The controversial Palestinian request for UN membership is the culmination of three competing strategies pursued by the US, Israel, and the Palestinians over the last three years.

The curtain opened in early 2009 with two new governments: a right-wing coalition in Israel and a more diplomacy-oriented administration in the...

The midterm elections are over in the United States, and the cognoscenti who follow Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have a new consensus. The election is a victory for the Israeli right wing.

The theory is that President Obama, who has vigorously, but so far unsuccessfully, pursued direct talks between the Israelis...

The Obama administration's intense efforts to restart serious negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians have stalled once again, so far for the last month. U.S. attempts to achieve direct talks have stymied because of characteristic posturing: Once the Israelis agreed to a ten-month moratorium on construction in the West Bank,...

The idea sweeping Washington over recent weeks has been the notion that the President should release an Obama Plan, or a set of Principles, or a Statement, outlining where the US stands on all the core issues in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute (Jerusalem, refugees, borders, and security). The National Security Advisor,...

I am sick and tired of hearing about how Obama is "not good for the Jews," or, as a friend of mine put it recently, "everyone who voted for him should be ashamed." If looking for solutions to Israel's toughest problems -- Iran and the Mideast peace process -- and...

The first phase of the Obama administration's efforts at progress on the Arab-Israeli dispute is over, and let's be honest: it's not what the administration hoped would happen when it embarked on its campaign to bring the parties to the table. In a prelude to negotiations, the Israelis were supposed...

Within 36 hours, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu met at the White House, and "NCIS," the crime drama about a naval intelligence unit, concluded its season with an emergency trip to Israel. Last week, I asked whether the U.S.-Israeli relationship depicted in the NCIS intelligence connection to...

If you want to understand the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, I suggest you look at some recent episodes of NCIS, the Navy crime drama on CBS, a show that has risen to #5 in the TV rankings this season. Apparently, for a long time, a peculiar arrangement has existed...

It's the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, and everyone seems to be celebrating. In my neighborhood in Los Angeles, the local bakeries are offering "Happy New Year" cakes for the local Iranian residents. President Obama and even President Peres are sending greetings of hope and future peace to the Iranians still...

Conventional wisdom has it that one of the few ways left for John McCain to win the presidency is for a national security crisis to intervene before election day. And Senator Biden's misunderstood comment about a challenge to the next president early on that perhaps mistakenly reinforced that conclusion...