November 30, 2014

US

Chuck Freilich points out that whatever the US does, Iran will remain a nuclear threshold state:

Should an agreement be reached, it will be the kind that no one wants, but will postpone the moment of truth to the future. With no truly good options, this may be the least of the bad options we face. The question is whether Iran is playing tough brinkmanship and intends to reach an agreement, or is totally rejectionist. Either way, it has succeeded in establishing itself as a nuclear threshold state. It is essential that it be kept as far away from that line as possible and never be allowed to cross it.

Senator Robert P. Casey argues that bringing down Assad should be a more serious part of the US campaign in Iraq and Syria:

The Islamic State must be our top focus in the region; it presents the clearest and most pressing threat to our national security interests and those of our partners. However, I am concerned that the administration has turned its attention away from our previous goal: bringing about the end of the oppressive, violent rule of Bashar al-Assad. Now is the time for the administration to take a hard look at where this conflict started: in deep-seated grievances against oppressive national governments in Damascus and Baghdad.

Israel

Professor Michael Brenner believes that the Likud’s spiritual father, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, would never have accepted the new nation state law:

This week, when the Likud ministers of the Israeli government proposed a controversial bill that would define Israel as a Jewish state, they might as well have taken down the framed images on the walls behind them in the Likud headquarters. Neither Theodor Herzl nor Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky would have approved of their initiative.

Amir Tibon reports on Kerry’s secret back channel talks during the peace negotiations and raises some interesting points about how the whole affair was conducted:

The secret channel—reported here for the first time—created substantial progress toward an agreement. But it also had one fundamental flaw, which contributed to the collapse of Kerry's entire process. Abbas’s supposed representative was in fact holding these talks without a real mandate from the Palestinian President; the concessions he discussed with Molho didn't represent the President's views. Parts of this story remain unsolved—most importantly, why this lack of a mandate was missed or ignored in real time. But what can be told is enough to raise some hard questions about Kerry's effort, and offer important lessons for future attempts at reaching an agreement.

Middle East

Aki Peritz and Robin Simcox discuss the discrepancy between ISIS’ ambitions of governing the Middle East and its extreme brutality (which is too much even for most Muslim extremists):

Why won’t the Islamic State protect its interests and refrain from baiting its enemies with brutality? The problem is an ideological one. As Zawahiri anticipated in that 2005 letter to Zarqawi, “And your response, while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers?” Like Zarqawi, the Islamic State promotes an apocalyptic prophesy that envisions a final confrontation between Muslims and “unbelievers.” The group fought hard to control the Syrian town of Dabiq and named its English-language magazine after it, because it subscribes to the belief that “the area will play a historical role in the battles leading up to the conquests of Constantinople, then Rome.”

Victor Gaetan writes about the pope’s charged upcoming visit to Turkey and about his attempts to help out in the Middle East:

Although it might seem incongruous for the notoriously frugal pontiff to be seen in Erdogan’s ostentatious palace, the Vatican doesn’t consider the president’s style choices relevant to this mission. Nor will the pope heed some commentators’ advice to talk about anti-Christian prejudice and violence in the country, which many believe some Turkish officials are stoking, and which has resulted in several high-profile murders over the last eight years—including the beheading of a beloved bishop by his driver. Two years ago, Erdoğan Bayraktar, the minister of environment and urbanism, declared that “Christianity is no longer a religion” but a culture, suggesting that it deserves neither respect nor institutional recognition.

Jewish World

Joshua Keating takes a look at Vladimir Putin’s friends at Chabad:

Whatever his many other sins, even Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics concede that he’s not an anti-Semite. As the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe notes, a number of his closest confidants, as well as the Judo teacher who served as a mentor and surrogate father, are Jews. He has personally intervened in cases of state anti-Semitism, such as an incident last year in which a teacher was charged with corruption and the prosecution used his Jewish last name as evidence. Putin labeled that “egregious,” and the conviction was overturned soon after.

A new book by Norman Bardichevsky examines the idea of replacing the ‘Jewish State’ with a more inclusive ‘Hebrew Republic’:

Perhaps the most thought-provoking section of Berdichevsky’s book, however, is its musing about the future in a chapter questioningly titled “From Jewish State Toward a Hebrew Republic?” Here, Berdichevsky argues that the best hope of forging a common Israeli identity in which Israel’s Arab minority could participate along with its Jewish majority is for the former to adopt Hebrew as its language, so that just as the inhabitants of France, say, feel French regardless of their ethnic, religious or political differences by virtue of being French speakers, so that the inhabitants of Israel will all feel equally Israeli by virtue of speaking Hebrew.