Senator Reid just now said a smart thing on the floor of the Senate: the way out of the Iraq mess involves talking to Syria. “Even talking to Syria.” The grieving David Grossman told Israel the same thing last week. And Americans for Peace Now reports that the intelligence head of the Israel Defense Forces Read More
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 22—The cease-fire that brought the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah to a halt last week is holding—for now—and Beirut’s neighborhoods, though still eerily quiet and free from traffic, are no longer reverberating to the sound of Israeli bombing raids.
Of course, I can’t speak firsthand about the sound of Read More
In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel’s Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid to say good things about the U.S. now without fear of a beating. Read More
JERUSALEM, Israel, Aug. 8—Ostensibly, Jordan and Israel are at peace, and have been since 1994, when Jordan’s King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a historic treaty at Wadi Araba. Still, most of the people I spoke to in Amman, where I spent last week, reacted testily, or worse, when I announced my Read More
If you ever needed a reminder of how important the realist intellectuals’ spring assault on the Israel lobby is, today’s Times bore it out. Its polls show that most Americans feel that Israel’s indiscriminate destruction in Lebanon will lead to a wider war, and that we don’t have a dog in that fight Read More
DAMASCUS, Syria, July 18—The road to Damascus was bombed again early this morning, the seventh day of fighting between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah. And though it is still possible to get from Beirut to Damascus along secondary mountain roads, the perils of the journey have pushed the price of the trip up Read More
DAMASCUS, Syria, July 18—The road to Damascus was bombed again early this morning, the seventh day of fighting between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah. And though it is still possible to get from Beirut to Damascus along secondary mountain roads, the perils of the journey have pushed the price of the trip up Read More
When I went to Syria in January (to visit my wife’s cousin who teaches in Damascus), I signed a visa application on which I had to check a box saying that I had never been to “Occupied Palestine.” I’d never been to Israel; I checked the box. I didn’t feel good about it.
Just Read More
Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative (and the former editorial page editor of the New York Post who abandoned neoconservatism in part because of the neocon disdain for “people of color”), is recently returned from a trip to the Mideast sponsored by Churches for Middle East Peace, a group dedicated to getting Read More
More evidence that the neocon moment is over.
David Schenker has lately left his post as “the Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestinian affairs adviser in the office of the secretary of defense” (to become—of course—a senior fellow in Arab politics for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy). Penning an article in Read More
