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 […]
David Friedman, the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, has been shooting off his mouth again, issuing statements at odds with American policy. An outspoken supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he recently claimed that “settlements are a part of Israel,” a loaded comment that surely embarrasses the United States. “I think that was […]
The Iran nuclear agreement, the object of Donald Trump’s withering wrath, could well be in jeopardy. The U.S. president has denigrated the accord, signed by Iran and six major powers in Geneva in the summer of 2015, as “one of the worst deals I’ve ever seen.” Furthermore, he has threatened to abandon it unless it is […]
Draft- dodging seems to come naturally to the ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, community in Israel. While tens of thousands of new recruits are called up annually to do their national service, risking life and limb to protect their fellow citizens, the vast majority of able-bodied haredi men shamelessly shirk their duty, claiming that their Torah studies […]
Syrian government spokespersons have steadfastly denied deploying chemical weapons in the ongoing civil war, but these claims have always rung hollow. Last spring, as per usual, the Syrian regime shamelessly stuck to its script by denying responsibility for a chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a rebel-held town in northern Syria. The strike killed 83 civilians […]
The caliphate is crumbling. Islamic State’s much-vaunted state-building project in Iraq and Syria, which attracted regional and international support and tens of thousands of recruits from the far corners of the globe, is tottering and on the cusp of collapse. Since July, Islamic State has lost two more cities in Iraq, the loss of which […]