Monthly Archives : May 2018

No deal to be had with the PLO


  President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace team intends to publish its plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians sometime next month, according to reports last week. But recent events in the Palestinian Authority make clear that there is really no point in advancing any plans for peace. Details of the peace plan are unclear. Reports of its purported contents published three weeks…

Read More »

The US, Morocco and Iran’s North African Expansion


  Iran’s response to President Donald Trump’s May 8 announcement that he was withdrawing the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal, has been striking. Iran’s first response, issued by President Hassan Rouhani, was to issue a blanket rejectionof Trump’s move. On Wednesday, Iran revealed its strategy for dealing with the Trump administration. It…

Read More »

Heeding Democratic Warnings


Every day Israel is subjected to a torrent of warnings from Democrats. “You will pay a price for your support of President Donald Trump,” we are told. “He won’t be president forever, and when he’s gone, watch out!” The basic notion, repeated over and over again is clear enough. If Israel doesn’t want to be punished by the next Democratic…

Read More »

Pompeo Presents the Trump Doctrine


Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech Monday at the Heritage Foundation marked a pivotal moment in U.S. foreign policy. Pompeo made several important arguments in the course of his half hour address, in which he set out President Donald Trump’s policy regarding Iran in the wake of his May 8 announcement that he is abandoning Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.…

Read More »

Endgame for the U.S. -Turkey relationship


On Monday, NATO ally Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Washington. The severe step is meant to punish the U.S. for opening an embassy in Jerusalem on Monday. Also Monday, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador to Turkey. It had already withdrawn its ambassador from Tel Aviv. In a speech at Chatham House on Monday, Turkish President Reçep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel a “terror state,”…

Read More »

Israel’s sucker’s game on the Gaza border


  There was a depressing familiarity both to Hamas’s suicide protest operation along Gaza’s border with Israel this week and to Israel’s response to it. Hamas’s jihadist regime in Gaza doesn’t have a lot of cards to play in its continuous war against the Jewish state. But, as we have been seeing since Hamas launched its campaign against the border…

Read More »

The Jerusalem Embassy and the Triumph of Truth


Monday’s ceremony marking the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, Israel, had a clear message: It is time to embrace truth. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, put it plainly when he said, “In December last year, President Donald Trump announced to the world that the U.S. would finally recognize the truth: That Jerusalem is the…

Read More »

Netanyahu’s finest hour


At the start of his cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump discussed his announcement Tuesday afternoon that he is removing the US from his predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and reinstating the nuclear sanctions that were suspended with the deal’s implementation in January 2016. European and other international leaders responded angrily to Trump’s move. The EU’s foreign…

Read More »