By BARRY RUBIN, JPOST— It is not every day one can announce a shift in world history, but today is such a day. We are now in a new era, in the Middle East and the rest of the world. This is not a joke – definitely not a joke – and, as you will…
By SHIRA SORKO-RAM, MAOZ— I’m sitting on my reclining chair looking out the window at the blue sultry August skies. Nothing but peace and quiet in our little suburb north of Tel Aviv. Yes, it is true that the most ghastly crime thinkable is taking place not far away. Syria’s president is gassing his own…
By ISRAEL HAYOM— The winds of war are blowing through the Middle East. The U.S., Britain and France are preparing to attack Syria while Israel is trying to stay out of the picture. However, on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a warning to Syria in response to threats that Syria would strike Israel in…
By MICHAEL FREUND, JPOST— After nearly two-and-a-half years of dithering, President Barack Obama finally seems poised to take action against the thuggish regime of Bashar Assad. When the Syrian military attacked rebel-held suburbs of Damascus last week with chemical weapons, killing hundreds of innocent people in what US Secretary of State John Kerry labeled a…
By YOAV LIMUR, ISRAEL HAYOM— The general assessment in Israel on Saturday was that the period of American restraint over events in Syria was over. An American attack against Syrian government targets is expected sooner or later, although the scope of such a strike is unclear and officials in both Washington and Jerusalem think there…
By CAROLINE GLICK, JPOST— Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US Secretary of State was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it. Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President…
By JAMES KANTER and JODI RUDOREN, NY TIMES— The military wing of Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shiite group, was blacklisted by European Union ministers as a terrorist organization on Monday in a policy shift that reflected their concern about Hezbollah’s suspected involvement in Europe-based bombings and its growing role in the Syria war. The blacklisting…
By ASHER ZEIGER, TIMES OF ISRAEL— Iranian president-elect Hasan Rouhani on Wednesday laughed off recent statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he pledged to do whatever was necessary to thwart Iran’s nuclear program. On Sunday, Netanyahu told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “if think that Israel will let them do it, they’re…
By RON BEN-YISHAI, YNET— The American policy toward the Middle East has been moving in the past few months from failure to failure, and mainly from helplessness to embarrassing mistakes. The inability of the Obama administration to produce worthy responses to the developments is angering not only the supporters of the US in the region,…
By SKYLAR SCHMANSKI, inCONTEXT— Syrian rebels temporarily seized control of the Quneitra crossing between Israel and Syria on June 6, spurring Austria to withdraw all of its 380 peacekeepers stationed in the Golan Heights. Vienna attributed its decision to vacate the buffer zone, where international forces have been stationed since the 1974 armistice, to the…