America, Israel, and the Middle East

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…

Since 1945, American power has been the principal guarantor of world order. Nearly 70 years on, what is America’s place in today’s global order, and do we stand at the dawn of a new and more chaotic age?…

What did the architects of American’s democracy agenda get right, and what did they get wrong? What do more recent developments teach us about hopes for democracy in the Arab world and their place in American foreign policy?…

Reviled as a fascist demagogue by his great rival David Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel’s underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex…

The United States has been a strong supporter of Israel. Is that likely to continue? How do changes over the last few years in the Middle East affect the US-Israel relationship? To what extent are different parts of…

One winter after an unusually heavy run of funerals, the rabbi of our Montreal synagogue reminded the congregation that in traditional Judaism, dying was only a minhag (custom); it was not a mitzva. I would like to extend…

The novelist Saul Bellow is fond of recalling a political incident from his youth. Saul, then an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, was, like so many of us in the 1930s, powerfully attracted to the ideologies of…

“Two states, living side by side in peace and security.” This, in the words of President Barack Obama, is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Washington is fully and…