Matthew RJ Brodsky is Director of Policy at the Jewish Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and editor of inFOCUS Quarterly. His website is www.MatthewRJBrodsky.com.
In the run up to the Israeli elections, the great fear discussed by pundits the world over was that Israelis would take a drastic turn to the political right at the polls. This, it was felt, would torpedo any chance of reviving the peace process and give Barack Obama another headache as he sought to […]
Leave it to the Israeli electorate to produce an election result that confounded most analysts’ projections. In general, the election was more about specific political personalities than it was about clear political and policy agendas. For as much as Washington views Israel through the prism of its foreign policy interests — namely, the ongoing impasse […]
Conventional wisdom in Washington and in European capitals is that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is doomed. The protests that have spread across the country since March of 2011 and claimed the lives of more than 6,000 people appear to be progressing by their own inertia. Secure in the assumption that “it’s only a […]
When it comes to the “Arab Spring” in Syria, the silence and lack of leadership in Washington is stunning. Two months into the uprising, unconfirmed reports suggest that as many as 800 people have been killed with as many as 10,000 arrested. The countrywide crackdown is massive, with the Assad regime using tanks and sniper […]
Last week’s agreement between Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government in the Palestinian Authority (PA) came as a shock to many Middle East observers — including those who have long advocated their political reconciliation. The two factions have been at each other’s throats for years and the last agreement proved to be of […]
When the Fatah Central Committee convened its sixth party conference last month in Bethlehem — the first such meeting in twenty years and the first ever held on Palestinian Authority territory — one might have expected a bit of soul-searching. After all, more than two decades after the Palestine Liberation Organization and its main political […]
When President Obama delivers his long-awaited speech in Egypt on Thursday, he will be fulfilling his inaugural pledge to “seek a new way forward” with the Muslim world. But finding areas of mutual interest may prove far more difficult than the president imagines. That is because, in recent years, the Middle East has seen the crystallization of regional politics […]
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