A group of female former Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails have accused prison guards of carrying out "humiliating" internal body searches in violation of Israel’s prison code, Al Jazeera reports:
In serious contention for Dumbest Washington Consensus for September is the idea of cutting off Iran’s gas imports to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium. A majority of Representatives and Senators have signed on to legislation that seeks to block Iran’s gas imports, a top legislative priority for the so-called "Israel Lobby." But it’s a…
President Obama has the opportunity to make history in Cairo on Thursday, the kind of history that President Eisenhower made when he rebuked the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel. Eisenhower’s stand won tremendous goodwill for the U.S. in the Arab world. If Obama stands firm on his policy differences with Israeli…
Two cheers for President Obama. President Obama, at the press conference today with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu: Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to…
There have been hints in the press that the Obama Administration has been considering conditioning U.S. aid to Israel on a real freeze of Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank. There’s a conventional wisdom that suggests that doing this would touch a “third rail of politics.” But the conventional wisdom might not have been…
Economists have a concept they call “revealed preferences.” The basic idea is that it’s one thing to ask someone how much they value something. It’s another thing to watch the economic choices that they make, from which you can draw inferences about what their true preferences are, regardless of what they say. A lot of…
It is well-known outside the United States that a key obstacle, if not the key obstacle, to Israeli/Palestinian peace is the relationship between Israel and the United States. To say that the U.S. “supports Israel” severely misstates the problem: the key problem is the perception and the reality that the U.S. almost unfailingly protects the…
NBC‘s Andrea Mitchell is reporting that Dennis Ross “will be coming back to the State Department as a ‘strategic advisor’ on the Near East and Gulf region”: He will not be described as an envoy negotiating agreements and will not be involved in Middle East talks. That job will be up to former Sen. George…