US President Donald Trump has put on the back burner an executive order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. He should leave it there permanently. Inclusive governments that are seen to represent the overwhelmingly devout Muslim societies of the Arab world are a vital antidote to global jihadism.
To be sure, the Muslim Brotherhood has not always fully embodied democratic values. In Egypt, for example, President Mohamed Morsi’s government treated democracy as a winner-take-all proposition – and was ousted after little more than a year.
But addressi...
The Ultimate DealHenry Siegman
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London Review of Books
| March 24th 2017
Reactions by the international commentariat to Trump and Netanyahu’s joint press conference on 15 February focused largely on Trump’s pronouncements, specifically on what seemed to be his abandonment of America’s long-standing bipartisan support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. ‘I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like,’ he said. ‘I can live with either one.’ Given his ignorance of international affairs in general and the Middle East in particular, he probably had no idea of t...
Standing alongside the Israeli prime minister at a White House press conference on February 15, President Trump uttered an unusual and even groundbreaking comment on the Israeli-Palestinian future: “I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. . . . I can live with either one . . . if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy.” Most commentators and experts were quick to dismiss the specific formulation used by the president as rookie inexperience, an unfamiliarity with the conflict’s specific li...
Illiberal Israel
The Strategist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
| February 10th 2017
After a half-century of occupying Palestinian territory, Israel is succumbing to its deepest ethno-centrist impulses, and increasingly rejecting recognized boundaries. Israel is now on its way to join the growing club of illiberal democracies, and it has Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to thank.
Over the course of 11 years as Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu has reshaped the country’s collective psyche. He has elevated the isolated, traumatized ‘Jew’—still at odds with the ‘gentiles,’ not to mention the ‘Arabs’—above the secula...
Has Obama "Betrayed" Israel at the UN?If there has been a betrayal in this latest chapter of America's relations with Israel, it is Netanyahu who has betrayed President Obama.
Has America’s president betrayed Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government bitterly accused after President Obama failed to veto a UN Security Council resolution that condemned Israel for its settlements in the West Bank?
True, President Obama told the international community in his address to the UN General Assembly in 2011 that an ...
Rex Tillerson, assuming he is confirmed as secretary of state, will immediately face an unusually broad array of challenges. Some of these derive from the unusually disordered state of the world, others from the unusually wide uncertainty about the new American president's intentions.
Among the challenges which would face any American secretary of state at this juncture of history are the half-dozen large and small wars in which the United States is currently engaged, the competition with other major powers, notably China and Russia, the threats from hostile regional powers like N...
