Israel signed an agreement on Sunday to be a partner in the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research project. UPI reported on the agreement signed by the European Commission’s President José Manuel Barroso and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: With a budget of more than $100 billion over the next seven years, the Horizon...

David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy released on Friday an analysis of recent Palestinian public opinion polls, which held some surprising conclusions with important implications for the region. Pollock notes that despite the apparent contradiction, most Palestinians favor a unity government between Fatah and Hamas, while at the...

Hamas is using the current period of political and military calm – most recently locked in by a unity pact between the terror group and its rival Fatah faction – to build a missile arsenal that can blanket population centers throughout Israel during any future conflagration, according to remarks made...

The Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday that a former senior American government official said that Hamas must not be allowed to participate in the upcoming Palestinian elections. Former National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger addressed his remarks to this week’s annual Herzliya Conference sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center. Hamas should not be allowed...

An official visit to Turkey by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani triggered a flurry of diplomatic statements and economic agreements celebrated by both sides on Monday, announcements that were read by observers as straightforward evidence that relations between the two sometimes rivals were on the upswing, and which came just as...

Egyptian media outlets hailed the Sunday inauguration of the country’s former military chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a victory for democracy and the rule of law, even as various Western powers continued to respond with something less than warmth to last month’s election, which saw Sisi win 97% of the...

Iranian officials over the weekend acknowledged plans to hold meetings with the United States and Russia outside of ongoing negotiations between the P5+1 global powers and Tehran, a development that media outlets described as everything from evidence that the parties were scrambling to reinvigorate faltering talks over the Islamic republic’s...

Israeli lawmakers elected Reuven Rivlin, a Knesset member with the leading Likud party, as the country’s next president today, replacing Shimon Peres, who retires on July 27. Rivlin won in a second ballot after no candidate received the votes needed in the first round of voting. Rivlin garnered 63 votes...

In an editorial Friday, the New York Times acknowledged that “some skepticism is warranted” about last week’s announced Fatah-Hamas unity government. The editorial noted: Mr. Netanyahu is correct that Hamas, the Iran-backed group that took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, is a violent, extremist organization committed to Israel’s...

Bashar al-Assad’s re-election earlier this week is viewed by Iran as “a defeat for the United States and some Arab countries in the region,” according to an analysis published Friday by a Harvard-affiliated scholar. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian-American political scientist who serves on the board of the Harvard International Review, writes:...