It is time to send in the clowns. With North Korea’s new young leader falling into old habits of saber rattling toward South Korea, and with China unwilling to put pressure on it to come into the community of nations, it is time to send in a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) mediator. The only trick is how to get the New Dear Leader to ask for one.
What’s it like to work in the White House? Elliott Abrams, author of TESTED BY ZION, takes us behind the scenes.
The action by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29, 2012 (Resolution 67/19) to acknowledge Palestine’s status as that of a state has inserted a new element into the on-again off-again effort at peace between Israel and Palestine. The Assembly’s resolution refers to the territory of Palestine as the area occupied by Israel in the 1967 (six-day) war, namely, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River. To that extent, Resolution 67/19 supports the Palestinian position that those two areas in their entirety form the territory of the State of Palestine, hence that Israel’s pretensions to West Bank sectors where Israel has built settlements are ill-founded. What Resolution 67/19 avoids is the circumstance under which Israel came into control of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1967.
We asked Lewis Batemen, a senior editor at Cambridge, about the editorial process behind Tested by Zion.
So much is happening now in the Middle East that one could happily spend all one’s time reading good books about it. But here is a list of some of the best books, covering a bit of the history and current developments.