Michael Barak surveys the online discourse surrounding the ongoing feud between the Fatah and Hamas movements, which has been characterized by public disputes between supporters of the respective movements. The tension is causing public concern about the possibility of further deterioration into civil war.
The articles in this volume explore the primary significance of the changes in the Middle East over the past year, and focus on the areas of intensifying friction in the region and their international context. Contrary to previous volumes in the Strategic Survey for Israel series, which raised many diverse issues, even those without immediate ramifications for Israel, this volume covers domestic and external events that have a clear and immediate impact on the country’s national security.
On Tuesday, January 15, 2019, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi assumed his position as the 22nd IDF Chief of Staff. From a security perspective, his tenure begins in a stormy, unstable period, when the IDF’s strategic and operational environment continues to be marked by vast uncertainty.
Since 2017, relations between the Visegrád Group (V4) and Israel have been changing. Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are increasingly developing shared views and values on international politics and show a greater willingness to cooperate economically. This coincides with growing European Union (EU) criticism of the Israeli government’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Six Day War, which broke out on the morning of June 5, 1967, was a formative event that changed the face of the State of Israel and, to a large extent, the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, Israel had been under existential threat and in six days, the Israel Defense Forces succeeded in removing the threat by achieving a decisive military victory and positioning Israel as a significant force in the region.
The US can and should develop a coherent region-wide strategy, involving US allies including Israel, to impede Iran’s ability to continue developing in ways detrimental to the region’s security. However, Iran is proficient in the practice of using proxies and paramilitary methods, as well as in the combination of paramilitary and political struggle. Its response to a US-led strategy to contain and roll back their influence is likely to focus on these areas.
S&P recently raised Israel’s credit rating to AA minus. This is a welcome development of much economic value and prestige, the result of a long process of economic improvement. From the perspective of national security, the high grade reflects Israel’s ability to grow in economic terms while simultaneously dealing with unusual security challenges.
Six pillars comprise Israel’s national defense doctrine: deterrence, early warning, short conflicts, defensive capabilities, and strategic alliance cooperation. Seventy years of Israel’s Alliances and Cooperation are reviewed.
Though written in May 2017, Paul Rivlin, a Moshe Dayan Center researcher analyzes a rich trove of data to analyze the Gaza Strip’s troubling economic character. Five major reasons are enumerated for its dilemmas: absence of investment, extraordinary high unemployment, a very young population, inability of goods and services to go in and out of the strip, and Hamas’s stranglehold on taxation and spending.
During the 1967 Six-Day War, the State of Israel conquered territory that tripled its size. Though Israel later ceded the clear majority of that territory in the context of a peace agreement with Egypt, the war changed the contours of Israeli politics and opened an ideological rift that has been at its core ever since.
The Israel Democracy Institute and Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) held a two day forum at the end of May 2017, on possible scenarios for the future of Israel.
Placing Jewish destiny into Jewish hands was why Zionism emerged at the end of the 19th century. Acquiring political power to promote Jewish security is how a Jewish state was created.
Coming up, fifty years after the June 1967 War. How many times have I taught the causes and effects, or written about the War? Hundreds of times in forty years.
America’s new president has the potential to thoroughly shake up international relations. Volker Perthes lays out five theses that researchers and policymakers will need to address.
The October 1973 War was 43 years ago this month. What follows is the US Intelligence Estimate when the war started on October 6
Israelis are divided on the impact and future of the territories gained in the June 1967 war, according to the June 2016 Israel Democracy Institute Peace Index.
Jeffrey and Eisenstadt in their analyses, US Military Engagement in the Broader Middle East, focus on the inheritance of the Obama administration’s general military disengagement from the region and the downward spiral of stability there.
The war in Syria has taken a massive humanitarian toll along with economic and social consequences that will reverberate throughout the region for decades to come.
Hamas has long sought to stymie Egyptian control over the peninsula and keep its weapons smuggling routes open, but its latest opportunistic gamble on local jihadists carries wider dangers that should be nipped in the bud by sponsors Turkey and Qatar.
The agreement will not prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapons capability. It will not require the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure. It will however reduce that infrastructure for the next 10 to 15 years.
There is a major, and unfounded, underlying assumption behinds calls for Israel to accept Hamas’s conditions: that Hamas is genuinely motivated by its responsibility for the welfare of Gazans.
Many recollections remain from the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973. The war set in motion a diplomatic process that eventually culminated in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.
Lessons from the overthrow of the Morsi government in Egypt, the restart of Palestinian-Israeli talks, and the civil war in Syria remind us how difficult it is to judge whether American engagement is good or bad in the long run.
Should the United States become centrally or peripherally involved in monitoring a cease-fire and the movement of a cease-fire into a new status-quo for Gaza, the contents of this MOU could constitute a workable outline for helping enforce calm in Gaza and on its borders.
