Yossi Alpher
By Yossi Alpher
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Opinion Torn Between West and (Mid) East
Should Israel’s two-day weekend include Friday or Sunday? The question has a far deeper meaning than may meet the eye. It touches on Israel’s identity: Are we part of the Arab Middle East or part of the West? The two-day weekend that has evolved in Israel in the course of the past three decades or…
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Opinion Attack on Iran Unlikely — For Now
The recent intimations that Israel is planning a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are not likely to lead to any such action anytime soon. More likely, they reflect an attempt to generate stronger international sanctions, coming as they did just as Vienna’s International Atomic Energy Agency was about to release a report confirming Israel’s…
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News Terror Attacks Reveal Danger and Opportunity of Arab Revolution
The terrorist attack launched from Egyptian Sinai, just north of Eilat, on August 18, brought Israel into a headlong collision with the problematic fruits of the Egyptian revolution. In Sinai, 12 militants were able to spend several days reconnoitering Israeli civilian targets along the loosely patrolled Egypt-Israel border, then launch incursions into Israel from alongside…
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Opinion This ‘Arab Spring,’ Only Uncertainty Blooms
Observers are increasingly using the term “Arab spring” to describe the tsunami of revolution, revolt, state collapse and armed intervention that is sweeping the Arab world. The term implies that a better reality, a rebirth, is about to burst forth from the Arab world. Yet it is not obvious or certain that we are actually…
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Opinion Look to Damascus and Turtle Bay
With revolutionary unrest sweeping the Arab Middle East, the focus is on democracy, not peace. Israel’s neighbors in Amman and Damascus are currently more worried about anti-regime unrest than they are about the failed peace process. The revelations about Israeli-Palestinian negotiating stances, revealed in detail by the Al Jazeera leaks a few weeks ago, have…
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Opinion Israel’s Stakes, Egypt’s Streets
With Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic, pro-Western regime under threat from the angry Egyptian masses, it appears we are witnessing a new dawn for the power of the “Arab street” in Egypt, Tunisia and potentially elsewhere. This is going to be a profound challenge for Israel, whose only diplomatic or even clandestine relationships with Arab states have…
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Opinion The Sudan Precedent
From Iraq to Lebanon, from the Palestinian Authority to Yemen, Arab states are increasingly fragmenting along regional, sectarian and ethnic lines. But only one Arab state is on the verge of formally dismantling itself: Sudan. The population of southern Sudan votes January 9 on a proposal to secede from the Arab-dominated north and become an…
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Opinion When Would Israel Attack Iran?
The prospect of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is very much in the news. Jeffrey Goldberg recently published a controversial article in The Atlantic citing what he called a “consensus” view among current and former Israeli decision makers that “there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next…
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