More in ‘Turkey’

• Last decade, thousands of Palestinians were stripped of Jordanian citizenship. Jordan’s government wants to maximize the Palestinians’ numbers to improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis Israel. [NYT]
• U.S. officials continued to criticize Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized again for the construction announcement’s timing while maintaining support for the settlements. My 10 ...

• After meeting Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Vice President Joe Biden declared, “There is no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.” [WP]
• A Reform Judaism task force proposed the establishment of separate blessings for major life events, including marriages, involving non-Jewish spouses. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]
• With U.S. ...

• The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly passed a resolution condemning Turkey’s Armenian “genocide,” a controversial, volatile (and historically accurate) step on which most pro-Israel groups are lukewarm. [NYT]
• Polish anti-abortion activists are using Hitler’s image on billboards, reminding folks that the Nazis legalized abortion in conquered Poland. [Haaretz]
• In an op-ed, Ireland’s foreign ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, David P. Goldman talks to George Friedman, whose defense consulting company Stratfor—a “private CIA”—predicts the rise of Poland as well as a Japanese-Turkish axis against America. Digging through old Yiddish newspapers, Eddy Portnoy finds that the pre-World War II Warsaw Beit Din frequently resembled less a staid rabbinical court and more ...

CREDIT: Mark Alan Stamaty
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Last Friday afternoon, we worried that high tensions between Israel and Syria—most immediately prompted by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s threats to Syrian leader Bashar Assad—could lead to violence. Well, fortunately, they haven’t so far, and hot tempers have appeared to cool over the weekend. Which can allow us now to focus on the broader question ...

You might want to head into this weekend hoping for peace in the Middle East. Not just peace in some not-too-distant future, but peace, like, this weekend. Possible enemy: Syria. The latest round of hostilities has been simmering for several days, but it was upped yesterday when Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced bellicosely, “I think ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Shalom Auslander explains death to his five-year-old son against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Norman Samuels gives a primer on how internal changes in Turkey have affected (and worsened) its relations with Israel. Reporting from the Herzliya Conference’s final day, Judith Miller notes the tepid reaction to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech. ...

The first instinct of those seeking to explain the rapid deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations is to find someone to blame. One popular target is the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the AKP, Turkey’s increasingly assertive Islamic governing party, who has publicly denounced Israel’s conduct in Gaza and memorably dressed down Shimon Peres ...

Does the road to Ramallah lead through Damascus?
That’s the contention columnist Yossi Alpher makes in today’s International Herald Tribune. (Though he doesn’t mention the Conference, Alper surely hopes the eminences gathered in Herzliya will take stock of his ideas.) Alpher’s case:
Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, declares himself ready to deal. A Syrian-Israeli process has a ...