Know your past, own your present, assure your future.
The focus of Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s first speech at the UN was a political weather report of Israel’s relations with Arab neighbors. He lauded Arab states for embracing Israel, hoped that Israel could move toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and blistered the hate spewing from Hamas and Iran; Israel he said, would not tolerate Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The U.N. partition resolution in 1947 cleared the way for Israel to declare independence six months later, but since then the United Nations has largely been antagonistic and condemnatory toward Israel and a tool for the Palestinians and Israel’s enemies.
The U.N. Security Council voted 13-0 on November 17, 2025, to adopt Resolution 2803, endorsing the 20-point Trump peace plan to end the Hamas-Israel war. The precedent-setting resolution provides a pathway to stability in the Gaza Strip and offers a chance for less violence in the Palestinian-Israeli relationship.
In recognition of the anniversary of the United Nations’ passage of Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, we present our newest three-part whiteboard videos providing context to this historical moment in Jewish history.
Netanyahu reproaches the international community for supporting the Iran deal, the UN for its deafening silence against threats to Israel, and, against Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas for promising to cancel all agreements with Israel.
The U.N. General Assembly overwhelming reverses a Soviet-driven decision 16 years earlier to declare Zionism a form of racism.
Following the conclusion of the June 1967 War, the Israeli government sent word to Egypt and Syria seeking peace plan that was intended to jumpstart a peace process with Israel’s belligerent neighbors, Egypt and Syria. The messages were sent through the US, but no response was apparently received.
The Resolution calls for unspecified Israel withdrawal from territories in return for right of all states to live in peace. It does not call for full withdrawal. It is the basis of Egyptian (1979) and Jordanian (1994) Treaties with Israel, and PLO (1993) recognition of Israel.
Otherwise known as Israel’s War of Independence, or, “the nakbah” or disaster to the Arab world because a Jewish state was established, the war was fought between the newly established Jewish state of Israel opposed by Palestinian irregulars, and armies from five Arab states. Official beginning of the war is usually given as May 14, 1948, the date Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, but the war’s first of four phases began in November 1947. Lasting for two years, the war ended with armistice agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and four Arab states.
US endorses application of UN Resolution 242 to the West Bank and Gaza, and seeks Palestinian
control over land and resources, and for the territories to be affiliated with Jordan.
Among Palestinians, Hamas popularity soars, two state solution at lowest ebb, Rise in European Anti-semitism, and Michael Mihlstein’s insightful analysis an essential read.
Watch our collection of weekly Wednesday webinars with expert analysis and insights into the war and related topics, and register for the next webinar.
Hamas absolutely opposes Israel’s right to exist, with its leadership repeatedly declaring that all of Palestine belongs to Moslems.
Compiled by Aidan New Iran lies behind much of what Israel has battled since Hamas launched its brutal terrorist attack Oct. 7, 2023. By theology and ideology, Iran is committed to Israel’s destruction. By policy…
Just as al-Qaeda seeks the total destruction of western democracies, Hamas seeks Israel’s total demise. Since its inception in 1988, Hamas has been crystal clear about its opposition to Zionism and Israel.
Hamas’ genocide against Israelis unleashed the long-blistering hatred that Hamas possesses for Israel and Jews. Entries include severe Arab criticism of Hamas, its detriment to Palestinian nationalism, statements by its leaders, and the war’s unfolding.
Former US President Jimmy Carter embraced Hamas as a legitimate voice of the Palestinian people. His motivations possibly stretched from intentional to misguided to malevolent. Hamas leaders who were engaged in inter-Palestinian struggles remained pleased with the recognition he gave them. American officials and Israelis were keenly perturbed by the courtship he gave them.
Asher Sussser, “The Rise of Hamas in Palestine and the Crisis of Secularism in the Arab World,” Brandeis, 2006 (79pp). (with permission) Read full article
The day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist assault killed 1,200 and dragged more than 240 kidnapped Israelis and others to Gaza, Hezbollah opened a second front along Israel’s northern border with missile fire from Lebanon….
The rise of Hamas marks a shift in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a struggle between national movements or states to a battle between religions, making a resolution all the more difficult to achieve.
One of four agreements Israel signed in 1949 with Arab neighbors, it does not end “state of war,” between Israel and Arab states. No treaty is signed until 1979.
Nasser asserts that the conflict with Israel is not over access to the Gulf of Aqaba but the very existence of Israel; Egypt’s foes are Britain and the US that support Israel.
Spring/Summer 1997 Kenneth W. Stein, “Continuity and Change in Egyptian-Israeli Relations, 1973-97,” Israel Affairs, Spring/Summer 1997, Vol. 3, Nos. 3 and 4, pp. 296-320 For 25 years, tension, mistrust, and strain have characterized Egyptian-Israeli relations….
