06/20/2018
President Donald Trump’s Middle East mediators, senior advisor Jared Kushner and chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt, are due in the Middle East this week to discuss aspects of their proposal for peace between Israel and the Palestinians with regional leaders. Their visit will include stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel. They will not be visiting with Palestinian…
06/15/2018
We didn’t learn this week whether North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. Only time will tell. But we did learn that US President Donald Trump knows how to negotiate. All of the negotiations experts insist the opposite is true. “How could they agree to a presidential summit without first guaranteeing its end product?” they sigh, knowingly. “Trump’s showmanship…
Since the blow-up between President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at last week’s G-7 summit in Canada, the default position of the anti-Trump commentariat has been to compare Trump’s angry response to Trudeau, the leader of the U.S.’s closest ally, on the one hand, to his gracious treatment of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, on the other…
06/12/2018
Israel was established 70 years ago. But June 25 will be the first time the Jewish state has ever been the destination for a British royal visit. For 70 years, the British Royal family has boycotted Israel and so refused to officially come to terms with its very existence. It isn’t that Israel has been completely overlooked. While Queen Elizabeth II, who…
06/08/2018
In the past month, the leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements in America have taken steps that change the basic contours of their movements. These steps portend disaster for them and for their members. Over the past two decades, the major disputes among and within American Jewish groups have revolved around two main issues. First, they faced the challenge…
06/07/2018
French President Emmanuel Macron showed Wednesday that he continues to take a flaky approach to international diplomacy. Shortly after the then-39-year-old took office last year, he decided that the best way to establish his seriousness as an international player was by squeezing President Donald Trump’s hand super-duper hard during their first meeting, which took place at a NATO conference in May 2017.…
06/04/2018
The North Korean media reported Sunday that Syrian President Bashar Assad is due in Pyongyang for an official state visit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Much of the instant media commentary regarding the announcement claimed that it is nothing more than a testament to the deep, long-standing ties between the two isolated nations, whose rogue behavior has caused both to be…
06/01/2018
Israel has a problem with its security brass. And this week we received several reminders that the situation needs to be dealt with. Since the Hamas regime in Gaza announced in March that it was planning to have civilians swarm the border with Israel, through this week’s Hamas-Islamic Jihad mortar and rocket assault on southern Israel, the IDF General Staff…
05/29/2018
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…
05/26/2018
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…