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Emory Professor of Contemporary and Middle Eastern History, Political Science, and Israeli Studies and Center for Israel Education President Kenneth W. Stein applies decades of document-based research, interviews and scholarship, including new insights gleaned from the study of detailed minutes in the Israel State Archives, to examine the Camp David Accords 40 years after Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin signed the agreement Sept. 17, 1978, that concluded 13 days of negotiations led by President Jimmy Carter.

Forty years ago this month, President Jimmy Carter convened the Camp David summit between Israeli and Egyptian leaders to push Arab-Israeli negotiations forward in an unprecedented and intensive manner.

It is now apparent that distances between the Carter administration and Israel did not begin in earnest after Begin’s May 1977 election or over the settlements. Newly available materials show that from its outset, the Carter administration prioritized curbing Israeli influence in Washington.

In the months before the UN vote to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states in November 1947, the Jewish Agency leadership there had to overcome a series of foreign policy obstacles working against the Jewish state’s establishment.

​Israel is only 70 years old. It is certainly more developed and different than the US was in 1846. What are the domestic and foreign policy issues that remain open-ended​? Which issues have settled into consensus acceptance?

In January this year, the veteran Arab journalist Rami Khouri made this assessment of the Middle East as a region, “Never before has the Arab region been so fractured, violent, volatile and vulnerable to the whims of desperate citizens, powerful autocrats, renegade militants, durable terrorists, and predatory foreign militaries.” By comparison, when Israel came into […]

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?

For more than seventy years the US government developed and revised its attitude toward Zionism and Israel. Using published archives, press conferences, speeches and numerous interviews, this compilation of 50 quotations traces how American views of Zionism and Israel changed.

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.

Whether you hate or love President Trump, don’t let it blind you from the meaning of the words he utters, or the tweets he sends. Regardless of your emotions or strong political leanings, his words are decisively important; he is President of the United States.

The 1937 plan to partition Palestine was never implemented. It did, however, remain a workable political option for resolving the conflict between Arabs and Zionists. Britain needed to placate Arab state opposition to Zionism, so it refrained from actively revisiting the partition plan.

In two books written sixty years apart, When Prophecy Fails, 1957 (Festinger, Riecken and Schachter) and The Influential Mind, 2017 (Sharot, an Israeli neuroscientist), the conclusions were the same.