In talking to scores of people from the diplomatic corps, the academic community and many from the media here in the US, the Arab states and Israel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the majority seem to agree that unless the United States puts its foot down, the renewed efforts to achieve peace launched by Washington will…

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Washington on May 16 comes at a pivotal time when the Middle East is riddled with extraordinary conflicts that have the potential of exploding into a regional war. The time is also ripe for creating a geopolitical realignment that could eventually usher in stability and progress. Turkey…

There are many impediments to finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including historical and current experiences, claims and counter-claims, the lack of trust, contradictory ideological and religious convictions, and the unwillingness to make painful compromises. The one critical impediment that has not been addressed and continues to impede resolutions to the conflicting issues is…

The resurrection of Arab Peace Initiative (API) by the United States, which was initially introduced by the Arab League in Beirut, Lebanon in 2002, is a strategic and timely move. Sadly, however, the API should have all along constituted the basis for a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement which was, and still is, the pre-condition for…

Iran may have not invented Chess, but it has nevertheless demonstrated unsurpassed skills in playing the nuclear chess game against the P5+1 (US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) and especially against the US. From the time it was discovered that Iran was operating a clandestine nuclear weapons program nearly two decades ago, Tehran has…

A critical impediment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the complete distrust between the two sides. What makes the conflict even more intractable is that neither side is convinced that distrusting the other can be mitigated given the history of the conflict, their opposing goals and day-to-day experiences, reinforced by the constant maligning of each…

Much has been said about President Obama’s journey to the Middle East but little about the substance and the implications the visit might have. I believe that if the President was set to win the hearts and minds of the Israelis, he certainly made considerable strides toward that end. Unfortunately, most Palestinian commentators misread the…

At the eleventh hour, Prime Minister Netanyahu hustled to put his coalition government together only two days before President Obama’s visit to Israel. Undoubtedly, Netanyahu’s last-ditch effort was prompted by his incontrovertible desire to be the sitting, rather than the caretaker, prime minister in his meeting with President Obama. Being the political animal that he…

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war and I for one recollect those years with deep sorrow. Scores of commentaries have been written on the misguided Iraq war and perhaps not much can be added to America’s worst foreign policy blunder since at the very least World War II. To put this war…