Six weeks into the ceasefire, I've done some thinking about strategy and about someone who I usually don't think is all that interesting. ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essay...

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the rise of politics of stupid www.thejc.com/opinion/mayo...

In my newest article I discuss one aspect of the corbynization of the American left that doesn't always get due attention: obsession with supposed Jewish evil doesn't just sanction violence or lead to disinhibition of other bigotries. It enforces a politics of stupid. www.thejc.com/opinion/mayo...

The new Agha & Malley book on the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking has been widely excerpted in the media and widely praised by all the foreign policy establishment voices. Here's my long review for @quillette.bsky.social. quillette.com/2025/10/14/r...

To understand just how counterproductive the new recognition announcements are, we need to go back in time. Not a lot, just a week. "How the West handed Hamas a win and killed the ceasefire," my latest article. www.thejc.com/opinion/how-...

Why didn't humanitarians go ballistic as Iranian missiles were fired at Israeli cities? In my latest article, I analyse all three reasons. The third is unalloyed bullshit; the first two are even worse. www.thejc.com/opinion/when...

BICOM’s Senior Research Associate @shanymor.bsky.social‬ spoke with Venetia Rainey of ‪@telegraphnews.bsky.social‬ on her Battle Lines podcast. 🎧 Listen to the full episode, Inside Trump’s Iran attack and why Tehran can still build a nuclear bomb, at: shows.acast.com/battle-lines...

Maybe, just maybe Deborah Lipstadt understands something that you don't. And the entire lexicon of denial you've deployed over a decade of writing about this ("conflating" "silencing criticism" etc.) has helped you renew membership in the community of the good but blinded you to the lurking danger.

The 3 bespoke norms invented for Israel's war in Gaza — on supplies and logistics, territorial changes, and keeping civilians in theatre — not only have no basis in international law, but they contradict nearly every stated policy aim of the countries insisting on them. www.thejc.com/opinion/the-...

"The most damaging misunderstanding about Corbyn and the problem of antisemitism was the instinctive framing of the issue as a prejudice, rather than as a fully formed ideology." My reflections on Corbynism and its implications for American politics. www.thejc.com/opinion/corb...

Israel's October 6 failures and its October 7 failures and its October 8 failures are all related. The current government is not equipped to properly handle this war for all the same reasons it was unable to prevent it.

Spoke yesterday on the BBC about the strange ceasefire-inside-a-ceasefire of the last eleven days. Split into parts here in the thread:

Been writing and thinking about national security policy for years, and I admit I can't find the concept behind a strategy of treating Canada and Mexico as enemies and Russia and China as allies.

Leading figures in Turkey & Qatar are implicated in Hamas' crimes. Neither is an ICC member state, but the crimes are happening in a territory that the ICC insists is in a member state. By principles of complementarity and jurisdiction, there is a case for prosecution and arrest.

2. I plugged @shanymor.bsky.social's article in Mosaic four months ago, and will do so again. Shany, who's not at all right-wing, blames four things: Bibi's personal failings, the settler movement, the peace process, the split sovereignty of the UNWRA system. mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel...

Hard to square some of the statements this morning from European foreign ministers with their governments' strident apologias (and generous funding) for UNRWA.

REMINDER: On September 26, with 100,000 Hezbollah missiles intact, Nasrallah in Beirut, Assad in Damascus, Putin in Tartus & Latakia, and Sinwar in Gaza, the brightest diplomatic minds of the world thought an Israeli ceasefire was crucial. Were they right? www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-...

You can learn a lot about the social praxis of "international law" by the amount of attention devoted in the days after the Syrian regime's fall to the Golan question. I wrote a bit about this in 2019: www.tabletmag.com/sections/isr...

On this day in 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242. I wrote about some of the ways it was an exceptional bit of diplomacy back on the fiftieth anniversary of its passage. www.the-american-interest.com/2017/11/22/u...

Is there an effective military response that Israel could have mounted after October 7 that would not have been met with violence against diaspora Jews and a mobilization of int'l orgs, NGOs, and the milieu of "international law" scholars behind the claim that it was a war crime?