Blogging about Turkey and Israel, the two most interesting countries in the Middle East
Every presidential election feels consequential, but events have combined to make Tuesday’s vote feel even more so. October 7 and the resulting year-long fallout has convinced many Jewish and pro-Israel voters that the very fate of Israel is at stake. American Jews feel more vulnerable than they have in living memory, with antisemitism skyrocketing by [ ]
For anyone skeptical that the nearly year-long daily exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah was an actual war, all doubts were erased over the past ten days. The new phase that began with exploding Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies was followed by Israeli airstrikes across southern Lebanon on the group’s weapons depots and top leaders [ ]
Henry Kissinger famously quipped that Israel has no foreign policy and only domestic politics. That observation was on full display this week, as rumors swirled that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was on the cusp of firing Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and replacing him with his erstwhile Likud rival Gideon Sa’ar. While Netanyahu’s camp claimed that [ ]
When six innocent people are executed in cold blood in order to prevent their safe return to their families and their homes, the extremism of the act begets extreme responses. Human instinct is to be angry and figure out how tragedy could have been prevented, and to become even more certain about what we believed [ ]
Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the early hours of Wednesday morning while he was visiting Tehran was about much more than taking Hamas’ senior most official off the board. It was twinned with a strike less than 12 hours earlier in Hezbollah’s Dahiya stronghold in Beirut that killed Fuad Shukr, one of [ ]
One of Israelis’ defining qualities is straightforward bluntness, captured by the Hebrew slang dugri. To talk dugri is to tell it like it is, consequences or hurt feelings be damned. This is a trait that is sometimes endearing and at other times infuriating, but one that marks many interactions with Israelis of all stripes. At [ ]
Benny Gantz finally departed Israel’s emergency government on Sunday after issuing an ultimatum to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu weeks ago pledging to leave if six policy issues were not resolved or clarified. This is the second time that Gantz has joined with Netanyahu in the face of an emergency—the first coming in the early days [ ]
President Joe Biden’s public reveal on Friday that Israel had passed along a staged ceasefire proposal to Hamas via Qatar the previous day, and his characterization of the three stages that the proposal lays out, garnered a confusing Israeli response. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s initial reaction was to neither confirm nor deny that Biden’s version [ ]
While Israel began its operation in Gaza facing an uphill climb, every passing week seems to complicate its task further. Following Friday’s International Court of Justice order to halt the IDF’s military operation in Rafah, the exchange of fire between Israeli and Egyptian soldiers over the weekend, and the Israeli strike on Sunday that killed [ ]
The chaos engulfing Israel’s political system and policy apparatus was in full force this week in unprecedented fashion. On the heels of Defense Minister Yoav Galant’s direct challenge to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s lack of a Gaza day-after plan and his warning that he would not support an Israeli military or civil administration in the [ ]