Analysis

"As long as the Lebanese government is hostage to Hezbollah, there's very little that ... outside countries can do," Israeli scholars say.

Algeria, which has never had diplomatic relations with Israel, is adopting an increasingly extreme stance toward the Jewish state and could even become an alternate base of operations for Hamas, which is being pushed out of Turkey.

A Mediterranean Union, designed to mirror only the best elements of NATO and the EU, is the best hope for ensuring good governance and peaceful government across the region.

There's no doubt that the threat from Iran is real, but it seems that the true engine behind the normalization process with Israel is their “enemy” from within. 

Senior Israeli officials who endorse a nuclear deal with Iran are undermining Israel’s interests. Without an agreement, Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear threshold state will be from a position of weakness, while Israel and the US will have legitimacy, urgency, and targets with which to inflict critical harm.

"This is part of an Iranian strategic calculation to turn Syria into another zone of activity for Palestinian terror organizations," says Michael Barak, a senior researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya.

While the American president's political reputation in polls continues to drop lower and lower, the US President embarks on a Middle East tour. Under the guise of an attempt to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, Biden is actually striving to improve his situation on his home front.

The cooperation between Israel and Turkey that torpedoed an Iranian plan to kill Israelis in Istanbul was unusual and commendable, but Iran is more determined than ever to make Israel pay.

The US president plans to form a regional defense alliance at a regional conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

In a region where the words "honor" and "power" are key, repeatedly spitting in Iran's face will inevitably incur a response, but Israel has no choice.