Middle East

By Sean Savage (JNS.org)As a presidential candidate in Iran, Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi believes the Islamic Republic should prioritize allaying its tension with Israel and the United States—not the kind of approach the world has been accustomed to seeing lately from a country whose leaders repeatedly vow to wipe the Jewish state off the map.   […]

  By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM — Last Sunday evening my wife and I went to Teddy Stadium, the main sports arena in Jerusalem, not to play soccer or even watch the game, but to demonstrate. The reason was the outrageous racism of some fans of the local soccer team Betar. A significant number of

By Alan Elsner WASHINGTON, D.C– President Obama’s decision to visit the Middle East this spring has focused new attention on how hard he intends to work and how much time and political capital he might expend on trying to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Obama will certainly receive a warm welcome both in

By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM –It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’re signs, albeit faint, that the in-your-face bravado announcements about settlement expansion by the Likud Beiteinu Party Leader Binyamin Netanyahu before the elections last month were different from what we seem to hear from the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu after the

By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM — The officials are warning not to expect too much of the announced visit to Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan by President Barack Obama, probably next month. In view of the failures of his predecessors, notably Bill Clinton, to push Israelis and Palestinians into making peace, it’s a reasonable

By James Colbert WASHINGTON, D.C. — Last week, the Israeli Air Force reportedly attacked two different targets in Syria. One is said to have been a convoy ferrying advanced anti-aircraft missiles to the Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah, the other, a large compound reported to contain training camps and research facilities housing Russian technicians as well

By Rabbi Dow Marmur   JERUSALEM — As much as I try to tell myself that Israel and the United States will make sure that Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons won’t reach Hezbollah or any other terrorist organization and thus threaten Israel, nevertheless last Sunday I went to pick up our gas masks from the

By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM — References to peace with the Palestinians have returned to the rhetoric of Binyamin Netanyahu. During the election campaign he tended to talk about the threat from Iran and its stooges, not about opportunities for peace. But in his acceptance speech in response to the request by President Peres that

   By Evelyn Gordon    SAN DIEGO — It was an election whose results stunned pundits both in Israel and abroad, a “wide and deep repudiation” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as some hastened to claim. And elections, as we know, have consequences. So are major changes expected in Israel’s foreign and defense policy? In a