Research & Commentary Results

The Middle East is in disarray, but in Gaza, of all places, there are fragile hints of better days.

Two weeks ago, for the first time since Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel permitted produce exports from Gaza into Israel and the West Bank.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged Gaza’s plight during a visit to the area in February.

Those Israelis who hoped for a change in Israel’s direction awoke this morning to news worse than they had feared. With more than 99 percent of the vote reportedly counted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party has won 30 seats to 24 for his main challenger, the Zionist Union’s Isaac Herzog.

A review of Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947, By Bruce Hoffman (Knopf 2015). This book review was first published by The Washington Post.

This article was first published on CNN.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the Congress this week was as eagerly anticipated in Tehran as it was in Washington.

The Iranian reaction to the speech has been a combination of indignation and indifference.

This article was first published on Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel.

Read full article at Politico Magazine.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come to the United States, spoken his piece and returned home to Israel to finish campaigning for the March 17 elections. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington was neither the triumph he expected nor the disaster forecast by opponents of the visit. Indeed, the visit shed no new light on the supposedly central issue of the day: the state of play in the Iran negotiations.

One of the more enduring characteristics of Israel’s electoral campaigns is their ability to produce surprises, often with considerable political consequences.

An Israeli helicopter fired rockets on a convoy in the Golan Heights on January 18, killing six members of Hezbollah and an Iranian general. MEI’s Randa Slim explains the context surrounding the attack and the likely repercussions.

Why did Israel choose this time to attack Hezbollah and Iranian targets in the Golan Heights?

Israel’s politics are always full of paradoxes. In the upcoming March 17 election, the central one is that the likely winner is perhaps the most disliked man in the country’s politics, namely the current prime minister, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu. Even many who will vote for him don’t like him. This is partly a function of his longevity in the top ranks; he first became PM in 1996, but others held the office from 1999 until he regained it in 2009, and he has made a lot of enemies over the years.

The electoral campaign in Israel is still unfolding, and with about two months to go anything might happen to upend predictions about the outcome. But there are straws in the wind.

This article was first published by Foreign Policy.

This article, co-written by James P. Farwell, was first published by The National Interest.

Shot in both legs, Shahruh Khan survived the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan. “The man with big boots,” Al Jazeera quoted Khan as saying, “kept on looking for students and pumping bullets into their bodies.”

Egyptian President Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi is no Zionist, as senior Israeli interlocutors like to point out, but his vision of state sovereignty and Egyptian national security often closely aligns with the interests of Israel. When Sinai’s Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, Egypt’s most lethal jihadi group, recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, perhaps the most interesting response was the non-response by the governments of Egypt and Israel. From the view of both, the origins and ideologies of Islamist groups are all the same.

In both general and more informed discussions in Pakistan and beyond, sectarian violence in Pakistan between Sunni and Shi‘i groups is almost without exception referred to simply as Sunni-Shi‘i violence. But such a characterization is a misnomer. Two of Pakistan’s three major Sunni subsects, the Ahl-e-Hadis, and to a lesser extent, the Barelvis, may have antipathy toward the Shi‘a, but rarely express such sentiments through violent activity.

There’s an expression in Israel along the lines of “people are scrupulously honest with pollsters, then they get into the voting booth and lie like hell.” It is important to bear this chestnut in mind as one scans survey returns regarding prospects for the major parties in the upcoming elections.