US
Charles Krauthammer thinks the GOP got the Iran prisoner swap wrong:
Give President Obama credit. His Iran nuclear deal may be disastrous but the packaging was brilliant. The near-simultaneous prisoner exchange was meant to distract from last Saturday’s official implementation of the sanctions-lifting deal. And it did. The Republicans concentrated almost all their fire on the swap sideshow.
Dominic Tierney stresses that the Iraq war was never Obama’s to lose:
Republicans also vastly embellish what an American successor force might have accomplished. In the GOP’s imagination, these troops have grown into supermen who could have held off extremism in the Middle East—as if Obama pulled the Spartans out of Thermopylae. But if 150,000 U.S. troops couldn’t salve Iraq’s sectarian divisions, why would 10,000 soldiers have solved the puzzle? And these troops would almost certainly not have prevented the emergence of ISIS, which mainly arose across the border in Syria.
Israel
Bernard Avishai examines the differences between the EU's labeling of settlement products and BDS initiatives:
In a way, B.D.S. leaders have played into the Netanyahu government’s hands, by blurring the Green Line for their own reasons, and by mounting a campaign against all Israeli entrepreneurs and scholars. Perhaps they assume that putting pressure on Israeli businesses, including banks, will force Israeli élites to effect a change in government policy. But this would be a mockery of the élite’s condition.
Ben Dror Yemini believes that Open Hillel are helping to silence Israel supporters on US campuses in the name of openness:
The thing is, every text has a context. And the context is that on many campuses in the US, there are many groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Islamic associations, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and many others. They have a lot of power. They act, sometimes with violence, against Israelis coming onto campuses. Sometimes it's just because they're Israeli, regardless of their opinions. This phenomenon is called a boycott. The members of these groups, most of whom support the BDS Movement, are the ones behind a campaign to silence other opinions. So an interesting thing is happening here – in order to strengthen “openness” and “inclusion,” we seek to open the door to those who use violence against openness.
Middle East
Egypt expert Eric Trager writes about General Sisi’s fracturing regime:
Sisi is right to be worried — but not necessarily about the prospect of renewed protests. While his popularity has declined in recent months due to Egypt’s sputtering economy, another mass uprising appears unlikely. Instead, Sisi’s vulnerability comes from an entirely different source — from within his own regime, where new tensions have emerged in recent months.
Ash Carter discusses America’s strategy to eliminate ISIL:
It must be local forces who deliver ISIL a lasting defeat, because only they can secure and govern the territory by building long-term trust within the populations they liberate. We can and will enable such local forces, but we cannot substitute for them.
Jewish World
Andrew Koss writes about a new book that sheds fresh light on life in the Lodz and Warsaw Ghettos:
No doubt it’s easier for many Western readers to relate to the memoirs of West European Jews like Levi, Frankl, and Frank (whose father deliberately de-Judaized her diary when preparing it for publication). But such Jews were a minority among those who experienced the Holocaust. The people depicted here are much more typical: Yiddish-speaking, religiously observant, and poor.
In honor of Tu B’Shvat, Jay Michelson explains why most Jewish environmentalism is rather useless:
But instead of the hard facts, Jews generally get well-intentioned suggestions to turn off the lights when we go out for a movie. And so the apathetic tune out and the true believers waste their time.
Well, here’s the Tu B’Shvat reality. You, singular, cannot make a difference. Only we, plural, can. Let’s stop deluding ourselves into uselessness and get to work.
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