Artificial 'obstacle' to Mideast peace

by Nicole Brackman and Asaf Romirowsky, Philadelphia Daily News About a week ago, the freeze on construction in Israeli towns in the West Bank expired. The hiatus had been reluctantly enacted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the year under pressure from President Obama. Obama has been trying to persuade Netanyahu to renew the…

Birds of a feather

by Ilan Berman, Forbes.com Last week, Iran rolled out the red carpet for an unlikely dignitary. The visitor wasn’t Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual head of the Hezbollah Shi’ite militia Iran created in Lebanon in the early 1980s and has sustained since. Nor was it Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s newly-reconfirmed prime minister, whom—having failed to supplant…