Five Key Takeaways From Israel’s Indecisive Election RerunDaniel Levy - The American Prospect | September 23^rd 2019

Anyone expecting clarity from Israel’s electoral rerun will be disappointed. The public was sent back to the polls when coalition negotiations following the April 9 election failed. The resumption of those negotiations based on the new distribution of seats in the Knesset will not prove any easier. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will soon call the party leaders to begin the traditional round of post-election consultations, and within days will call on either Benjamin Gantz, the leader of the Blue and White Party (with 33 seats), or Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud (31 seats),...

Kushner’s Israel-Palestine Shindig: Easily Forgettable and Rather ImportantDaniel Levy - The American Prospect | July 5^th 2019

Jared Kushner’s long-awaited “Peace to Prosperity” gathering at the Manama Four Seasons Hotel in Bahrain generated just about the level of serious coverage that it merited—precious little. For all its borderline pantomime-style imbecility (Kushner himself put in a performance as someone pretending to care about the Palestinians), this convening actually matters. Coming at a time in the region when the U.S. is inching closer to an armed confrontation with Iran and endorsing Israel’s permanent annexation of more Palestinian territories, the Bahrain work...

Israel and American Jewry: A Parting?Henry Siegman - The National Interest | February 21^st 2019

As published in The National Interest. The Zionist idea—the restoration of Jewish national existence in Palestine—took shape in the late nineteenth century, a time when the concept of nationalism was coming into its own. We now know it is an idea that can harbor dark and destructive forces that yielded World Wars I and II, bringing death and destruction on a scale no one could have imagined. The two wars led to the emergence of less restrictive concepts of national identity and to multinational institutions, beginning with the League of Nations, which evolved into th...

The Choice for the West: Focus or Strategic Failure The Cairo Review | November 12^th 2018

As published in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. The last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first might be described as an attempt at peace-driven, then war-driven American-led approaches to the region. In effect, this was nothing new, Western policy was American policy, and America’s allies in the West dutifully fulfilled the role of mostly ornamental accessories, who on occasion brought significant dowries to the table. This was most on display during the defining moment of the era, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Then-British Prime Minister Tony Bl...

The Oslo Accords Are Dead, but There Is Still a Path to Peace Foreign Policy | September 13^th 2018

As published in Foreign Policy. Twenty-five years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton presided over a famous handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the South Lawn of the White House as they signed the Oslo Accords. Those accords, initiated at secret Norwegian-hosted talks between Israeli academics and PLO officials, set an agenda and a five-year timetable for a full peace deal that would initially allow limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of the occupied territories and entailed mutual recognition...