More in ‘Iran’

• Vice President Joe Biden gave his big speech in Israel, after tweaking it in response to the East Jerusalem construction announcement. The speech was mostly warm, with Biden explaining, “Only a friend can deliver the hardest truth.” [JPost]
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to stick to the proximity talks, even after the construction announcement. ...

• Israel’s interior minister says he is “very sorry for the embarrassment” resulting from his government’s approval yesterday of 1,600 new E. J’lem homes as Joe Biden arrived in the country to support peace talks—but the approval is still in effect. Biden’s now trying to reassure the P.A. that all is not lost. [AP]
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Postmodernists long ago disabused us of the idea that texts have stable, fixed meanings. French literary critics like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes introduced a vision of the text as a tricky, shape-shifting improvisation; their American disciples like Stanley Fish proposed that these texts only acquire meaning through the efforts of interpretive communities. The relevance ...

• The Palestine Liberation Organization formally dropped its requirement that Israel freeze all settlements before peace talks commence, in order to allow a new round of U.S.-mediated indirect negotiations. [AP/NYT]
• Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Israel today, ostensibly to kick-start those talks, but perhaps most of all to signal to Israeli leaders that America ...

On Wednesday at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., a debate took place on U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran. You can listen to it here, and read a transcript here.
The central question of the evening was “Engagement or Regime Change?” In one corner: Michael Ledeen, a proponent for regime change in Tehran ever since the ...

Slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to strike a deal with Yasser Arafat because, he told a top aide three days before he was assassinated, “[Arafat] and his [Palestine Liberation Organization] represent the last vestige of secular Palestinian nationalism.”
So we learn in a forthcoming book by that aide, Yehuda Avner. Rabin was extremely skeptical ...

• Vice President Joe Biden hosted folks from most Jewish-American groups to consult on his upcoming trip to Israel. Conspicuously unrepresented: J Street. [Laura Rozen]
• A columnist argued that Syrian President Bashar Assad is cozying up to Iran not out of rational self-interest and power politics but because he’s an anti-Israel ideologue. [JPost]
• Iran announced ...

• The New York Daily News editorializes against Brooklyn’s Mile End and its preference for Montreal bagels: “this is a crime against the culture of your city. One punishable by flogging with hard salamis.” Maybe this will be a central plank of News publisher Mort Zuckerman’s Senate campaign! [Daily News]
• Syria symbolically reaffirmed its membership ...

• We learn that two of the suspected (and allegedly Mossad) assassins of Hamas’s chief weapons man escaped to Iran after the killing. The Scroll will have more on the yet more bizarre mystery later in the day. [NYT]
• In public and private, the Obama administration tsk-tsked Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to landmark two Biblical ...

“We don’t know of a single ‘Western scholar’ or ‘policy wonk’ … who thinks that access to the Iranian regime is going to make them powerful, rich, or both,” Flynt Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, recently wrote on their website, raceforiran.com. The two Iran lobbyists were responding to my profile of them in ...