To Israel’s discredit, Yuli Edelstein, the Speaker of parliament, has formally rejected a request from Christian Arab parliamentarian Hanna Swaid to place a Christmas tree in a prominent place in the Knesset. “I do not believe it appropriate to order the erection of a Christmas tree as you requested,” wrote Edelstein on Dec. 26, […]
It would appear that the American Studies Association is striving to be more Catholic than the pope himself, so to speak. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has publicly rejected a boycott of Israel per se, while supporting a boycott of products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Yet a […]
Israel has mounted a serious diplomatic and public relations campaign to shape the contours of a future comprehensive agreement on Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Having lost the battle to toughen the interim accord — which was signed on Nov. 24 in Geneva and is widely seen as a step in the right direction to resolve […]
Shortly after the eruption of the popular uprising in Syria, in March 2011, the prime minister of neighboring Lebanon, Najib Mikati, announced he would hew to a policy of neutrality, or “disassociation”, so that his nation would not be dragged into the bloody mayhem of that conflagration. Lebanon, he declared, would support neither the Baathist […]
The six-month interim accord signed by the world’s major powers and Iran in Geneva on Nov. 24 paves the way for a comprehensive agreement that may well permanently freeze, if not dismantle, Iran’s militarized nuclear program. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, having pressed for a much tougher outcome that would have neutralized Iran as a nuclear […]
So near, yet so far. As recently as a week ago, speculation was rife that Iran and the world powers were on the cusp of reaching an historic agreement on Iran’s contentious nuclear program. Such was the upbeat mood that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif ventured to say that a deal could be signed at […]
A year ago, on Nov. 14, Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defence, an eight-day offensive designed to restore a measure of peace along its volatile border with the Gaza Strip. Israel and the Palestinians promised to observe a ceasefire in the wake of the fighting, and although there has been a significant drop in the […]
One of the world’s most repressive theocratic regimes, Saudi Arabia, has won membership in the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, along with such repressive countries as Cuba and China. The UN General Assembly, much to its discredit, made that egregious decision on Nov. 12. Saudi Arabia’s application should have been denied because of its abysmal record on […]
Radical Islamists from Germany have been pouring into Syria to fight in the civil war, the German newsmagazine Focus reported recently. Disquietingly enough, some of the Islamic fundamentalist fighters who’ve joined the rebel movement trying to unseat Syrian President Bashar Assad are German Christian converts to Islam. This may come as news to most people, […]
Several months ago, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shuttled one from one Middle East capital to another in an attempt to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, he urged the Israeli government to seriously consider a revamped Arab League peace plan as a basis for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. As […]