Benjamin netanyahu

Trump has no appetite for a second-term war

Now more than ever, Donald Trump appears to be channeling his inner Lord Palmerston. It was the 19th-century prime minister, after all, who went down in the history books for his declaration that England had no permanent enemies or allies. Generations of statesmen have recited that gelid precept, but Trump is one of the few who actually seems prepared to act upon it. Speaking in Riyadh, he implored Iran – the longtime bugbear of Washington hawks, including Trump’s defenestrated national security advisor Mike Waltz – to strike out upon a new course, vowing that there are no “permanent enemies” for America.

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Hostages

Trump turns on Netanyahu after securing US hostage release

As the military helicopter carrying Edan Alexander - the last remaining American hostage held by Hamas – landed on top of the Tel Aviv hospital, the crowd gathered below erupted in cheers of pent-up relief. Edan, now 21 years old – but just 19 when he was captured, was finally free following 594 days in captivity. After spending almost two years underground the American-Israel looked pale and traumatized. But remarkably he walked off the helicopter unaided. His mother, then his father, practically leaped into his arms. There was dancing and singing in the crowd around me outside the Ichilov hospital, people waved Israeli and American flags. One of them was Tslil Ben Maruch, Edan’s aunt. “I have three young kids at home, all of whom love Edan.

Introducing the MAGA-za Strip

President Donald Trump warned Hamas that there would be “hell to pay” when he returned to the White House if the terrorist organization continued to hold the hostages that it and Gazans have held for almost 500 days. Around eighty hostages, living and murdered, remain in Gaza.Last night, Trump laid out what “hell to pay” could look like: a potential American takeover of the Gaza Strip, maximum pressure against Iran and arms shipments to Israel.Trump, who famously compared the Arab-Israeli conflict to a “real-estate deal” in 2015, proposed a radical reshifting of the entire region, alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the first foreign leader he’s hosted in person in the White House in his second term.

The international criminal justice system was prejudiced from the start

From our UK edition

Three generations ago, Britain and the United States joined forces to propose the establishment of a revamped international rules-based system to remake the world. This was initially articulated in a document that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, signed in August 1941. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, were persuaded to join the effort, part of a grouping that came to be known as the United Nations. The new rules would address trade and other economic matters, decolonisation, war and the fundamental rights of human beings. In the summer of 1945, the Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal was drafted, reflecting agreement on a list of international crimes and the notion of individual criminal liability, up to the very highest levels of public office.

Is time up on TikTok?

TikTok is hoping that 2025 can be its year — but what comes next for the social media company is truly anyone’s guess. Will someone buy it? Will it divest from its Chinese Communist Party ownership? Will it exist in America next week (the app is fully banned in China as is)? Stay tuned.The social-media app is seeking yet another revival at the eleventh hour. Despite a bipartisan bill signed by President Joe Biden that restricts the ability for foreign adversaries to run social-media companies in the United States, TikTok is activating its army of supporters once more (the app is presumably hoping that its child soldiers will not threaten to kill themselves or lawmakers this time)... and it just might work.

brett cooper

What’s going on between Brett Cooper and Candace Owens?

Brett Cooper, former host of The Comment Section on the Daily Wire, has sparked rumors after liking a controversial Instagram post by former colleague Candace Owens. Speculation follows a clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored last month in which Owens accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a war criminal with “genocidal ambitions.” Owens told Morgan, “I want to use my platform to say that I believe they are intentionally executing a holocaust.” Cooper liking Owens’s post raised questions: does Cooper agree with Owens’s take on the war in Gaza? Could this be tied to her departure from the Daily Wire? And does she plan to collaborate with Owens moving forward?

Trump is already the diplomat-in-chief

The United States only has one president at a time. Until January 20, that’s Joe Biden. But President-elect Donald Trump and his skeleton foreign policy team are waiting in the wings, plotting policy behind the scenes on issues — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Middle East peace — that have stymied the Biden administration for the last year. In fact, Trump is already influencing the respective calculations of allies, partners and adversaries before he even steps foot in the Oval Office. And Biden’s advisors seem perfectly fine with it. Trump fancies himself as a master negotiator, somebody who’s inherently skilled at poking, pressuring and sweet-talking the opposite side of the table until he gets what he wants.

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Trump’s White House… reloaded

President-elect Donald Trump is slowly revealing who will — and who will not — be a part of his second administration come 2025. As a reminder, last week Trump announced campaign co-manager Susie Wiles as his chief-of-staff.Over the weekend, Trump rebuffed Nikki Haley, who previously served as Trump’s UN ambassador, and Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s secretary of state. “I will not be inviting former ambassador Nikki Haley, or former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our country.

Trump drops bombs on Liz Cheney

Former president Donald Trump slammed former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has been campaigning on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris, for her war-hawk tendencies and quickly found himself in a media feeding frenzy. Trump said during a town hall with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “She’s a radical war hawk... Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”He added, “Look, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right in the mouth of the enemy.

How will Yahya Sinwar’s death change Netanyahu’s calculations?

It was a short, stern, matter-of-fact message from the Israeli Defense Forces — "Eliminated: Yahya Sinwar." The man the Israeli military establishment was searching for throughout Gaza's alleyways, underground tunnels and blasted-out buildings for more than a year, responsible for the worst terrorist attack on Israel since the founding of the state, is now dead and gone. Sinwar becomes the latest in a long line of Hamas leaders and commanders — Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, to name a few — who have eventually met their fate at Israel’s hand.  Sinwar, however, often made the others look like conciliatory men. The sixty-something-year-old Palestinian, born in a Gaza refugee camp, lived and breathed Hamas for his entire adult life.

