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Sunday was Jerusalem Day in Israel, a holiday once again observed by thousands of young Jews who chanted as they marched through Arab neighborhoods conquered in the 1967 Six Day War. The tension is always highest in the narrow passages of the largely Palestinian Old City. So much so that the city’s police this year [...]
A flurry of gestures toward the Palestinian leadership suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his new role as leader of a center-right government, is warming toward the resumption of peace talks — or at least giving the appearance of warming; call it a rosy glow rising from a pair of announcements on Monday. [...]
By unveiling a new governing coalition that includes the centrist Kadima party, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only called off a national election he had just set for early September, he also re-calibrated the outlook of Israel‘s political establishment. In the bargain, he spared his defense minister Ehud Barak, his former commander and current wingman [...]
Update: The late-night, last-minute deal to avert early elections by bringing the centrist Kadima party into the ruling coalition — announced in the early morning hours of Tuesday in Israel — comes with an agreement to pass some sort of governance reforms. ”The parties pledge to work towards fundamentally changing Israel’s government system and establishing [...]
The effort to glean insights into the mind of Benjamin Netanyahu by examining the views of his extraordinary father reached a new level with word that Benzion Netanyahu had died, at age 102, in his Jerusalem home early Monday. A historian of Jews in medieval Spain, the elder Netanyahu spent most of his academic career [...]
The former head of Shin Bet minced no words. “I have no faith in the current leadership of the State of Israel, which is supposed to lead us in the event of a major event, such as a war with Iran or a regional war,” Yuval Diskin told a group of retired security officials on [...]
The news out of Jordan almost does not qualify as news: Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh resigned Thursday. It happened all of a sudden and without explanation, but it’s something that happens so frequently in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan that his successor, Fayez al-Tarawneh, is the fourth person to hold the office in the space [...]
The Israeli military chief of staff says he doubts Iran will try for a nuclear weapon, but that persuading its leaders against the option requires a credible threat of attack. Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, who heads the Israel Defense Forces, made the remarks in an interview with the Hebrew language daily Haaretz, offering a far [...]
In 2003, Iran set aside the portion of its nuclear program devoted to developing a weapon. That was the assessment of the American intelligence community, which among other things eavesdropped on hardliners complaining to one another about the decision. But why did Iran stop?
