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May 13, 2025 President Donald Trump’s address laying out a vision for Middle East peace and prosperity and ending sanctions on Syria at the 2025 Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, https://www.youtube.com/live/wj1QOz3iuCE?si=dtaydfnk2pFf76UX&t=140 Well, thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here. What a great place. What a great place. But more importantly, […]

Noted Palestinian and Arab authors discuss reasons for a fractured Palestinian community (fractured politics, jealousies, peasant impoverishment, and deep sociological divisions)

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.

להיות עם חופשי בארצנו Zionism’s two part history, Early History to 1897 and Zionism 1898 to 1948 Where has Zionism succeeded?  What remains incomplete or  unfinished? Finished or well-shaped results of Zionism   Unfinished results of Zionism, so far Israel has not answered or been able to answer fully if, how, or when — Ken […]

From 1970 to 1984, Khaddam served as Syria’s Foreign Minister, and later Syria’s decision-maker for its actions in Lebanon. He recounts Syrian anger toward Egyptian President Sadat’s slow but continuous bilateral engagement and recognition of Israel. He recalls how Syria’s President Assad, after a four hour meeting, refused Henry Kissinger’s invitation to attend the 1973 Geneva Conference, not wanting to sanction the closeness Sadat was establishing with Israel and with Washington. These were the same reasons why Syria refused President Carter’s invitation to attend a similar Middle East peace Conference in 1977. Khaddam said, “We were shocked by Sadat’s actions.”

March 25, 2019 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-recognizing-golan-heights-part-state-israel/ The State of Israel took control of the Golan Heights in 1967 to safeguard its security from external threats. Today, aggressive acts by Iran and terrorist groups, including Hizballah, in southern Syria continue to make the Golan Heights a potential launching ground for attacks on Israel. Any possible future peace agreement […]

For a century, Arab and Muslim attitudes toward Jews, Zionism, and Israel have evolved and lived together along a spectrum of outlooks that sees Jews, Zionism and Israel as threatening, disliked, barely tolerated, moderately accepted, recognized, collaborated with, and vigorously hated.

UAE and Bahraini ambassadors to the US provide incisively sharp assessments about why their peace accords unfolded with Israel in September 2020: to halt West Bank annexation, strengthen ties with the US, enhance national security purposes, and stimulate, if possible Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

La música israelí ofrece una poderosa perspectiva a través de la cual podemos comprender la evolución cultural y política del país, sirviendo como fuerza unificadora y reflejo de su diversa sociedad y compleja historia. Desde los inicios del período sionista hasta la fundación del estado, la música actuó como un factor de unión cultural hebreo y desempeñó un papel central en la configuración de lo que se convertiría en la identidad y cultura nacional israelí a través de canciones, melodías y danzas pioneras que celebraban el trabajo, el sacrificio y la conexión nacional judía con la tierra de Israel. Después de 1948, la música israelí sirvió como vehículo de expresión cultural, política, religiosa y social: celebrando los numerosos triunfos de Israel, reuniendo apoyo durante la guerra, conmemorando las pérdidas colectivas, definiendo el judaísmo en el estado judío, expresando protestas y mucho más.

Assembled by Scott Abramson and Ken Stein, Center for Israel Education Aviram Bellaishe, “When Recognition Becomes Evasion: Europe’s Palestinian Statehood Campaign,” Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, April 29, 2025, https://jcpa.org/article/when-recognition-becomes-evasion-europes-palestinian-statehood-campaign/ Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin, “Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities,” The Free Press, April 27, 2025, https://www.thefp.com/p/explosion-in-foreign-funding-for-american-universities?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email Shoshana […]

May 14, 1948: The Declaration recounts the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, the birth of Zionism, and recognition by the UN of a Jewish state’s legitimacy. It also promises that the state will be a democracy for all its citizens.

With crisp analysis, Haganah Commander Yigal Allon, later a Prime Minister of Israel attributes Israel’s successes to multiple factors including the absence of a centralized Arab command, limited Arab military training, underestimating the potential fighting capabilities of local Arabs, and Israel’s success in integrating its citizens into the war effort.

In March 1948, two months before Israel’s establishment, the US State Department sought to reverse the US vote in favor of partition for the creation of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine.

