Israeli negotiators have long emphasized that any robust Israeli-Palestinian peace deal must include a formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Israeli officials have gone so far as to foreground the issue as one covering “90% of the conflict,” and it was described in 2011 by Israeli Prime Minister...

Skepticism of Iranian intentions – a crucial variable in evaluating the degree to which the U.S. should be willing to offer concessions to the Islamic republic during upcoming talks over Tehran’s nuclear program – has been aired with various intensity in recent days by American, Arab, and Israeli leaders. Media...

Controversy swirled this weekend and into Monday regarding the positions of major pro-Israel groups toward efforts by the Obama administration to delay the imposition of new sanctions against Iran, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issuing a rare on the record statement Saturday night: “AIPAC continues to support...

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon warned over the weekend that Hamas was arming itself and seeking to conduct what the Israeli official called “a renewal of violence”: “Hamas sees it as a way to lay infrastructure for terror attacks. We consider Hamas, which is engaged in digging and controls Gaza,...

Palestinian officials over the weekend denied a report, published late last week in the New York Times and elsewhere, saying that Palestinian peace negotiators had tendered their resignations due to the construction of Israeli homes in territory beyond Israel’s 1948 armistice lines. The New York Times report had cited “an...

Analysts have been issuing increasingly pointed warning that Hamas is seeking to stage large-scale attacks in an effort to restore the terror group’s crumbling credibility, the result of a series of failed diplomatic gambles that saw the Palestinian faction align itself with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey. Cairo’s post-Brotherhood government...