Communications

Whether or not Iran played a direct role in planning and executing Hamas’ brutal assault on Israel doesn’t really matter. What does matter is Iran’s indispensable, long-term role in building Hamas’ capability to do what it did. In the near term, Israel will settle for nothing less than the physical elimination of Hamas as a military, administrative, financial, and...

Skeptics like to say that the real Israeli election only begins after the votes are counted, because the electoral system makes it practically impossible for any single party to gain a majority. This week’s election confirms that pattern. As expected, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged as the leader of the largest party. However, the reduced plurality of his...

This week, the European Union went to war against Iran. There was no formal declaration, of course, nor even any undeclared use of military force. But the E.U. decision to place an embargo on Iranian oil imports, ban new contracts, and freeze Iranian Central Bank assets is effectively an act of war and may very well result in the military hostilities that sanctions are meant...

Kudashkina Ekaterina, The Voice of Russia If people want to start thinking outside the box and think about things that havenג€™t been done before, I think there are basically only two possibilities. One of them is to say: look, the purpose of this exercise is not peace, because you cannot force peace on anybody; the purpose of this exercise is to force unilateral Israeli...

Instead of wasting time and energy trying to revive a moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the United States and European Union should take another look at the Palestinian initiative to seek U.N. recognition in September. What is described in some quarters as a recipe for new strife and confrontation can actually be leveraged into a win-win situation for Israelis,...

By Mark Heller in International Herald TribuneIf Bush truly wants his nine-day excursion to the Middle East to make a difference, he should consider going to a place that is not on his announced itinerary - Iran.