I started reading The New York Times as a university student, which means that a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I discovered it decades ago. I enjoy reading the Times mainly because its coverage of international news and American domestic affairs is superior, a cut above the tepid and often superficial […]
When I dropped into the cool and elegant marble lobby of the Peace Hotel, an exquisite Art Deco building overlooking the Huangpu River in central Shanghai, I was only vaguely aware of its storied history. Although I did not know it was once called the Cathay Hotel, I knew it had been built by one […]
A little more than two months after succeeding Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, Naftali Bennett will have his first opportunity to meet U.S. President Joe Biden. They will confer at the White House on August 26. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the visit would “strengthen the enduring partnership between the United States and Israel, reflect […]
Alma Rachel Heckman has written an original and important book concerning the role that radicalized Jews played in Morocco’s struggle for independence from France and in newly independent Morocco. The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford University Press) is billed as the first volume of its kind. These Jews, members of […]
Israel and Poland are at war again, figuratively speaking at least. For the second time since 2018, they are embroiled in a nasty war of words, which have had an unsettling effect on their bilateral relations. This increasingly bitter diplomatic row revolves around a Polish parliamentary bill which drastically limits the ability of Holocaust survivors […]
We’re back to square one in Afghanistan. Once again, this benighted country is under the thrall of a regime inspired and guided by a radical, austere and repressive form of Islam. Nearly 20 years after U.S. forces deposed the Taliban, it is firmly back in power. What a humiliating, head-spinning reversal of fortune for the […]
When Joe Biden became the first American president to recognize the Armenian genocide, the United States joined a select list of about 30 countries that already had recognized the Ottoman Turkish massacres of 1915. Reacting to Biden’s move this past April, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement recognizing the “terrible suffering and tragedy of the […]
A report released by Human Rights Watch on August 12 reinforces the widely-held perception/belief that Hamas committed war crimes during the Gaza border war with Israel this past May. Hamas, the governing authority in the Gaza Strip since 2006, fired 4,360 unguided rockets and mortars at Israel during the hostilities. Ninety percent were downed by […]
Israel’s relationship with Morocco is growing. Israel renewed bilateral relations with Morocco last December, following its normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, all of which were brokered by the United States. The Israeli government initially compared its rapprochement with Morocco with that of the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain. Morocco, however, presented the […]
“This is an important milestone in Arab-Israeli relations,” said Anwar Gargash, the then United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, last August, just a day after Israel and the UAE reached a historic normalization agreement. He was absolutely right. Israel’s accord with the UAE, its third peace treaty with an Arab state in […]