Sadat tells the Israeli people and world that he seeks a just and durable peace, which is not a separate peace, between Israel and Egypt. He equates statehood for the Palestinians as their right to return.
By Ken Stein, October 28, 2024 When Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter became the 39th President of the United States in 1977, he had little foreign policy experience, particularly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Despite this, he…
Hermann Eilts played a pivotal role in representing the U.S. to Egypt and vice versa in the vital 1973-1980 period when Egypt embraced Washington and turned away from Moscow, and made peace with Israel. Eilts knew Egyptian President Sadat as well as any American official in the period. He provides rich detail and vivid insights into Sadat’s often mercurial decision-making.
In this two-part Whiteboard video series, we explore the transition from the 1978 Camp David Accords to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty signed at the White House on March 26, 1979.
Signed sixteen months after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, it calls for establishment of diplomatic relations, staged Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, and American security arrangements to support the bilateral treaty.
Perspective provides valuable insights in evaluating contemporary diplomacy. Though neither the Palestinian-Israeli-U.S. summit of July 2000 nor the Egyptian-Israeli-U.S. summit of September 1978 ended discussions between Israel and its Arab adversaries, there were more differences than similarities between the two intense and highly charged meetings.
March 26, 2025 By Ken Stein The ripe conditions that prefaced the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty and might presage additional Arab-Israeli agreements are almost totally absent in 2025. Why? Today, there is an absence of political…
Ambassador Bandar Bin Sultan served as Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2006. From 2005 to 2015 he led the country’s National Security Council. He offers a scathing attack on Yasser Arafat’s failure to embrace multiple negotiating overtures proposed by Presidents Carter and Reagan. Additionally, he expresses his anger at the present Palestinian leadership for criticizing the UAE’s recognition of Israel in the 2020 Abraham Accords.
Note by the author: As a faculty member at Emory University, I wrote several articles per month for national and local newspapers. This article appeared in October 2002 in the Orlando Sentinel. The idea for a trusteeship to be possibly be considered to manage the Israeli-Palestinian relationship emerged from my decades of study of the Palestine Mandate, understanding the concept of separation of the two communities that was offered by the British on more than one occasion during the 1930s and 1940s, and the American suggestion in early 1948 to create a trusteeship for Palestine’s future. Martin Indyk, a US diplomat published an article about considering a trusteeship as a future political option in a Foreign Policy magazine article in July 2003.
Perspective provides valuable insights in evaluating contemporary diplomacy. Though neither the Palestinian-Israeli-U.S. summit of July 2000 nor the Egyptian-Israeli-U.S. summit of September 1978 ended discussions between Israel and its Arab adversaries, there were more differences than similarities between the two intense and highly charged meetings.
October 1991 Kenneth W. Stein and Samuel W. Lewis, Making Peace Among Arabs and Israelis: Lessons From Fifty Years of Negotiating Experience, United States Institute of Peace, Washington, October 1991, second printing 1992, 69 pages.
Comparing the 1936-39 Arab uprising in various parts of western Palestine and the intifada that began in 1987 in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, the most striking conclusion is the large number of general similarities between these manifestations of Palestinian national consciousness. The two most significant differences, however, are that the 1987 intifada generated a deeper and more prolonged Palestinian national coherence across all classes than did its predecessor and clarified and crystallized Palestinian opinion, which helped create a historic compromise in Palestinian public policy.
A comprehensive U.S. plan to end the Hamas-Israel war is unveiled eight days before the second anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Kenneth W. Stein, “One Hundred Years of Social Change: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” in Laurence Silberstein (ed.), New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State, New York University Press,…
Secretary of State James A. Baker III brings a realistic and prescient vision of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and U.S. mediation to AIPAC early in the George H.W. Bush presidency.
January 19, 2010 Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas military commander and founder of its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is drugged and suffocated in his hotel room hours after his arrival Dubai. A Dubai police report…
The First Commonwealth: Kingdom of Israel/the United Monarchy (circa 1030-930 B.C.E.) under Kings Saul, David and Solomon. The monarchy split into two kingdoms in 930 B.C.E. The northern Kingdom of Israel endured until 722 B.C.E., when…
September 28, 1995 After signing the Declaration of Principles (DOP) on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, commonly known as the Oslo Accords, on September 13, 1993, Israel and the PLO reached three additional interim agreements before Oslo…
November 2, 1917 The Balfour Declaration was the Jewish charter that Herzl failed to obtain from the Ottoman sultan 20 years earlier. The terms were included in the preamble of the Palestine Mandate’s Articles in…
Jews always have bound themselves together by committing to Torah values, taking care of one another, adapting to new settings, coping with persistently precarious living environments, and finding leaders who looked past immediate obstacles to…
Scott Abramson, November 2023 Throughout the history of their diaspora, the Jewish people had represented the definitive nation-in-exile and the quintessential minority, “the minority par excellence,” as philosopher Hannah Arendt described them. Jews had even…
Historical Background Unlike any other region of the world, Europe has had the most intimate, impactful and longest-lasting relationship with contemporary Israel and its origins. As the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and with the…
Diversity is one of Israel’s most distinctive features. Finding common ground on sacred ground, Israeli Jews have returned to their homeland from more than 100 countries, forming a population of diverse culture, religious observance and…
The U.N. partition resolution in 1947 cleared the way for Israel to declare independence six months later, but since then the United Nations has largely been antagonistic and condemnatory toward Israel and a tool for the Palestinians and Israel’s enemies.
