World News Insights: Opinion Articles

When we encounter masses galvanized by a fairy tale to crush those who do not fall in line, or when we are faced with crowds who derive their power from fairy tales and go around subjugating those who are weaker than them, or when we see petty avarice for money, status, or career advancement lead…

Over the past six months, a remarkable series of promising events have unfolded in the Middle East. The most significant of which was the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement brokered by China, which was preceded by Turkiye, encouraged and spurred on by the Russians, opening up to the Assad regime in Syria…

The current century has come to be painful for the Middle East. Terrorism struck the symbols of the prestige of New York and Washington, and the wounded empire embarked on a punishment journey, the most important of which was the Iraqi adventure. Lebanon soon joined the list of the sufferers, as…

Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book, “Superintelligence,” a crucial text for the community of worriers about the risks of artificial intelligence, begins with a fable: A tribe of sparrows, weary of a marginal existence, becomes convinced that everything would be better if they could only have an owl to help…

The United States and the West have taken stances that can only be described as tactical, not strategic, since the announcement that Saudi Arabia and Iran were normalizing relations, through a China-brokered agreement, and with more and more talks being held to restore Arab relations with Bashar al…

From the perspective of a Russian soldier, the war in Ukraine must look nightmarish. In over a year of combat, nearly 200,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, according to American officials, in a military operation that has proved both incompetent and ill equipped. Morale is reportedly…

An environment minister once told me: "We are the Ministry of Environment, so we don't deal in politics." I immediately realized that his ministry would not succeed in making any serious progress, because the ministry is indeed a political entity, whose mission is to set legislation and laws that…

Israel’s professional politicians have taken their fierce and stubborn dispute to the corridors of the political system. The president has been the mediator, and all sides have kept their weapons, and despite temporarily delaying work on their main issue - the “judicial reform” - the majority in…

“This government just does not listen to us,” said Renald, a 50-year-old electrical mechanic at the Port of Marseille, as his co-workers assembled a barricade this week on the route leading to a fuel depot. “There’s a deep anger here.” That anger is unlikely to have been assuaged by President…

The month of March appears to be a consequential month for the Arab world. Over the past decades a number of events with far-reaching consequences for the region have taken place during this month. Amongst these events is the US invasion of Iraq. This month we commemorated the 20th anniversary…

After the formation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has been called the most radical government in Israel’s history, I wrote that this was a “government of confrontation.” However, I did not expect to see this wave of criticism from Israel’s friends worldwide or the internal tensions that…

In the Lebanese disagreements, place is no longer the only divisible element. Even time was divided into two imaginary places. In both of them, the lines of partition re-surfaced, in parallel with calls for confederation or federalism by the promoters of these lines, reviving the language of civil,…