إسرائيل

Hanging over yesterday's meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was one overriding question: Can the president's strategy of diplomatic engagement persuade Iran to cease its efforts to develop nuclear weapons? Unfortunately, history offers little cause for hope -- especially if the United States remains focused on

Download the complete proceedings. In keynote remarks made at The Washington Institute's 2009 Soref Symposium, Michael Herzog discussed the Israeli perspective on growing security challenges in the Middle East, with particular focus on the Iranian threat. Michael Herzog, a brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces, currently serves as chief

Why has the United States consistently failed to achieve its strategic goals in the Middle East? According to Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, two of America's leading experts on the region, it is because we have been laboring under false assumptions, or mythologies, about the nature and motivation of Middle

U.S. special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell is scheduled to visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and North Africa this week. Conspicuously absent from his itinerary is Damascus. Despite a Syrian public relations campaign designed to exploit Washington's opening gestures with Syria as a major

On March 31, Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu will be sworn in as Israel's next prime minister almost a decade after the end of his first premiership. Although American media has focused on the cabinet inclusion of Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, the more important

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Reverberating across the Middle East, the accord profoundly impacted regional politics, inter-Arab relations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although the parties, their leaders, and the neighborhood in which they operated were much different from those today, understanding

In early March, two senior U.S. officials traveled to Damascus for the highest-level bilateral meeting in years, part of the new administration's policy of "engagement." Washington seeks to test Damascus' intentions to distance itself from Iran. While a "strategic realignment" of Damascus is unlikely, in the short term, the diplomatic

On February 19, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its most recent report on Iran's nuclear activities, indicating that the Islamic Republic may have produced enough low-enriched uranium for its first nuclear weapon (if further enriched). Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu is putting together a right-leaning government that

Israel's new prime minister has a challenge: The Turkish-Israeli relationship -- the country's only public and normal relationship with a Muslim-majority country -- is dangerously strained. The deterioration of the public face of the relationship, exemplified by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's harsh anti-Israeli rhetoric, attacks against Israeli athletes in