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, […]
A progressive Zionist voice rang out clearly and strongly on Oct. 6, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, as the inaugural national conference of JSpace Canada took place at the University of Toronto. Founded in 2010 by members of the First Narayever Congregation, JSpace Canada provides a boldly alternative voice […]
The Middle East as we know it today was essentially formed during World War I, when Britain, in conjunction with France, secretly carved out the region at the expense of the tottering Ottoman Empire and in violation of a promise to support Arab autonomy within a greater Arab state. While an Oxford University-trained archeologist named […]
Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird told the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 30 that Iran’s current charm offensive is more show than substance. “Sound bites do not remove threats to global security,” he said in a reference to Iran’s militarized nuclear program. Canada will judge Iran on the basis of its actions rather than […]
Forty years ago, I saw my first corpse. Or rather corpses. In October of 1973, with the Yom Kippur War raging, I joined an Israeli government press tour of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. I was a freelance journalist in Jaffa and jumped at the opportunity to visit […]
Twenty years ago this month, the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the most protracted and debilitating disputes in the Middle East, finally seemed on the verge of being resolved through peaceful means. On Sept. 13, 1993, Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, hesitantly shook hands with his arch nemesis, Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the […]
It would be foolhardy to cast aspersions on the recent agreement reached by the United States and Russia to dismantle and destroy Syria’s formidable arsenal of chemical weapons. The accord, hammered out by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Sept. 14 and formalized by the United […]
As the crisis in Syria intensifies, riveting the world, the United States appears to have painted itself into a corner. A year ago, President Barack Obama explicitly warned Syria that the use of chemical weapons against its citizens would represent an intolerable “red line” for the United States. Yet Washington has done remarkably little since […]