WASHINGTON (JTA) – Five Arab nations cut ties with Qatar on Monday, escalating a long-simmering competition for preeminence in the region into actions that could set the stage for war. Saudi Arabia, which is leading the charge, has cut off Qatar’s only land crossing – and what one Saudi-friendly estimate says is as much as 40…
This should have been Bibi Netanyahu’s big year at the United Nations. World revulsion toward ISIS was at a peak, putting Islamist terrorism at center stage. President Obama, long derided by Netanyahu and his allies as a naïve peacenik, had suddenly become a wartime president. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was, at last, the least of the…
Getty Images Israel’s consul for public affairs in New York, Gil Lainer, has offered a spirited reply to my June 10 column, “How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War In Gaza.” As a devout Zionist, I’m glad to see a strong, cogent defense of the state of Israel. Unfortunately, as Groucho Marx once put…
CAIRO – An Egyptian court on Monday banned deposed President Mohamed Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood and ordered its funds seized, a crippling strike in the campaign to crush the Islamist movement. The case was brought by a lawyer from the leftist Tagammu party on the grounds of protecting Egyptians from violence. It was not stated if…
Were there any satisfaction to be gotten from saying “I told you so” about Egypt, Israel would have every reason today to be a satisfied country instead of a worried one. While just about everyone else was giddily celebrating the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the wondrous “Arab Spring,” Israeli government circles were among the…
Palestinian Islamist group Hamas urged Egypt on Wednesday to reopen the border crossing with the Gaza Strip that was closed after a suspected militant attack on Egyptian policemen near the frontier earlier this week. Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has ruled Gaza since 2007 and has an uneasy relationship with Egypt’s new army-backed…
Israel’s Walla News site offers a fascinating and, I think, crucial insight (in Hebrew) into the turmoil in Egypt and Syria. It’s by Dror Ze’evi, a professor of Turkish and Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. He writes that the two conflicts, however similar or related they might appear on the surface,…
At the risk of sounding ethnocentric, the current earthquake in Egypt has enormous implications for the well-being of Israel, and not in a good way. Put simply, the course of action that seems self-evidently proper to right-minded Americans — punishing the Egyptian military, ending military cooperation, suspending aid — will almost certainly have a catastrophic…
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