The New Republic

The ceasefire struck last week between Israel and Hamas after eight days of conflict seems to be holding. But that’s not to suggest that the time for diplomacy is over. To the contrary, it’s precisely now that the United States needs to survey the new landscape that has emerged in the Middle East, and determine how it can shape it going forward. READ MORE >>

Not long ago, Andrew Sullivan had ultra-hawkish views on Israel and the Middle East. The problem as he saw it, was very simple: The Muslim world was anti-Semitic and wanted to kill all the Jews. Naive Western governments pushed innocent Israelis to make peace, when the only answer was force. Here are some excerpts from an August 2001 column he wrote: READ MORE >>

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Immediately after the massacre of eight students in a yeshiva library in Jerusalem last week, speculation began within the Israeli security establishment and the media about who had dispatched the lone murderer. Was it Hamas? Hezbollah? Perhaps a new, unknown organization claiming to act on behalf of the "liberation" of the Galilee? In fact, the speculation was pointless. Regardless of the affiliation of the actual perpetrator, the ultimate responsibility for this attack, as for almost all the terror attacks on Israel in recent years, lies with Iran. READ MORE >>

Will some Democrat, other than the Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman, give a speech on how the country should deal with the worldwide Islamic jihad, a perilous contagion that is both palpable and ideological? Or does our party think there is no contagion and no peril? READ MORE >>

If you buy this reading of events, you must accept a certain irony. It is fashionable in some quarters to say that U.S. identification with Israel produces hostility against us in the Islamic world. But, in actuality, Israel may be paying a price for the U.S.-led effort to pressure Iran to give up its nuclear aspirations. READ MORE >>

The Palestinian People: A History By Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal (Harvard University Press, 608 pp., $45) READ MORE >>

I. That investment in education is critical for economic growth, improved health, and social progress is beyond question. That poverty is a scourge that the international aid community and industrialized countries should work to eradicate is also beyond question. There is also no doubt that terrorism is a scourge of the contemporary world. What is less clear, however, is whether poverty and low education are root causes of terrorism. READ MORE >>

Yehuda Amichai, the great Hebrew poet dead a year now, a friend of The New Republic and its editors, wrote a poem two decades ago that began:  The diameter of the bomb was thirty      centimeters And the diameter of its effective range      about seven meters, With four dead and eleven wounded... READ MORE >>

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 26, George W. Bush gathered 15 prominent Muslim- and Arab-Americans at the White House. With cameras rolling, the president proclaimed that “the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good.” It was a critically important moment, a statement to the world that America’s Muslim leaders unambiguously reject the terror committed in Islam’s name. READ MORE >>