America, Israel, and the Middle East

Why did Secretary of State John Kerry originally present a cease-fire plan that acceded to some of Hamas’s demands and none of Israel’s? Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution tried to answer that question in a Mosaic…

There is now an Israeli consensus on the Palestinians, a coalition comprising everyone except the very radical left. Ran Baratz, the editor of Mida, recently looked at why consensus has formed in the historically contentious world of…

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a resolution condemning Israel for, among other libels, “the targeting of civilians.” The resolution never once mentioned “Hamas.” As is so often the case with absurd resolutions against Israel,…

George Mason University’s Jeremy Rabkin reviewed Hoover Institution Scholar Peter Berkowitz’s Israel and the Struggle Over the International Laws of War in The Jewish Review of Books‘s Summer 2012 issue. Rabkin praises Berkowitz for his cogent defense of Israel…

In an English article in Mida, Seth Frantzman went in depth on the origins of a troubling meme going around the press: that Hamas was not responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer,…

Haviv Rettig Gur, a political correspondent and analyst for The Times of Israel and an alumnus of Tikvah’s advanced institute “American Grand Strategy”, has written one of the deepest analyses of the forces at work in the…

This week, former Tikvah fellow Yishai Schwartz offered an idiosyncratic moral defense of the ongoing Gaza war in The New Republic. Schwartz first posited that justice requires the reasons for the war be “morally compelling” and…

In a thorough Azure essay in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, Israeli ethicist Asa Kasher inquired into the principles of “Just War” theory and the reality of the 2008-2009 operation in Gaza. There are obviously differences between…

As Hamas terrorizes Israel, it’s worth understanding just what Hamas is trying to achieve. One of the best short works on Hamas’s ideological foundations and strategic ambitions comes from a book review in the Autumn 2006 Azure. In…

It has been a great ambition of modern political thought to bring about a world without enemies. But Hamas’s ruthless quest to slaughter Israeli civilians and to reap the public-relations boon of Palestinian deaths is a reminder that…

As part of the advanced institute on "Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews," Tikvah hosted the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz has been a partisan of the left, the right, and, most of all, the Jews. In…

At our Advanced Institute on “War and Human Nature,” we hosted Yale University diplomat in residence and career foreign minister Charles Hill. Mr. Hill’s session began from the insight that the distinctively human quality – the essence…