The Turkish parliament on Oct. 2 passed a motion by a margin of 298-88 authorizing its forces to be deployed in Iraq and Syria in the case of a threat to national security. The bill, submitted by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, also allows for foreign troops to transit through Turkey and calls for the establishment […]
On Feb. 12, 1942, the assistant superintendent of the Palestine Police Force in Tel Aviv, Geoffrey Morton, burst into a small flat on Mizrachi Bet Street and cornered Avraham (Yair) Stern, a Polish-born fugitive whose militant Zionist group had launched a war of liberation against British colonial rule in Palestine. Within minutes, if not seconds, […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in an upbeat mood as he turned up at a press conference in New York City on September 28. One of the topics at hand was his upcoming meeting with India’s newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, who’s considered friendly toward Israel. “We are very excited by the prospects of […]
At his show trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann coyly described himself as “just a small cog” in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt lent credence to this warped view, claiming in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published a year after his execution in […]
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s lead negotiator at the failed peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, has issued a warning that Israel should heed. Livni, the minister of justice in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, said that Israel has two choices: “Either we resume negotiations with the Palestinians to reach a permanent agreement, winning the world’s […]
They are usually small in area and population, ethnically and religiously homogenous, well-off and situated in a peaceful part of the world, alongside neighbours who have no designs on them. What are they? Countries which go virtually unnoticed internationally. Yet they can be quite interesting. The quintessential example? Uruguay. A settler state like its big […]
The ghost of legendary Jewish entrepreneur David Sassoon lingers over Mumbai, India’s commercial center. One hundred and fifty years after his death, several landmarks and synagogues in this pulsating, cosmopolitan city bear either his family name or owe their existence to his philanthropy. Sassoon (1792-1864), the scion of a distinguished Sephardi clan from Iraq, settled […]
The latest phase in the global armed struggle against Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway organization that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East, has begun with a flash of shock and awe. More than a month after bombing Islamic State strongholds in northern Iraq, the United States has opened a new front in the […]
In a landmark court verdict whose ramifications may be of seminal importance in the battle against terrorism, a federal jury in New York City has concluded that a major financial institution in the Middle East, Arab Bank, supported terrorism. The judgment, handed down on Sept. 22, is significant. It’s said to be the first civil […]
On Sept. 20, for the first time in history, two Chinese warships docked at Iran’s principal naval port of Bandar Abbas, in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the gateway for at least 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas shipments. The ships are taking part in four days of joint naval exercises. One of […]