Now that the recent war in Gaza seems to have come to some kind of end, we’ve arrived at the portion of this cyclical fighting in which each side vies to spin itself as the winner. But amid this jockeying, the position of perhaps the most important player in the drama to come has been…
The determination that the Israeli infantry officer thought to have been captured is in fact dead has changed the trajectory of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, which now appears to be winding down. Military officers were quoted by Walla News and Haaretz late Saturday night as saying that IDF engineers will be…
Mark your calendars: It was on Sunday, July 20, that the momentum turned against Israel. Sometime around noon the wind shifted and the tide began to roll out, and Israel started to lose international sympathy for its Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. Up until Sunday morning Israel had a pretty clear field, owing to a…
From the “If You’ve Only Got Time To Read One Thing” Dept. Actually, I’ve got three items to recommend, each of which casts invaluable light on what’s going on right now in Gaza. In a moment I’ll rank them in order of importance, but first, a comment on what they have in common. The three…
The Forward has my latest column on how Israel and Hamas stumbled through a series of accidents and misunderstandings into a war nobody wanted. Because it’s written for print (unlike this blog) it has limits on length, and even though the paper generously lets me run way over my limit every week, there are inevitably…
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Israel’s expanded operation in Gaza a “genocide” — and moved ahead with plans to join the International Criminal Court. “It’s genocide — the killing of entire families is genocide by Israel against our Palestinian people,” he told a meeting of the Palestinian leadership at his headquarters in the West…
Mourners at the fresh grave of Naftali Fraenkel, one of three Israeli teens murdered, allegedly by members of the Hamas-linked Qawasmeh family of Hebron. / Getty Images Now that the bodies of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers have been found and laid to rest, the crisis is rapidly turning into a wickedly complex, five-sided tug-of-war…
Martin Indyk, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian peace, will formally resign this afternoon and return to his think-tank job at the Brookings Institution, the Associated Press reports. If there was talk of a renewed American effort to reignite peace talks, this is probably a bad sign. It’s probably just coincidence that the news…
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