Jeffrey Goldberg

Last weekend, Marine Corps General James Mattis, the recently retired leader of U.S. Central Command and a man known inside the White House for his sharp opinions (which is one reason he’s no longer leading Central Command) issued a very sharp opinion about Israel’s future. Speaking at a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, Mattis warned […]

A few days ago, I wrote that John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, might be running a fool’s errand if he thinks he can bring the Israelis and Palestinians to a final-status agreement. I argued that neither side is ready for the necessary compromises — the Israelis don’t have the political will to reverse […]

Veteran Middle East peace processors are arguing that naysayers are in bad odor this week, now that John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, has seemingly defied the skeptics. Kerry has actually achieved what so many American officials have achieved before — which is to say, getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree, provisionally, to […]

So, it hasn’t been the best week for Al Jazeera, the television network owned by Qatar’s despotic ruling family, for the same reason that it hasn’t been a great week for the despotic ruling family itself: the ouster of Egypt’s president, Mohamed Mursi, the bumpkin fundamentalist. Qatar pumped a lot of money into Mursi’s Muslim […]

Two men I admire, U.S. Senator John McCain and Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, have recently argued that the U.S should suspend aid to Egypt after the army coup last week that ousted President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood. “We cannot repeat the same mistakes that we made at other times in our […]

A few months ago, King Abdullah II of Jordan told me about his meetings with Mohamed Mursi, the now-deposed president of Egypt. The king wasn’t fond of Mursi, both because the Egyptian was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and because Abdullah found Mursi exceedingly stupid. “I see a Muslim Brotherhood crescent developing in Egypt […]

So here’s a question that’s nagging at me as we watch millions of Egyptians express their loathing for Mohamed Mursi, their hapless, power-grabbing president, and for his Muslim Brotherhood movement: How exactly did the U.S. come to be seen by Egyptian secularists and liberals as the handmaiden of a cultish fundamentalist political party whose motto […]

It’s a testament to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s grit, determination and self-assurance that he refuses to give up in his quest to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But I wish that he would, during the long slog toward renewed talks, ask himself one question: Why didn’t his predecessor, Hillary […]

The question before the voters of New Jersey is a simple one: Is Newark Mayor Cory Booker too Jewish to be a U.S. senator? I bet you didn’t know that this was even a question. Before I provide the answer, here’s a story about Booker, who is the favorite to win the Democratic nomination — […]

Ten years ago, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself at a cafe in the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem. Seven people were killed, including David Applebaum, an American-born emergency-room doctor who had treated countless victims of previous attacks. Applebaum was visiting the cafe, called Cafe Hillel, that evening with his daughter Nava, who was to […]