Middle East

As I write, I am sitting on the balcony of the Castle in Karem Maharal, a few miles north of Caesarea and a few miles south of Haifa. I look out over my balcony at the vineyards drinking Tishbi wine, which has been grown here in Zichron Yaakov for decades. To my left the sun is setting over...

Honestly, I thought I had seen it all.  I had resigned myself to the traditional media doing everything they could to avoid drawing attention to McCain's inability to keep basic facts about foreign policy straight -- Sunni vs. Shia, Czechoslovakia (four times!), Somalia vs. Sudan, the remarkable Iraq/Pakistan border.  But I never expected CBS to actually edit an interview with...

The following is a guest post by Aaron Zelinksy, a member of the Yale Law School Class of 2010. Wednesday marked the historic transfer of Israeli and Hezbollah prisoners at the Lebanese border. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, proclaimed that he was “very much encouraged by the exchange of prisoners” and that he hoped it would be...

It makes no sense.  Israel has traded five brutal militants for the bodies of two dead soldiers and the assorted body parts of other Israeli soldiers.  I am in Israel now teaching with a Whittier/Pepperdine study abroad program and coverage of the prisoner exchange is ubiquitous.  I attended a special class session with our students of a presentation by Major Aharon...

I notice that none of us have posted on the Israeli military assault on Gaza.  This is not surprising, there is very little useful to say about it, especially from a legal point of view.  There is something depressingly predictable about the commentary arising out of Israel's military incursion into Gaza.   Critics of Israeli policy in general have denounced the incursion, alleging...