The Only Path to Peace is Prosperity, Not Hamas
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress on July 24 at what promises to be an historic and controversial moment. Netanyahu’s speech allows him to “share the Israeli government’s vision to defend its democracy, combat terrorism and establish a just and lasting peace in the region,” said House Speaker Mike […]
Why Jerusalem Remains Relatively Quiet during the Gaza War
Recently I called up an Arab friend in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Kufr ‘Aqab. Having just returned from Israeli military reserve duty, I felt out of the loop and wanted to know what’s happening, especially why East Jerusalem’s Arab population seemed to react to this war differently than it had in previous rounds of […]
Spanish Bull: Sanchez and Recognition of a Palestinian State
During the Middle Ages, Jews were persecuted and expelled, repeatedly at times, from every European country – but the one the world remembers most is the expulsion from Spain in 1492 of what had been the world’s largest Jewish community. This ancient wound was very much in the foreground when on May 28, 2024 Spanish […]
The Failure of the “Economic Peace” Model in the Middle East
On September 26, 2021, Israel’s then Prime Minister Naftali Bennet took the podium at the UN General Assembly and laid out a grand vision for the Middle East. It was a modernist, advanced, technological future (as befitted Bennet, a former high-tech entrepreneur) in which Israel would play a major role – focused upon a world […]
A Multinational Authority for “the Day After” in Gaza
Hamas’s terrorist attack of October 7 and the Israeli, American, and Iranian/Iranian proxy responses have already fundamentally changed the Middle East. The priority now rightly is on ending the fighting, yet history shows that what comes after a war is as important as combat results in securing a lasting peace. To ensure that an attack […]
Turkey and Israel Ties at Low Ebb, But Could Recover
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a rocky relationship with Israel and bilateral relations have currently reached a nadir. But Erdoğan pursues a transactional foreign policy in general and, if interests re-align, he could once again restore robust relations with Israel. A long-time supporter of Hamas, Erdoğan bitterly criticized Israel’s 2008 incursion into Gaza that […]
The Empathy Gap
One of the most striking characteristics of the war in Gaza is a severe deficit of empathy. Israelis and Palestinians indicate that they have no emotion left for the other side. The stress would be too unbearable. In addition, each side tends to dehumanize the other, deny the other’s suffering and promise vengeance and violence […]
Israel and the World After October 7 – An Interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy
ParisThere are few men who feel the pain of distant upheavals as acutely as Bernard-Henri Lévy, 75, a French philosopher, filmmaker and public intellectual. Born to a wealthy Sephardic family in French Algeria, he cut his teeth as an international activist in his support for the war of secession against Pakistan by the erstwhile East […]
Protest, Colonization, and the Ukrainian Nation
Many observers of the pro-Gaza/Hamas demonstrations at college campuses throughout the U.S. have been taken aback by the rhetoric and behavior of the protestors and their advocates. Masked faces and widespread refusals to self-identify display the protestors’ reluctance to face real consequences for their actions. What is most troubling, however, is the contention that Israeli […]
No End to National Security Surprises
The surprise was total and horrific—Israeli men, women and children brutally killed or taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Israel’s vaunted intelligence services failed to provide adequate warning, its military—the Israeli Defense Forces—failed to provide adequate security, and Israeli political leadership remained cocooned in their comfortable assumptions about risks to Israeli security posed by Palestinians in […]
