Once again, Israel and Gaza have briefly traded rocket fire only to quickly deescalate. However, this time Hamas mostly stayed out of the fighting, leaving Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to fight Israel alone. This shift suggests that the rounds of…
In March 2018, the United States sent a strong, bipartisan message to the Palestinian Authority (PA) through the Taylor Force Act: Stop the promotion, glorification and incentivization of terrorism and violence against Israeli civilians or the U.S. will withhold hundreds of…
Tensions between Israel and Hamas reignited this spring in the worst fighting since their 2014 war, sparking fears that another full-scale conflict could break out this summer. Certainly the incentives for escalation continue. There have been Gazan injuries during the…
On July 25, The Jerusalem Post reported that former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert suddenly decided to cancel a scheduled visit to Switzerland. The reason for this decision was not a scheduling conflict, or a health emergency, or any of the…
Some Washington Mid-East experts have criticized the Trump administration’s recent Bahrain economic workshop for Middle East peace. Critics have accused the White House of engineering a Marshall Plan instead of forging a political peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian…
Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently released a report accusing both Hamas and the Israeli government of committing war crimes regarding an incident in May 2019. During these hostilities, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) struck 350 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad…
The Middle East grows more and more volatile each day. Israel emerged from a contentious election, Hamas launched rockets against Israel and the Israeli army responded with lethal force, President Trump ordered a carrier group to the Persian Gulf, and Iran…
A casual observer could be forgiven for presuming Israel and Hamas again stand on the precipice of war as rockets fly over Tel Aviv and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strike key Hamas leadership targets in response. Despite the volatile…
Photo Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz via Haaretz Politicians, trial lawyers and drafters of reports learn early on that framing an argument is central to the task of persuasion. And so it goes for the report by the U.N. Human Rights Council’s…