Ken Stein In the 1988 Hamas Charter and from remarks by it leaders and in other publications, they express hatred of Zionism, Israel and Jews. It is unmistakably clear that Hamas abhors Zionism, Israel and Jews in a sovereign state.  Hamas opposes any kind of negotiations that recognizes Israel as a reality or requires cooperation […]

Since its inception in 1988, Hamas has been crystal clear about its total opposition to Zionism and Israel. It opposes any kind of negotiations or agreements that recognize Israel as a reality, and its more extreme spokesmen regularly incite or celebrate the killing of Jews.

Dr. Eli Sperling, April 15, 2025, for CIE © Israeli music offers a powerful lens through which we can understand the country’s cultural and political evolution, serving as both a unifying force and a reflection of its diverse society and complex history. From the early Zionist period until the founding of the state, music acted […]

Britain, France, Italy, and Japan established the great power mandates for Syria and Lebanon (to France) and Palestine and Iraq (to Great Britain) after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. The League of Nations ratified the Mandates in 1922, giving the Mandates international legitimacy.

In less than 45 minutes, Israeli educator Susan Nachman Fraiman presents a taste of the variety of voices in Israeli art that have emerged in the past 20 years: female, religious, Mizrahi, Ethiopian and Israeli-Palestinian, all of which are rich subjects in themselves. We examine a few examples of works from each of these sectors and try to understand the rich background from which they come. This video is from a session July 25, 2022, at the 21st annual CIE/ISMI Enrichment Workshop on Modern Israel.

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 of the Jewish community from 24,000 in 1882 to some 650,000 in May 1948, while the Arab population increased from 300,000 to approximately […]

Meeting for the 2nd time in 80 days, the two leaders focused on the president’s announcement of a renewal of (indirect) Iran-U.S. talks, Hamas-Israel hostage negotiations, and the Gaza War. In light of Trump’s policy for all, he did not withdraw from a 17% tariff imposition on Israel. Trump praised Turkish President Erdogan for being “”the first person in 2,000 years to conquer Syria,” noting “that any problem that you (Israel) have with Turkey, I think I can solve.”

Explicit intentions of the agreement were not only to strengthen bilateral relations during the Cold War, but to boost Israel’s struggling economy. For 30 years Israel has maintained an annual trade surplus with the United States.

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.

History remembers the following lecture (translated into English for the first time) not only as one of Amos Oz’s most celebrated, but also as his last. Regardless of whether he intended it as such, the lecture represents a summation of his insights on the subjects he had engaged with throughout a career that spanned a half-century.

In early May 1921, communal riots unfolded in Jaffa and at Jewish settlements along the coast. There were 96 deaths, equally between Arabs and Jews. This inquiry commission confirmed what another 20 official investigations into Palestine’s political realities would show until 1948, the two communities could not live together; attempts to promote communal coexistence could not overcome angry and geometrically increasing intolerance of the other. And importantly a very low Jewish and Arab interest of wanting to live with one another. From before WWI forward, both strongly preferred spatial, organizational, and political separatism.

Assembled by Scott Abramson and Ken Stein, Center for Israel Education ​Salwa Alinat-Abed, “Politics of Faith: Discourse and Practice Among Women of the Islamic Movement in Israel,” Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, March 20, 2025, https://dayan.org/content/politics-faith-discourse-and-practice-among-women-islamic-movement-israel Calev Ben-Dor, “A Tale of Two ‘Marches’,” Fathom Journal, March 2025, https://fathomjournal.org/a-tale-of-two-marches/​ Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, […]

Ben-Gurion elegantly connects modern Israel from messianic redemption to Zionism, building the country through labor and immigration, with dual needs to remain actively linked to the Jewish diaspora and Jewish values through education.

This document was secured at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Less than a year before Hitler invaded Poland, Arab leaders with an interest in Palestine are starkly disappointed that the the German government did not go to war against the Zionists in Palestine. The same leaders give the Zionist national builders high marks for their perseverance against terrorist bands in the Palestinian countryside. They worry that unless Arab states come to the Palestinians’ assistance, Palestine will be lost to the Zionists. A remarkable assessment for Palestinian Arab leaders and their supporters.