By Ken Stein and Scott Abramson, March 23, 2025 Zionist/Jewish Economic Development in Palestine Before 1948 Jewish physical growth in Mandatory Palestine in the period known as the New Yishuv was sufficient through land acquired…
April 14, 2025 The period of the New Yishuv lasted from the last 40 years of Ottoman rule in Palestine through the British Mandate until the establishment of Israel in 1948. It saw the growth…
March 12, 2025 By Ken Stein The Jewish growth in Mandatory Palestine in the period of the New Yishuv to establish a Jewish territory for a state had significantly developed by 1939. Arab leadership in…
Two major discordant issues that vexed Israel before October 7, 2023, continue to cleave Israeli society: a possible exemption from mandatory military service for the Haredim and the Netanyahu government’s persistent effort to wrench from…
By Ken Stein, October 28, 2024 When Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter became the 39th President of the United States in 1977, he had little foreign policy experience, particularly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Despite this, he…
Where you choose to begin or tell or remember it shapes the history and politics you do or do not want to convey. What you include and what you leave out reveals your knowledge,
biases, and political intentions.
Since the June 1967 war, Anti-Israeli sentiment on US campuses has grown to extraordinary proportions merging with previously evolved anti-Zionism into sporadic mention to regular embrace.
The writing of any history is an art and not a science. History is not stagnant because there are always new materials discovered and new means used to analyze data. There is the bias and…
Neither Israel’s political culture nor Israel’s democracy based on Jewish self determination simply materialized on May 15, 1948. A connection exists from Jewish self-rule in the Diaspora to Zionist political autonomy during the Yishuv and to contemporary Israeli political culture. Likewise, the origins of Israeli democracy are found in the hundreds of years of Jewish Diasporas transitioning into the Zionist movement to the state; from aliyot before the Palestine Mandate to 1948 and since. Components of Israeli political culture…
Published by JESNA, Jewish Education Service of North America ISSUE #18 WINTER 2004 Israel Education and the College Campus, “Awake ye from ye slumber, the call that is heard, oh my people.” Agenda: Jewish Education,…
Four out of every five Jews in the world live in the United States and Israel; 6.3 million in Israel, 6.7 million in the US. According to Pew Research Center Studies, 7 in 10 American Jews feel attached or very attached to Israel.
The notion of a two-state solution remains front and center as the most often discussed and endorsed solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dimension of the conflict in the Middle East. So why has it not happened?
Divine, Donna Robinson, Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power, Lynne Reinner Publishers, Boulder, 1994, pp. 191-215 (with author’s permission, September 2025) This is a rigorous analysis of the struggles of…
Examination of the mobilization of society for the Israeli War of Independence effort enables one to present a more extended process that began in October 1947 — some two months prior to the outbreak of the war — and ended, from the standpoint of mobilization of personnel, at the beginning of 1949, when demobilization of the first draftees from the wartime army took place, and from an economic standpoint in April 1949, when an Austerity system was declared in the State of Israel.
In pursuing its central political objective to control and lead the Palestinian Arab quest for statehood, the Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by Mahmoud Abbas is delighted to have multiple countries endorse a two-state solution. Affirming…
When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigned in 2008 amid allegations of bribery, Israel came within reach of a milestone in gender equality — one that was a credit to the Jewish state as much as…
Adopting a systematic, yet non-technical, approach, Jacob Metzer’s book is the first to analyze the divided economy of Mandatory Palestine from the viewpoints of modern economic history and development economics.
Udi Dekel and Noa Shusterman, with permission of INSS
By Scott Abramson A Disadvantaged Land in a Pivotal Location The State of Israel lies at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, at the intersection of three continents: Asia, Africa and Europe. Together with…
When the British and the French decided on the borders of some modern Middle Eastern states in the Levant in the 1915-1922 period, no Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Jewish, Lebanese or Jordanian state existed. Before the…
Dr. Eli Sperling, April 15, 2025, for CIE © Center for Israel Education, 2025 Israeli music offers a powerful lens through which we can understand the country’s cultural and political evolution, serving as both a…
Musa Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine,” Middle East Journal, Volume 3, No. 4, October 1949, pp. 373-405 Reprinted with permission of The Middle East Institute, October 2021 In this 1949 article published in Middle East…
