Benjamin Wittes writes: The reason I don’t write about Israeli-Palestinian matters much is that the more time I have spent with them, the less I think I have anything useful to say on the subject. The process of spending time with the actual conflict has humbled me to the point that I am these days much more interested in asking questions than I am in making pronouncements. I am much more interested in conveying information than I am in telling…
Haggai Matar writes: Contrary to what many Israelis are saying, and while the army was clearly caught completely off guard by this invasion, this is not a “unilateral” or “unprovoked” attack. The dread Israelis are feeling right now, myself included, is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. The responses we are hearing from many Israelis today…
Politico reports: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top military adviser said Tehran supported the attacks by Hamas against Israel on Saturday and would continue to back the Islamist fighters “until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.” The remarks by Yahya Rahim Safavi, a former commander of the country’s Revolutionary Guards, will only fan suspicion that Tehran played a direct role in supporting its traditional ally, Hamas, in the well-planned attacks that have killed at least 40 people and injured…
The New York Times reports: The startling clash between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which threatens to become a regional conflict, jeopardizes the months-long effort by President Biden and his top aides to push Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. Even before the assault by Palestinian militants of Hamas on Israeli towns on Saturday morning, American officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, had warned that the complex diplomacy over normalization might not bear fruit. On Saturday, Mr….
The Guardian reports: Joe Biden is facing accusations of betraying a pre-election promise to re-evaluate ties with Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in favour of pursuing a rapprochement with the kingdom aimed at repelling a challenge from China to US primacy in the Middle East. The charge, from human rights campaigners and some Democrats, follows the fifth anniversary of Khashoggi’s death at the hands of Saudi regime agents and comes amid mounting criticism of a proposed new…
Norman L. Eisen and Joshua Kolb write: On Thursday, Donald Trump’s legal team filed a long-awaited motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election interference charges on presidential immunity grounds. We anticipated that Trump would mount this defense even before the charges officially dropped in a model prosecution memo on the case earlier this summer and published an extended takedown of the arguments. Now that the motion is here and we can judge the substance, it is still likely to…
David Remnick interviews Al Gore: Gore: [I]t now seems obvious to almost everyone that the severity of the crisis has reached a new level of intensity. Climate-related extreme events have become so common and so dangerous that people who wanted to dismiss it are now waking up to the reality that we’re facing. And, of course, the underlying substance is shocking. We’re still using the sky as an open sewer for the heat-trapping, gaseous pollution that we spew into it…
The Washington Post reports: Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored…
The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in a recent interview, language with echoes of white supremacy and the racial hatreds of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump made the remark in a 37-minute video interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was posted last week. It drew broader scrutiny on Wednesday after the liberal MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan surfaced the quote in a post on X….
Joanne Freeman writes: Without a doubt, the Republican ousting of Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a banner of dysfunction. Sifting through the chaos for its meaning is more complex. It certainly signals that something is broken, but what? It’s not the Republican Party’s fracture in and of itself. Fractured political parties are hardly new; the 19th century was the great age of splintering parties. We’ve had contentious speakerships before (though a party ousting its own speaker is something special). Extremism…
Former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg: “I think another shoe is going to drop very soon, which is, in the order today, they ordered him to disclose secret equity partners in any of the interests in his New York properties. Now, I’ve been theorizing for years now, to editors and to other journalists that Trump has these investors — that his piece of the equity is not really his piece; that he has loaned it out. We will see what…
Maksym Vishchyk and Jeremy Pizzi write: As Russia’s war against Ukraine persists, officials in Ukraine, Russia, and beyond have differing visions of how hostilities should end. Ukraine has consistently made its position clear that no peace negotiations with Russia are possible before the complete restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, that is, a return to Ukraine’s 1991 internationally recognized borders. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid down that marker when he first outlined his 10-point Peace Formula in November 2022. In contrast, Russia has repeatedly stated that…
Politico reports: After a year and a half of war, Ukraine’s leaders now have a new reason to worry: Mounting political chaos in America is threatening to derail their supply of money and weapons. Days after lawmakers shelved a vital U.S. plan to send billions of dollars in aid to Kyiv, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted by his own Republican Party colleagues. Aid to Ukraine was named as one of the reasons. In Kyiv, officials are at a…
Shelby Talcott reports: Members of Donald Trump’s team are quietly preparing to go on offense against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as internal campaign polling suggests his expected third party bid could draw more votes from Trump than President Joe Biden in a general election. Semafor has not independently reviewed the polling. One person close to Trump’s campaign said it showed that Kennedy took more votes from Trump than left-wing independent Cornel West drew from Biden when both were tested. “It’s…
Politico reports: It wasn’t that anyone seriously thought he’d win the 218 votes to be elected. In fact, most who were familiar with the conference’s internal dynamics believed he couldn’t even get the conference nomination, requiring a simple majority of Republicans. Centrist Republicans running in Biden districts were dreading the prospect of being tied to Trump as speaker. And even traditional and conservative Republicans were not happy about the idea of reporters peppering them with questions about whether they think…