Gaza will never become an independent nation, Israel Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter says.
“There's not going to be an independent sovereign state other than Israel west of the Jordan River,” Leiter told The Daily Signal.
“There could be all sorts of autonomous arrangements,” he said, “but there's not going to be an independent sovereign Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. It's just not going to be.”
The nation of Israel extends from the Joran River west to the Mediterranean Sea to form the narrow country that is roughly the size of New Jersey. Since Hamas launched its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, pro-Palestine protesters in America and round the world have chanted, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” referring to Palestine fully occupying the land between the Joran River and the Mediteranea Sea, in turn eliminating the nation of Israel.
Following Oct. 7, there is a “complete absence of bandwidth” in Israel for the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. There is, however, a great deal of interest in Israel to expand partnerships with nations in the Middle East through the Abraham Accords, according to Leiter.
For thousands of years, people have looked into the night sky and seen something unusual.
It was fuzzy, sometimes bright, and it wasn’t there before. It appeared out of nowhere and, after a few days or weeks, disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.
When these events occurred, they were often interpreted as omens. Good or bad depending on who was doing the interpretation.
Today, we have a much better understanding of what they are and how they work.
Learn more about comets, how they have been observed through history, and what they are on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the US can approach future national security challenges, I spoke with Dennis Ross, a senior US diplomat and the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World(Oxford University Press, 2025) offers a revised toolkit for US foreign policy and global leadership.
The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.
The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the “forever wars.” But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft—diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education—to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.
In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft—German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8—and bad cases of statecraft—going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.
Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war.
Are you tired of incessant, unhinged Democratic fundraising texts and emails? Well, so are we. Tommy sits down with three experts in the party's digital fundraising space to talk about how this model became the norm, why it may be hurting Democrats more than it helps, and how that campaign — you know the one — got your cell phone number. Blue State Digital founder Joe Rospars joins to diagnose the problem, our own Dan Pfeiffer weighs in on its impact, and ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones explains why Democrats rely on the tactic and lays out what we stand to lose if Trump's attacks against her organization succeed.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Hundreds of U.S.-based scholars say the United States is swiftly heading away from liberal democracy and towards some form of authoritarianism. In this episode of The Sunday Story, NPR's Frank Langfitt speaks to people who have fled authoritarian regimes for America. They say some of the Trump administration's tactics remind them of home.
What do you do when your likeness has been turned into A.I.-generated pornography?—it’s a problem people are already facing. But legislation moving through Congress may cause more problems than it would solve.
Guests:
Joanne Chew, actress and visual artist based in LA.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.
Donald Trump has said he will call Vladimir Putin on Monday to stop the Ukraine 'bloodbath'. Also: Reuniting Chile's stolen children with their birth parents, and the theft of a statue of Melania Trump.
