06/09/2017
US President Donald Trump has been attacked by his ubiquitous critics for his apparent about-face on the crisis surrounding Qatar. In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump sided firmly with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the other Sunni states that cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and instituted an air and land blockade of the sheikhdom on Monday.…
06/06/2017
How can we explain the international community’s indifference to Palestinian suffering? Every day, angry bands of protesters burn the flag of Israel, call for the destruction of the Jewish state and insist that Israel and its Jewish citizens be shunned from polite society and thrown out of the global economy all in the name of opposing “the Occupation.” Although the…
06/02/2017
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump bowed to the foreign policy establishment and betrayed his voters. He signed a presidential waiver postponing the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem for yet another six months. Ahead of Trump’s move, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a last-ditch bid to convince Trump to move the embassy to Jerusalem. But it was not…
05/30/2017
In US academic tradition, university administrators choose commencement speakers they believe embody the zeitgeist of their institutions and as such, will be able to inspire graduating students to take that spirit with them into the world outside. In this context, it makes perfect sense that Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy at City…
05/26/2017
On Thursday, less than 48 hours after US President Donald Trump completed his successful visit to Israel, his chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was back in town. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson set the tone for Greenblatt’s mission when he told reporters aboard Air Force One that during his visit, Trump “was putting a lot of pressure” on Prime…
05/23/2017
Israelis are greeting US President Donald Trump with cautious optimism. Their optimism stems from President Trump’s iconoclasm. Trump won the US presidential election based on a campaign of rejecting the prevailing narratives on US domestic and foreign policy that have long held sway among the elites. These narratives dictate and limit the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the US. Unfortunately,…
05/19/2017
The United States is sailing in uncharted waters today as the intelligence-security community wages an all-but-declared rebellion against President Donald Trump. Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein’s decision on Wednesday to appoint former FBI director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating allegations of “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign…
05/16/2017
Eight years from now, China will outstrip the US as the world’s largest economy. In three years, Israeli GDP per capita will outstrip Japan’s. These two data points are useful to bear in mind as we consider the Trump administration’s sudden decision to go retro and embrace the Clinton administration’s foreign policy on Israel from the early 1990s. When then…
05/12/2017
In private conversations over the past week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has complained bitterly about American Jewish billionaire Ronald Lauder. According to media reports, Lauder played a key role in convincing US President Donald Trump that he can reach “the ultimate deal” with the PLO and Israel. Netanyahu is surely right that Lauder shouldn’t be acting like he knows what’s…
05/05/2017
By all accounts, US President Donald Trump is a friend of the Jewish state. It is due to Trump’s heartfelt support for Israel and the US-Israel alliance that his meeting Wednesday with PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas at the White House is most discouraging. By meeting with Abbas, and committing himself to working toward achieving a peace deal between Abbas and…