There is no doubt that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s acceptance of House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress on Iran is extraordinarily damaging to Israel-US relations. The damage, however, transcends the bilateral relations as it reverberates and impacts adversely on Israel’s relations with scores of other countries. Netanyahu and his messenger…
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been more vocal than any of his predecessors about the ‘looming Iranian danger,’ insisting that any agreement to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons will amount to nothing more than a technical pause. He has been rallying members of Congress to impose additional crippling sanctions on Iran, hoping that the mounting…
The Arab Peace Initiative (API) presents an unprecedented and vital opportunity to change the course of events in the Middle East by realizing an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. At no time since the API was introduced in 2002 by Saudi Arabia has the development of events in the…
As it happened, Ali Khamenei, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan were all walking in one of the UN’s corridors. To show that he is just an ordinary human being and a humble man, Khamenei shouted, ‘hey Vladimir, Tayyip, Bibi, come over here! Why don’t we all sit down and chat about so…
The gruesome and tragic beheadings of innocent US and UK citizens is excruciatingly painful, especially for the families of the victims. Other than making supreme efforts to free current prisoners held by ISIS by any means available, no compromises can ever be made with this extremist group. The nature of ISIS’ menace necessitates an inexorable,…
There are those who believe that given the sweeping turmoil in the Middle East, the two most powerful non-Arab countries other than Turkey – Israel and Iran – have common interests in forming a strategic alliance that would substantially strengthen their position and contribute to regional stability. They argue that such an alliance would create…
Given the strong likelihood that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, why and how to prevent it from achieving its goal must be based on the assumption that the consequences will be dire should Iran realize its objective. There are two intertwined implications for the Gulf States and Israel in particular that a nuclear Iran presents:…
It is hard to imagine that representatives of the 30 countries that assembled in Geneva actually believed that they could find a political solution to the Syrian civil war. Given the differing strategic interests in Syria of the powers within and outside the region, reaching a consensus to end the crisis at this juncture is…
In my last article I surveyed as impartially as I could the position of the various countries that might be affected by the interim deal recently forged between Iran and the P5+1 (the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany). In this article I venture to explain why I believe that Iran will not give…