Israel

Netanyahu as politician: When asked about himself, Netanyahu replies that he is neither Shimon Peres nor Yitzhak Shamir. Indeed, Netanyahu is not the ideologue some think he is: he has met with Arafat, he never speaks of "Greater Israel" and by agreeing to the Hebron Accord of January 1997, he

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was a watershed event for Israel, and the country has not settled down since. This event had implications for the political system, the role of the ultra orthodox, and the public mood as well as the peace process. Israel at fifty is a country coming

The Israeli-Turkish-U.S. trilateral search-and-rescue exercise taking place this week near Israel's Mediterranean coast highlights the thickening network of ties between Washington's two major non-Arab, Middle Eastern allies. A plus for U.S. interests in the region, Israeli-Turkish relations are watched with growing unease in Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran, on the one

Born a small, beleaguered state, outnumbered and surrounded by enemies committed to its destruction, Israel early in its history formulated a distinctive set of principles for its basic defense policy. To outside observers, Israel's approach became emblematic of, indeed, in some respects indistinguishable from its national character. Throughout the quarter-century

"Both [President Sadat and Prime Minister Rabin] were leaders in the sense that they understood the responsibility they had to lead their people, not to be led by their public opinions, not to be constrained by them, but rather to get out ahead of them and to try to change

What I would like to do rather than brief on Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's trip to the Middle East, from which we have just returned, on what she did accomplish and what she did not, is share six observations about where we are and where we may be going

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit this week to the Middle East may be the last chance for the United States to avert a potential drift toward armed confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), due to the latter's failure to mount a sustained effort to halt terrorism by

The course of history since the first Zionist convention 100 years ago—World War II, the Soviet breakup, and of course, the establishment of Israel—would leave the first Zionists in awe. Beginning with the founding of Israel as a homeland for Holocaust refugees and ending with the influx of Soviet Jews

In May 1996, the peace process was not the dynamic, successful set of negotiations that many today retrospectively claim it was. In fact, the Israeli-Palestinian track was on the verge of collapse. Had it been making real progress, Binyamin Netanyahu would not have been elected prime minister. Thus, when the