After high-level phone contacts between Bibi Netanyahu and King Abdullah and Shin Bet chief, Nadav Argaman's secret visit to Amman, Israel and Jordan appear to have worked out a compromise to defuse the Amman embassy standoff and the al Aqsa protests as well. According to an outline of the deal reported in Israeli media, the Jordanians have permitted the … [Read more...]
Western Wall: Nexus for Gender and Religious-Nationalist Conflict
This week, Israel's far-right government acceded to its ultra-Orthodox coalition partners and torpedoed a compromise years in the making, which had been intended to offer Israeli women a means of worshipping at the Western Wall in an egalitarian manner. Women of the Wall have long protested the segregation and second-class status of women who choose to pray … [Read more...]
Al Jazeera: Jordan, Not Israel, Was Original Intelligence Source for ISIS Bomb Plot
Boy, what a difference a day makes. On Monday, I published an article in Middle East Eye in which I speculated that Jordan was the likely source of the intelligence which Donald Trump relayed to the Russians about an ISIS airplane bomb plot. I wrote then: None of the media stories reveal the name of the foreign nation whose operation Trump exposed. … [Read more...]
First Foreign Visit of Trump Presidency is to Mideast, in Shadow of Major ISIS-Russia Intelligence Scandal
Today, Middle East Eye published an earlier version of this article. After publication, Washington seemed to explode with stories making portions of my earlier piece obsolete. So I've updated it here: As U.S. Pres. Donald Trump prepares for the very first foreign visit of his presidency, a major intelligence scandal and another controversy hang over his … [Read more...]