., a Boeing 707, code-named Egypt 01, landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, one minute ahead of schedule. Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, had arrived in Israel, the first Arab head of state to set foot in the Jewish […]
Earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu singled out Iran as the source of most of Israel’s security concerns. Speaking at a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires — a terrorist attack which claimed the lives of 29 Israeli diplomats and local workers and which was […]
Israel’s next general election is about two years away, but the newly elected leader of the center-left Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, is already maneuvering for advantage. Gabbay, who was elected to his post in July, has moved the Labor Party rightward in the hope of siphoning votes away from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud […]
Massoud Barzani, the longtime president of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, announced his resignation on October 29 in a tacit acknowledgement that his historic gambit for Kurdish statehood had failed spectacularly. In the face of Iraqi and regional animosity, Barzani — the head of the Kurdish Democratic Party — went ahead with […]
Conditions are not yet ripe for Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a peace agreement, but in the meantime, the Israeli government should adopt pragmatic measures to ensure that final-status talks will be possible in the future, says Amnon Reshef, the founder of Commanders for Israel’s Security, a non-partisan Israeli organization that promotes a two-state […]
The recent fall of the northern Syrian city of Raqqa is one more indicator that the days of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria are numbered. Raqqa, its self-proclaimed capital since 2014, was captured by U.S.-backed Arab and Kurdish forces on October 17 after four months of intense battles, which reduced much of it to rubble […]
President Donald Trump’s risky decision on October 13 not to certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement raises several troubling questions. Is he recklessly playing with fire by jeopardizing an accord that placed strict and verifiable limits on Iran’s budding nuclear program? Is he giving Iran a pretext to resume its quest for a nuclear arsenal? […]
The Palestinians have signed yet another reconciliation agreement, but will it last? In the past decade, the two rival factions of the Palestinian national movement, Fatah and Hamas, have reached multiple unity agreements, only to see them dissolve in mutual acrimony within weeks or months. Can the latest one, brokered by Egypt’s General Intelligence Service […]
Israel is emerging as the most crowded country in the Western world, according to one of its leading environmentalists. “The elephant in the room is over-population,” says Alon Tal, the former chairman of Israel’s Green Party and the founder of the Israeli Union for Environmental Defence and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Tal, the […]
Kurdish independence is long overdue, as U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (New York) declared the other day in hailing the outcome of the September 25th referendum on Kurdish independence in the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. As he put it, “The historic vote in Iraqi Kurdistan should be recognized and respected by the world, and the Kurdish […]