Yossi Alpher
By Yossi Alpher
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Opinion As Israel Turns 57, New Fights Displace Old War Mentality
Let’s take a moment, as Israel marches into its 58th and perhaps most challenging year, to ponder the Jewish state’s evolving strategic interests. First and perhaps most significantly, the perception is gradually sinking in that, for the foreseeable future, conventional military attacks on Israel are a thing of the past. The last conventional war imposed…
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Opinion The Four Questions of the Peace Process
Disengagement is going to happen this summer. That is now the working assumption of most observers and practitioners. Even the settlers, the “victims” of disengagement, are increasingly recognizing the inevitable and are correspondingly adjusting their opposition tactics toward merely making the experience as unpleasant as possible. In so doing, they hope to persuade the Israeli…
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Opinion America Brandishes a ‘Big Carrot’ at Iran
President Bush appears to have encountered the limits of American power. Hence, his approach to extremist elements in the Middle East has become more nuanced in his second term, and the results are increasingly confusing. Take Iran. While continuing now and then to threaten Tehran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Bush is looking for…
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News Killing of Lebanon Ex-premier Boding Ill for Entire Mideast
The Valentine’s Day massacre that shook downtown Beirut on Monday, killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri and at least a dozen others, is bad news not just for Lebanon but also for the region. Hariri, who had dominated Lebanon’s politics since the end of the civil war there in 1990, was killed when a…
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Opinion The Old Arab Pecking Order, Turned Upside Down in Iraq
The Iraqi elections almost certainly created a government dominated by the country’s Shi’ite majority. For the first time in Iraq’s history, and the first time in several hundred years in the Arab world, an Arab state will be ruled by representatives of Shi’ite Islam, the same minority branch of Islam that rules Iran and is…
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Opinion Spooked Agencies
The nature of a country’s intelligence gathering and military or paramilitary operations has to change in accordance with changing threats to its security. This seems to be a fairly sound national security principle. But as we have seen in recent months and years in both Israel and the United States, the conceptualization and actual implementation…
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Opinion The Power of Change, or Just a Change in Power?
Who will succeed Yasser Arafat at the helm of the Palestinian national movement? The question is simply impossible to answer. The predictions we are hearing are based largely on speculation, rather than on substance. In intelligence-community parlance, the prospect of Arafat’s departure from the scene has thrust Palestinian politics and society into a “revolutionary situation”…
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Opinion When Evil Speaks the Truth
Remember Tareq Aziz, the senior official in Saddam Hussein’s regime who frequently spoke on its behalf to Western audiences? He will soon stand trial in Baghdad, alongside Saddam and other former henchmen. As a mouthpiece for the most brutal regime anywhere in recent history, he deserves no pity. But consider this: He frequently spoke the…
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