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 […]
The Middle East has kept Barack Obama extremely busy, if not preoccupied, since he assumed office in 2009. Obama has had to grapple with a multitude of challenges in this turbulent region, from Israel’s perennial struggle with the Palestinians and Iran’s quest for an atomic bomb to the revolutionary Arab Spring rebellions that have toppled […]
Israel is widely regarded by friends and foes alike as a Western state, but is it really Western? On the face of it, Israel is quintessentially Western, a modern, developed, democratic nation dedicated to and bound by the rule of law. And like classic Western states, Israel has a post-industrial economy, a bourgeois way of […]
On Oct. 6, waves of Egyptians descended on Cairo’s Tahrir Square to celebrate the 40th anniversary of what is widely regarded as Egypt’s “victory” over Israel in the three-week Yom Kippur War. When Islamist supporters of the ousted and now imprisoned president, Mohamed Morsi, converged on the square, the symbolic heart of the 2011 revolution, […]