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Kamala’s press tour ends in viral mockery

Amid lingering questions about what Kamala Harris stands for — plus a precipitous decline of the momentum the vice president enjoyed after leaping to the top of the Democratic ticket — her campaign decided it was time to send her into the media fray. This was a very calculated media tour, of course. With the exception of the traditional 60 Minutes interview on CBS (which Trump declined this time around, as his team claimed the outlet wanted to do “live fact-checking”), Harris stuck to friendly, low-risk outlets where she was unlikely to make any major fumbles.Unfortunately for the Harris campaign, this simple task would prove to be too much for the veep.

Where conflict in the Middle East goes from here

Anything written on the Middle East at this moment in history is almost instantly out of date. As Lenin said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The Arab-Israeli war in 1967, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the invasion of Iraq in 2003...the region may once again be at one of those forks in the road that dictate the fate of nations for years to come. Journalists’ predictions age like milk out of the fridge. Nevertheless, here are some: Israel attacks Iran. This isn’t a hard one. The question is what form that attack will take. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has wanted to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before, only to be stopped by the US.

With Israel, the US is caught in a world of contradictions

Ever since a 2,000-pound bomb demolished Hezbollah’s headquarters in Southern Beirut last Friday and killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the organization since 1992, there was an expectation among the commentariat that Iran would retaliate. The scope of that response, however, was very much in dispute. The Iranian government was reportedly divided about whether to respond at all, with the newly-elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, taking the position that an attack against Israel would likely ruin his foreign policy agenda — he offered the West the thinnest of olive branches during his time in New York for the UN General Assembly meetings — and give the Israeli government an excuse to strike inside Iranian borders.

The US should stop raising false hope of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire

The months-long ceasefire and hostage release negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been the diplomatic equivalent of Groundhog Day. And the US officials tasked with bringing those talks across the finish-line have contributed mightily to the very bad, never-ending movie we (not to mention the hostages’ families and the more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza) have watched since President Biden rolled out his ceasefire plan in late May. In the months since, Washington has committed verbal blunder after verbal blunder by getting over its skis and proclaiming progress where no progress exists.

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The US is unwise to lift restrictions on the sale of bombs to Saudi Arabia

To the extent Joe Biden had anything to say about Saudi Arabia during the 2020 presidential campaign, it largely centered on shaming the oil-rich monarchy into changing its ways. Coming off the 2018 state-sponsored murder of Washington Post columnist and former royal court insider Jamal Khashoggi in a Turkish consulate, Biden aired numerous complaints about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He pledged to make the kingdom a pariah state during a Democratic presidential debate, accused the Saudi air force of killing children in Yemen — it wasn’t as much an accusation as a fact — and committed himself to reassessing US arms sales to Riyadh. The Saudis didn’t like what they saw during the Biden administration’s opening months.

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Why America was in the dark over Israel’s assassinations

For the last three months, the Biden administration has had one top priority in the Middle East: end the war in Gaza. President Biden’s May 31 address, during which he outlined a three-stage process whereby a temporary six-week ceasefire and hostage exchange would eventually led to a permanent end to the fighting and Gaza’s reconstruction, remains official US policy. CIA director Bill Burns, a former senior negotiator himself courtesy of his decades-long experience in the State Department, has spent the last ten months flying to Cairo, Doha, Jerusalem and Rome to close the remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas. It’s hard and thankless work.

A very bad week for the Secret Service

The Secret Service’s worst week since John Hinckley Jr. failed to gun down President Ronald Reagan continued with some buggy problems just days after the organization’s embattled director announced plans to step down following bipartisan condemnation.Fresh off of failing to adequately protect President Donald Trump from a deranged gunman, the Secret Service failed to secure the Watergate Hotel where Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying and allowed a pro-Hamas organization to pour live maggots all over a room where he was alleged to be dining. “BON APPETIT!! MAGGOTS RELEASED ON THE CRIMINAL ZIONIST’S WAR TABLE!” the Palestinian Youth Movement posted on Instagram, along with a video of insects crawling all over the Watergate’s grounds.

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Why won’t the AP tell the truth about J.D. Vance and the couch?

Sofa, so good? What does “fake news” mean in the post-truth era? Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and rebranding of it to X, was supposed to augur a new age of unfiltered information, to combat the censorship of Silicon Valley apparatchiks. For a lot of this week, that meant you’d see Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk sincerely assuring you that Joe Biden was dead or about to die (he addressed the nation, weakly, on Wednesday, an impressive feat for any corpse). How is the discerning reader supposed to separate fact from falsehood in this climate? That’s the question facing tech-savvy Senator J.D.

Inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress

Today Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first world leader to address a joint session of Congress four times, surpassing the previous record jointly held by him and Winston Churchill. And the anti-Israel protesters, not unlike the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, drastically inflated their numbers ahead of Wednesday’s proceedings. Despite concern that more than 10,000 anti-Israel protesters would descend on the nation’s capital, only a small group that carried Hamas flags and shut down multiple streets showed up. That’s not to say there was no drama, however. There was “absolute chaos” in the streets of the capital by the protesters who did show, with some activists pepper-sprayed and arrested by the Capitol Police.

An end to Israel is the only ‘de-escalation’ the pro-Palestine crowd wants

Everywhere you turn in conversations about Israel, Gaza, Jews and antisemitism right now, the long-promised specter of expansion and escalation is... well... escalating. More than nine months into Israel’s war with Hamas, the rhetoric of conflict and activism has escalated into violent confrontations on the battlefields of war, politics and protest.   Across Israel’s northern flank, for instance, its months-long flare-up with Hezbollah is quickly escalating into an all-out war as the Iranian-backed militia killed a pair of Israeli civilians last week via rockets launched from Lebanon.