Policy Analysis

Individuals and groups in the Gulf Arab countries—especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain—have repeatedly expressed interest in Israel and frustration with Palestinian leadership over the last few years. These statements reflect a growing loss of patience with the prolonged Palestinian-Israeli dispute, along with a new attribution of the conflict’s

Carmel Dangor of the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation published a leaked Israeli proposal for annexation in late June, which shows the difference between President Trump's vision and a subsequently developed Israeli map. This new Israeli map shows a very different concept than the Trump map. While Israel would get 30%

In the past few years, unprecedented economic and security cooperation between Israel and United Arab Emirates has grown given the common threat from Iran. At stake are the Israeli diplomatic mission in Abu Dhabi housed in the renewable energy agency, along with an informal trade office in Dubai. Just last

The Emirati public is split about how much the government should be doing about public health.

With the potential of Israel moving forward with annexation looming, the question of its likely impact on recent steps of normalization with Gulf countries is becoming increasingly relevant. Yet the situation is ambiguous; while the scope of any annexation and the intensity of opposition to it throughout the Arab world

The Jordanian “street” is now relatively content with its government’s posture, in spite—or indeed precisely because—of all the turbulence surrounding it.

Despite the international praise Jordan has received for the measures it introduced to combat the spread of coronavirus, the country’s policy makers remain deeply worried about the likely dire economic fallout from the pandemic. In this context, the Israeli announcement that it plans to proceed with unilateral annexation of large

As soon as next month, Israel’s new government could approve plans to annex a substantial portion of the West Bank. The trigger for this comes from Washington—a shift by the Trump administration to recognize Israel’s new self-declared borders. But that still doesn’t explain why. What might Israel gain by discarding

Israel's newly formed unity government intends to press ahead with a unilateral action to annex Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley by early July. The current plan appears to include settlement blocs and most of the 140 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where

The drastic new declaration by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) abrogating the PA’s commitments to its political agreements with Israel, including security cooperation, has aroused great concern among both Israelis and Palestinians. The crux of the matter is this: will it be just one more of the many

The world was caught unprepared by the COVID-19 outbreak, which has unleashed an unprecedented global crisis and left more than one hundred thousand people dead and many more in grave condition. The pandemic shows no signs of abating and the most recent assessments project tens of thousands of more deaths

With the announcement this week that Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu would remain Israel’s prime minister in a new “emergency national unity” government, the latest poll shows that 62% of Israelis express support for this unusual political deal. Opposition leader Benny Gantz, who fell just short of unseating Netanyahu in an unprecedented

The Bellwether Citizenship Question–Palestine Now Trumps Israel: East Jerusalem’s 330,000 Palestinian legal residents, though overwhelmingly not Israeli citizens, have many practical advantages over their West Bank neighbors. Only the former have the right to work, study, and travel freely inside Israel, and to participate in Israel’s extensive social welfare system

This month marks the anniversary of the pivotal Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, the first agreement of its kind. The two nations have enjoyed diplomatic relations since the signing of the treaty over 40 years ago. Through trials and challenges, the agreement has held and offers hope in a time where peace

In early 1947, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad Ta’amirah threw a rock into an opening on the side of a cliff near Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea and heard a clay pot shatter. The next day, the shepherd returned with some of his friends and climbed

The first signs of the coronavirus epidemic came just two weeks before Israel’s third election, when fourteen Israelis were quarantined for two weeks on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan. For Israel’s politicians, the virus gave them the excuse to bombard the electorate with news of

The disenchanted response of much of the Arab world to U.S. President Trump’s recently announced Peace Proposal has highlighted the serious need for alternative visions of a peace process, especially from Palestinians. And as an international community, we need to shake the foundations of this conflict to find peace. The

Three different Palestinian polls in the past few weeks indicate that the West Bank and Gaza publics roundly reject the U.S. administration’s peace plan by margins of around 90%. But the latest poll, conducted by the Palestine Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), also shows that most Palestinian respondents now also

On January 29, the Trump administration unveiled the political aspect of the long-awaited ‘Deal of the Century.’ This announcement came six months after the Manama workshop in Bahrain, which focused on the Plan’s economic vision, including proposals for investment and infrastructure projects in Palestine worth around $50 billion. The newly

In the past week since its announcement, there have effectively been no Palestinian voices coming out in favor of President Donald J. Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, announced on January 28, 2020 and dubbed as “The Deal of the Century,” whether publicly or privately. Palestinian opinion is overwhelmingly against this latest