JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
J.T. Rogers and Bartlett Sher always knew their history play had a lot to teach us today. But they never wanted it to be quite this relevant. “When we first did the piece, that was 2016, and as much as it was about Palestine and Israel, it was really about Republicans and Democrats,” said Sher,…
Yasser Arafat once insisted on cutting up Dennis Ross’s chicken during a dinner; Ross was then head of the American effort to arbitrate peace between Israel and Palestine. At the time, it seemed like a sign of hospitality and hope — Ross joked that Arafat had “a Jewish mother syndrome.” These days, after the Human…
2020 was a breakthrough year for Middle Eastern peace. The Abraham Accords have warmed relations between Israel and a number of Muslim majority nations, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sudan, Bahrain and Morocco. For too long American, Israeli, and international leaders indulged Palestinian demands without insisting on much from their leaders, swallowing the propaganda…
Twenty-four years after the signing of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, and after two concerted peace efforts (Camp David 2000 and Olmert-Abbas in 2008) to negotiate a final-status agreement, Oslo’s two main flaws are painfully apparent. One flaw is that the Oslo menu for final-status negotiations comprises two fundamentally different types of issues, one of…
Judging from President Trump’s first months in office and from his recent Middle East trip, he is determined to bring about some sort of Israeli-Palestinian agreement. He believes that it is possible, but he has not yet figured out how. His aides are rumored to be working on a proposed U.S. “agenda.” His aspiration deserves…
Most people knew Shimon Peres, who died on September 28, as a president and prime minister with a 60-year career in public service and a dedication to building peace in the Middle East. But to a handful of Israelis, he was just a neighbor. “Shimon Peres is the guy who would bring trash down on…
(JTA) — Mahmoud Abbas assured Dutch Jews that he neither intends to abandon the Oslo Accords nor insist on the absorption of millions of Palestinians into Israel. “We never said we were going to cancel the Oslo Accords,” Abbas said Friday during a meeting near The Hague with members of the Center for Information and…
“Palestinians cut security coordination with Israel”? Really? This looks like another one of those cases where the press gets out ahead of the story. The initial headlines (here, here) said the Palestinians have cut security coordination between their forces and Israel’s. The stories under the headlines said that actually the PLO’s central council had either…
