#Israel

2 for 1 on this Friday. We’ll start with the op-eds. 1) The always provocative Gideon Levy, in Haaretz: Let’s face the facts, Israel is a semi-theocracy. 2) Nir Rosen, in the Boston Review, hammers the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. 3) Hassan Haidar, in the Lebanese daily Dar al-Hayat: The Rediscovery of Afghanistan. 4) FP […]

1) General Petraeus before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today: Achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard and progress there likely will be slower in developing than was the progress in Iraq. Nonetheless, as with Iraq, in Afghanistan hard is not hopeless. Wonderful to put to rest any suspicions that the military might be trying […]

1) Dawn, Pakistan: We must come together—now 2) Dawn, Pakistan: U.S. signaling 3) The Nation, Pakistan: No light in the Afghan tunnel 4) Guardian, U.K.: The U.S. cash behind extremist settlers 5) Hurriyet, Turkey: Pakistan and Turkey’s difficult decision

1) Anders Aslund in FP writes that including Russia in BRIC isn’t accurate. I made a similar point here. 2) India is floating withdrawing a “significant” number of troops from Kashmir, a move which could only help the tattered Indo-Pakistani relationship. 3) The EU has been increasingly vocal lately on East Jerusalem, most ominously—in Israel’s […]

1) To nobody’s surprise, Somalia is the most corrupt country on earth—followed closely by Iraq and Afghanistan. Transparency International wrote in its report, “When essential institutions are weak or non-existent, corruption spirals out of control.” The task, then, for America is institution building—but is it willing to spend the time and effort to create civil […]

Human Rights Watch has landed back in the news, though not in the way that it likes.  For the last few months the organization has endured controversy over its coverage and position on Israel.  First, news broke in July of a fundraising trip that Human Rights Watch undertook to Saudi Arabia where the representatives allegedly highlighted […]

On the road of being a journalist, there is one important lesson I have learned–never abandon your notebook. By notebook, I mean reporter’s notebook–those kind that are long and skinny and allow you to flip the pages as you furiously take notes. For a journalist in the digital age, this might seem an archaic way […]

If you are in New York City and have time for an intelligent conversations–with guaranteed humor intertwined–look into tomorrow night’s interview with Israeli writer, Etgar Keret. Keret, who is author of several books and two screenplays, will be interviewed by This American Life’s Ira Glass for NPR. Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7:00 PM Celeste […]

JERUSALEM–When journalists go out on the streets to report, it is usually to record a newsworthy story. But what about when reporters search for violence? Look at the recent events in Jerusalem surrounding Al-Aqsa mosque. Rumors that extremist religious Jews were planning to enter Al-Aqsa and pray there sparked widespread calls for Muslims to take […]

JERUSALEM–The past few days in Jerusalem have been uneasy ones. In a city that teeters on the verge of violence on a fairly regular basis, the height of the week long Jewish  holiday season of Sukkot added an element of unrest. The holiday draws a large number of Jewish visitors from around the world and […]

Looks like this year Qaddafi will be the center of attention at the UN.  While Ahmadinejad’s speech had some classic “blame West” moments, it just did not match the diatribes found in Qaddafi’s speech (For more on Qaddafi’s speech, check out the Foreign Policy Association’s Human Rights Blog).  Ahmadinejad’s speech was more subdued, but that […]

The debate over Israeli and Palestinian conduct during the 2008-2009 Gaza War continues, this time with the release of the UN Human Rights Council report on the issue.  Commonly referred to as the Goldstone Report after the head of the special commission, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the 575 page report found that both sides […]