US
Gary Rosenblatt talks with Michael Oren about his new book on the distancing between the White House and Israel:
Oren doesn’t say that the president is anti-Israel. Rather, “Obama is pro-Israel — but his is a certain mythical, pre-1967 Israel that never really existed,” he said, a time when the state was “less democratic, less open, less respectful of minorities.”
As for the real Israel of today, in the eyes of the administration it is a country out of step with American interests. Oren writes that the president’s foreign policy priorities included “creating a Palestinian state, reconciling with Islam, and preventing nuclear proliferation. “All three,” he noted, “intersected with Israel’s interests, and in potentially abrasive ways.”
Lee Smith believes that there’s no stopping ISIS without stopping Iran:
As Gen. David Petraeus and the other U.S. commanders in Iraq showed in fighting AQI in 2007, the only way to defeat a menace like the Islamic State is to strip it of its base of support in the broader Sunni community. And the only way to do that is to make clear to the Sunnis that the United States is not going to leave them to the mercies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies. To defeat the Islamic State, the Obama administration is going to have to turn against Iran first.
Israel
Yair Lapid discusses the rough times Israel and the US are having:
We're in trouble with America.
And I don't mean the usual and almost-comical kind of trouble that stems from the differences in character and temperament between staid and soft-spoken Americans and Israelis who speak too loudly. I'm talking about a deeper kind of trouble, one that is seeping into and gnawing away at the trunk and roots of the relations between the two countries.
Mazal Mualem thinks Israel’s new minister of culture is drunk with power:
Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev came well prepared to her first meeting with representatives of Israeli cultural institutions on June 11. Regev, on a collision course with “left-wing artists” since her first day on the job, arrived accompanied by legal advisers and driven by a clear goal — to show this group of leftists who's the new boss.
Middle East
According to Seth Jones, ISIS will have to fight an uphill battle with the AfghanTaliban in order to expand the caliphate as planned:
Finally, ISIS will have to fight other groups, particularly the Afghan Taliban, to expand its market share. In early June, ISIS apparently suffered heavy losses during clashes with the Taliban in the western province of Farah, suggesting that it will be an uphill battle. Fighting the Taliban may be its most difficult challenge, and one that could have profound implications for violence in the region.
Non-proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis believes that the Saudis actually can build a nuclear bomb if they want to:
Zakaria isn’t explicit about what he believes to be the technical requirements for building a nuclear weapon, but he clearly thinks it is hard. Which was probably true in 1945 when the United States demonstrated two different routes to atomic weapons. Since then, however, the technologies associated with producing plutonium and highly enriched uranium have been developed, put to civilian use, and spread around the globe. The fact that most states don’t build nuclear weapons has a lot more to do with restraint than not being able to figure it out.
Jewish World
Shalom Goldman recounts Jorge Luis Borges’ trip to Jerusalem:
For Borges, “the Bible was one of the first things I read or heard about. And the Bible is a Jewish book” and the root of all that is valuable in Western culture. This attitude was the legacy of his greatest childhood influences, his father and his maternal grandmother. With the rise of Fascism in Europe and Argentina, the Bible assumed even greater importance in his mind. The Bible stood for morality, justice, and the prophetic voice. Fascism, with its hostility toward the religion and the people of the Bible, was the enemy of culture and personal morality.
Shulem Deen writes about how it feels like to lose your faith when you're a Hassidic Jew:
The inner turmoil left me dizzy with grief over my lost faith. I wanted it back. I wanted the feelings of ecstasy I’d had from reciting nishmas Kol Chai or singing Yedid nefesh. I wanted to feel the words of Torah as, in the words of the Talmud, black fire on white. I wanted to study the hasidic texts I had once found so much joy in, experience again the euphoria of singing “God, the master of All Creation” with thousands of other hasidim, and feel the near-tangible presence of the sublime.
But it was all gone.
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