June 7, 2015

US

Aaron David Miller gives 5 reasons why the US cannot defeat ISIS:

Indeed, there are many things the United States can do to counter the Islamic State… But what it cannot do is defeat the Islamic State and eliminate it from Iraq and Syria. Even if we finesse the problem and use Obama's clever turn of phrase, to “ultimately defeat” ISIS, as our goal, we had better get used to a very long war. Even with such a war, victory as conventionally defined may still be elusive.

Eric Trager explains why members of the US Government should not engage with the Muslim Brotherhood’s delegation to Washington:

While the delegation will likely draw interest from the media and think tank communities, the Obama administration should not engage with it at any level. Given the Brotherhood's explicit embrace of violence and calls for Sisi's death, U.S. engagement with the Brotherhood at this time will undermine the administration's efforts to strengthen relations with Cairo. It will also undercut the administration's attempts at encouraging the Sisi government toward greater political openness.

Israel

Jeff Robbins stresses the importance of being civil and not alienating too many people while advocating the Israeli cause:

With American support for Israel the sine qua non of Israel’s long-term survival and an ugly effort being waged by her enemies to degrade popular support in America for the Jewish state, Israel and her friends would do well to focus like lasers on this fact: the idea is to actually win friends, not to lose them, and not to repel those whose attitudes about Israel are either unformed or under-informed.

Orian Morris describes a conversation he had with his right-wing 10-year old daughter following the Gaza war:

“Look,” she repeats in her new style, “I’ve always been right-wing. I never believed the Arabs really want peace. But now, when they started shooting missiles at us, I’m certainly not going to feel sorry for them ever again.”

Those who believe that nothing was accomplished in Operation Protective Edge are mistaken. Maybe Hamas wasn’t so bothered. But Protective Edge was an internal battle over Israeli souls, over the conscience of Israel’s citizens. And one has to admit, they certainly did a good job. At least on my little girl.

Middle East

Zachary Laub interviews Gonul Tol, director of Turkish studies at the Middle East Institute, about today’s elections in Turkey:

If the AKP manages to capture a supermajority of 367 seats [it currently has 311], it will be able to change the constitution unilaterally. That means Erdogan would realize his dream of a presidential system. That does not bode well for Turkish democracy and Turkey's EU accession process. The presidential system Erdogan has in mind has no checks and balances.

Hisham Melhem writes an interesting piece on the Arab world’s attitude towards the 1967 war:

How should the Arabs circa 2015 reflect on the 48th anniversary of the 1967 defeat in the war with Israel? Maybe the question should be posed differently. Are the Arabs, particularly those in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia, given their current political and cultural dizzying turmoil even capable of seriously reflecting on a calamitous shock that was considered by my generation of Arabs as a historic milestone and a unique disaster that nothing could surpass?

Jewish World

According to Emmanuel Navon, it is American Jews, not Israel’s Jews, who are drifting away from the rest of the Jewish world:

Liberal American Jews, such as Peter Beinart, claim that Israel is isolating itself from the rest of the Jewish people because Israelis are moving to the right while Diaspora Jews are moving to the left. The very opposite is true: both Israel and the non-American Diaspora are moving to the right. Liberal American Jews are the exception and they are the ones being isolated. All recent elections in Western democracies prove it.

Jay Michaelson discusses the fundamentalism taking over a lot of the Haredi world:

More brazen – and more fundamentalist. The Haredization of Orthodoxy – the Hasidim and yeshivish moving further to the right, Modern Orthodoxy splitting between “open” reformers and hardening traditionalists – has consequences everywhere. Education has become narrower. Strictures have become stricter. Women have become more and more covered up – even leading to the reductio ad absurdum of one Hasidic sect adopting the Muslim burka as preferred female attire . Practices that were entirely kosher a generation ago are now entirely treyf.