As the budding protest movement in Turkey against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan struggles to gain a foothold, Israel is watching the developments with some measure of ambivalence. On the one hand, Erdogan has led Turkey away from a close alliance with Israel, using his perch to castigate Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians…
Now that the White House has officially acknowledged the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons, the question is no longer whether we get involved in the Syrian civil war, but how. This represents a victory for the smallish, outspoken group of liberal interventionists who have been arguing for an American military role, while trying to…
Weeks before Turkish protesters took to the streets, alcohol fueled the flames of revolt. It was not drunkenness, however, that turned up the political heat; rather, it was government rhetoric that denied alcohol’s Turkishness. First, the conservative government initiated bans on selling alcohol. Then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pushed for constitutional reform in order…
A funny thing happened to Israeli figurehead president Shimon Peres on his way to the World Economic Forum. Scheduled to address a gathering of Middle Eastern political and business leaders at a Jordanian Dead Sea conference center on Sunday evening, the 89-year-old elder statesman came under furious attack from Likud cabinet ministers Sunday afternoon for…
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said at the White House on Thursday that he intends to go ahead with a planned trip to the Gaza Strip next month despite pressure from the United States to delay it. “I place a lot of significance on this visit in terms of peace in the Middle East,” Erdogan…
I doubt I’m the only one who noticed the irony of Defense Secretary Hagel affirming Syria’s likely use of chemical weapons, touching off a clamor among congressional hawks and the now familiar gaggle of neocons and liberal interventionists for American intervention in the civil war there, on the very day that President Obama was in…
In the first few days after the Boston bombings, liberal pundits (like David Sirota, Cenk Uygur and Michael Shure) were hoping aloud that the perpetrators would turn out to be “white” rather than Muslim or Middle Eastern, so that the incident wouldn’t further inflame grass-roots anti-Muslim passions. Well, it looks like this was a twofer…
An Israeli delegation will visit Turkey for the first time in three years next week in another sign of thawing relations since the United States brokered a breakthrough in March, but any further advancement in ties was expected to be incremental. Israel apologised to Turkey over the killing of nine Turks in a 2010 naval…
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