Last week American ratings agency, Standard and Poor’s issued its report on Israel’s economy. The ratings agency affirmed Israel’s highest ratings for both long term and short term obligations – A+ and A-1 respectively. The Times of Israel reports that Israel benefited from “prosperous and diverse economy.” The ratings agency also...

Just a day after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah spoke of “coffins of Israeli soldiers,” the organization has thrown into disarray internal Lebanese talks about a national dialogue. The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV said the reason for the party’s boycott of the Dialogue session was what it termed [Lebanese President Michel] Suleiman’s...

In what is being dubbed as the biggest corruption scandal in Israeli history, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted this week of bribery committed during his tenure as mayor of Jerusalem. Nine other defendants were convicted as well, including Olmert’s successor Uri Lupolianski, and three were acquitted in the...

The Palestinian Hamas faction is reportedly making something of a comeback in territories long dominated by its rival Fatah – staging rallies in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem campus of the Palestinian Al-Quds University – after a series of bad geopolitical gambles had left the terror group economically and...

President Barack Obama on Friday traveled to Saudi Arabia for what had long been anticipated as a fence-mending visit, after months of increasingly public disagreements between the US and its traditional Gulf allies over Washington’s posture towards Shiite expansionism, on the one hand, and political Islamists within the Sunni world, on the other. The...

The erosion in the international sanctions regime against Iran has generated what the Wall Street Journal last week described as “a steady flow of Western executives” – a signal that the outlet read as suggesting that “economic detente with the rest of the world may be on the horizon” – generating renewed concerns among journalists...

On the day Israel offered yet more concessions for peace, the Palestine Liberation Organization further entrenched its position insisting any future Palestinian state be built on all the land captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. It stressed the Palestinian people “hanging on to their legitimate national rights, first...

Two former heads of Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) spoke out Thursday at the ongoing failure of peace negotiations to bring about any sense of compromise on the part of the Palestinians. Speaking at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, former National Security Adviser Uzi Arad noted that...

Facing uncertainty in the near future due to the America rapprochement with Iran and growing disunity among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Gulf kingdom of Qatar is upgrading its defensive capabilities, especially its naval assets. At the recently concluded Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (Dimdex 2014),...

DefenseNews recently highlighted the capabilities of Iran’s navies, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy (IRGCN). While neither navy is a major threat in conventional terms both are threats, especially in the Persian Gulf region, due to their “ability for irregular warfare.” A...