Ken’s Blog

From July 1971 to May 1973, we lived in Jerusalem’s Beit Hakerem neighborhood, then only a walk across an open valley to the Givat Ram campus of The Hebrew University. No high-rise hotels there then. Lots of stray cats and schoolboys playing soccer in the street.  Prior to leaving for Israel to carry out dissertation […]

Given the turmoil in Syria, sectarian violence in Iraq, Lebanon’s economic woes, Turkish military adventurism, and Iran’s regional mischief-making, the October 2019, US bipartisan congressional delegation visit to Amman made great sense. It emphasized that for Washington, Jordan is a critical geographic and political asset for America and, for anyone else interested in preserving some measure of regional stability in at least part of the tumultuous Middle East.

On a stormy evening on Sept. 17, 1978, with President Jimmy Carter as their witness, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stepped to a table at the White House and signed the Camp David Accords, consisting of two framework agreements: an outline for the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty and a scaffold for planning self-rule for the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, held by Israel since the June 1967 war. Six months later, on March 26, 1979, the three men gathered again at the White House to sign the peace treaty. But their path to the ceremony 40 years ago was hardly smooth.

Context and perspective are key elements in understanding history. Zionism emerged in the 19th century because there was a unique Jewish identity built around belief, Torah, ritual, and community concern for one another. And second, the presence of wretched anti-Semitism. Nordau gave an impassioned speech about the Jewish condition at the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in the late 19th century making the case for a Jewish national home. Nordau energized the audience and the Zionist movement.

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.