Netanyahu To Play His Bankrupt Peace Deal Ploy on Trump

Netanyahu hopes Trump will save him. He's wrong.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Made Super

And here we go again. Especially in the United States, Palestinian-Israeli violence always sucks up the headlines, siphoning valuable media and filling it with tried-and-true journalistic narratives that play to the myriad of biases that always come to the fore when discussing the Holy Land. Evangelical Christians get their dose of Biblical chaos, hoping beyond …

Israel and America Are Breaking Up (And For Once, Obama Is Ahead of the Curve)

It can be hard to see the difference between the relationships formed by leaders and the geopolitical relationships of states. Leaders can be friends; they can trust one another, they can hate one another, they can kiss one another.  That's because two leaders sitting in a room can function just like two dudes sitting in …

Why the hell does America support Israel? (A fine story for a Monday)

Now that title ought to catch a few Google searches there.  Anyone who's ever been in an abusive relationship understands the belief that sometimes, even though he keeps on yelling and hitting, you know, deep down, you're just right for one another and eventually he'll become the guy you knew when you first met him. And it …

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Will Go On Until It Can’t (Or: When Proxy Wars Lose Their Value, They End)

You could wake up in 1950, 1960, 1970, or 1980 and read more or less similar headlines.  Arab forces, outmatched but full of dumb, brave young men, launch attacks on Israel.  Israel kills a whole bunch of people in return, not particularly worried about who so long as the attacks stop.  Everything goes quiet for …

The Levantine Mess (Or, What It Looks Like From Jordan These Days)

I just got done with a week's holiday in Jordan, the only country in the region not to have suffered catastrophic civil war, conquest, or some other kind of military disaster in recent years.  I saw a variety of Free Syrian Army coffee mugs (with little slogans etched into them with a nail, like "Damascus …