More in ‘Iran’

According to White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Biden did not, as some had alleged, tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israeli settlements endangered U.S. troops. But what about the venerable General David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. military’s Central Command (which is responsible for Central Asia and most of the Middle East)? He reportedly ...

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell, scheduled to head to the region today in advance of the proximity talks, has put his trip on hold pending an Israeli response to U.S. concerns. [AP/Gulf News]
• U.S. diplomats want Prime Minister Netanyahu to quash the 1600 planned new houses in East Jerusalem; however, in a speech, Bibi noted ...

• Vice President Joe Biden gave his big speech in Israel, after tweaking it in response to the East Jerusalem construction announcement. The speech was mostly warm, with Biden explaining, “Only a friend can deliver the hardest truth.” [JPost]
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to stick to the proximity talks, even after the construction announcement. ...

• Israel’s interior minister says he is “very sorry for the embarrassment” resulting from his government’s approval yesterday of 1,600 new E. J’lem homes as Joe Biden arrived in the country to support peace talks—but the approval is still in effect. Biden’s now trying to reassure the P.A. that all is not lost. [AP]
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Postmodernists long ago disabused us of the idea that texts have stable, fixed meanings. French literary critics like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes introduced a vision of the text as a tricky, shape-shifting improvisation; their American disciples like Stanley Fish proposed that these texts only acquire meaning through the efforts of interpretive communities. The relevance ...

• The Palestine Liberation Organization formally dropped its requirement that Israel freeze all settlements before peace talks commence, in order to allow a new round of U.S.-mediated indirect negotiations. [AP/NYT]
• Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Israel today, ostensibly to kick-start those talks, but perhaps most of all to signal to Israeli leaders that America ...

On Wednesday at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., a debate took place on U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran. You can listen to it here, and read a transcript here.
The central question of the evening was “Engagement or Regime Change?” In one corner: Michael Ledeen, a proponent for regime change in Tehran ever since the ...

Slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to strike a deal with Yasser Arafat because, he told a top aide three days before he was assassinated, “[Arafat] and his [Palestine Liberation Organization] represent the last vestige of secular Palestinian nationalism.”
So we learn in a forthcoming book by that aide, Yehuda Avner. Rabin was extremely skeptical ...

• Vice President Joe Biden hosted folks from most Jewish-American groups to consult on his upcoming trip to Israel. Conspicuously unrepresented: J Street. [Laura Rozen]
• A columnist argued that Syrian President Bashar Assad is cozying up to Iran not out of rational self-interest and power politics but because he’s an anti-Israel ideologue. [JPost]
• Iran announced ...

• The New York Daily News editorializes against Brooklyn’s Mile End and its preference for Montreal bagels: “this is a crime against the culture of your city. One punishable by flogging with hard salamis.” Maybe this will be a central plank of News publisher Mort Zuckerman’s Senate campaign! [Daily News]
• Syria symbolically reaffirmed its membership ...