Articles by: "Schlomo"
How Israel failed its Covid test

When the Jewish new year began late last month, Israel was enduring its second nationwide lockdown, after daily per capita Covid-19 infection and death rates reached some of the world’s highest levels. How did a …

The consequences of the Israel–UAE peace deal

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hailed the agreement normalising relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates—which the two countries will sign at a White House ceremony today—as a historic step that equals Israel’s …

A doomed Israeli–Palestinian peace

Twenty years ago this month, US President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David, in a bold effort to resolve …

The messiah of Mar-a-Lago

US President Donald Trump says he is ‘the chosen one’, and many of his evangelical supporters agree. But standing, Bible in hand, in front of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington DC, after …

Why democracies are better at managing crises

The Covid-19 crisis has become the latest front in the escalating clash of ideologies that has become a central feature of geopolitics in recent years. Representing authoritarianism is China, which has touted the success of …

Why this pandemic is different

Long before people and goods were traversing the globe non-stop, pandemics were already an inescapable feature of human civilisation. And the tragedy they bring has tended to have a silver lining: perceived as mysterious, meta-historical …

Netanyahu again?

Israel’s third electoral showdown in a year was not kind to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even though his right-wing bloc of ultra-Orthodox and nationalist parties won more seats in parliament than the centre-left bloc headed …

The paradigm shift on Palestine

Nobody should be surprised that US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace proposal is heavily tilted towards the Israelis. What is surprising is that, rather than rejecting Trump’s proposal, the world has left the Palestinians …

Not another Arab Spring

‘A spectre is haunting the rich world. It is the spectre of ungovernability’, began an editorial in The Economist earlier this year, paraphrasing the opening line of The Communist Manifesto. But it is not only …

Is Russia the Middle East’s new hegemon?

The collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago meant that its once-formidable presence in the Middle East collapsed as well. Today, however, as the United States has withdrawn from the region, Russia has rushed …

Trump’s perfidious America

US President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from almost all of Syria, clearing the way for a Turkish offensive against the Kurds, is an unconscionable betrayal of a strategic ally. One would …