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Begin New Search Content Type Special Report Publishing Institution The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA) Publication Year within 10 Years

1. The Soleimani Killing: An Initial Assessment

Author:
Hillel Frisch, Eytan Gilboa, Gershon Hacohen, Doron Itzchakov, and Alexander Joffe
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
The targeted killing by the US of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force and close confidant of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has unsettled the region and the world. We have assembled initial takes on this event by five BESA researchers: Prof. Hillel Frisch, Prof. Eytan Gilboa, Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, Dr. Doron Itzchakov, and Dr. Alex Joffe.
Topic:
Military Strategy, Geopolitics, Qassem Soleimani, and Assassination
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Middle East, North America, and United States of America

2. Iran’s Missiles and Its Evolving “Rings of Fire”

Author:
Uzi Rubin
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning on the emergent Yemen-originating missile threat corresponds to Iran’s modus operandi of surrounding its foes with missile “rings of fire” and will enable Tehran to complete the missile encirclement of the Jewish state as a step toward its eventual demise. Israel must do its utmost to confront this new strategic threat by establishing an alert system and defense capabilities against Yemen-originating cruise and ballistic missiles, whatever the cost.
Topic:
Security, Military Affairs, Geopolitics, and Weapons
Political Geography:
Iran, Middle East, Israel, and Yemen

3. Operation “Shahid Soleimani”: Iran’s Revenge

Author:
Uzi Rubin
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
Operation Shahid Soleimani, the Iranian revenge attack for the killing of Qassem Soleimani, was less spectacular than the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities last September and was apparently controversial even within Iran’s top leadership. Still, Israel can learn lessons from it: that Iran’s regime is willing to take extraordinary risks when it feels humiliated; that in certain scenarios precision missiles can be as effective as combat aircraft; that even a few precision missiles can disrupt the operation of modern air bases; and that good public diplomacy is crucial for crisis management.
Topic:
Military Strategy, Weapons, Crisis Management, Risk, and Qassem Soleimani
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Middle East, and Israel

4. The Coronavirus Crisis: Origins and the Way Forward

Author:
Hanan Shai
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Amid the debate on the coronavirus crisis, there is broad agreement on three issues: The nation-state has failed to check the spread of the virus, quickly and with few people being infected, by using its autonomous capabilities, which turned out to be meager. Trans-state bodies that derived their economic capabilities from the state have failed in their role of assisting it. The idea of globalism is fundamentally true, and the problems that have emerged in the crisis must be remedied by strengthening the states and, at the same time, as concluded by French President Emmanuel Macron, the trans-state bodies. This study contends that globalism in its current form has failed and collapsed, just as communism and other social frameworks failed and collapsed before it. The reason for their collapse was that all of them were based on delusory utopian ideas. These utopian ideas are grounded in a dominant European liberal discipline whose founders abandoned the scientific revolution at the beginning of its path, abjured rational thought, and continued, like the church, to adhere to faith-based thought, feelings of the heart, and delusions of the imagination. Another liberal discipline, less well-known, is the rational one. Committed to truth and to the absolute laws of nature, it was adopted by the Anglo-Saxon democracies, which, thanks to its values, experienced long periods of growth and prosperity. On three occasions this discipline could be mobilized to help rescue Europe from calamities that its utopian conceptions had caused.
Topic:
Health, Global Focus, State, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Europe and Global Focus

5. The San Remo Conference 100 Years On

Author:
Efraim Karsh
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
There is probably no more understated event in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict than the San Remo Conference of April 1920. Convened for a mere week as part of the post-WWI peace conferences that created a new international order on the basis of indigenous self-rule and national self-determination, the San Remo conference appointed Britain as mandatory for Palestine with the specific task of “putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the British Government [i.e., the Balfour Declaration], and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” This mandate was then ratified on July 24, 1922 by the Council of the League of Nations—the postwar world organization and the UN’s predecessor. The importance of the Palestine mandate cannot be overstated. Though falling short of the proposed Zionist formula that “Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people,” it signified an unqualified recognition by the official representative of the will of the international community of the Jews as a national group—rather than a purely religious community—and acknowledgement of “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” as “the grounds for reconstituting their national home in the country.” It is a historical tragedy therefore that 100 years after this momentous event, the Palestinian leadership and its international champions remain entrenched in the rejection not only of the millenarian Jewish attachment to Palestine but of the very existence of a Jewish People (and by implication its right to statehood). Rather than keep trying to turn the clock backward at the certain cost of prolonging their people’s statelessness and suffering, it is time for this leadership to shed its century-long recalcitrance and opt for peace and reconciliation with their Israeli neighbors. And what can be a more auspicious timing for this process than the 100th anniversary of the San Remo Conference?
Topic:
History, Zionism, Conflict, Negotiation, and Peace
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

6. Coronavirus, China, and the Middle East

Author:
Mordechai Chaziza
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
The Middle East was already plagued by war, famine, and wholesale death in the form of multiple civil wars when the outbreak of Covid-19, a novel coronavirus, added pestilence to the mix. The pandemic offers a unique prism through which to assess the way China interacts with Middle Eastern states in time of crisis. While many countries in the Middle East suspended bilateral air travel, repatriated their citizens from China, and prevented Chinese workers from returning to the region, the same governments also sought to maintain close relations, expressed support for Beijing, and delivered aid to China. The findings show that at least for now, the relationship between China and the Middle Eastern states remains close. However, it may take months to see the full ramifications of the pandemic in the Middle East, so it is too soon to tell how China’s interactions with the countries of the region will develop.
Topic:
International Relations, Health, Bilateral Relations, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
China, Middle East, and Asia

7. The West Bank’s Area C: Israel’s Eastern Line of Defense

Author:
Gershon Hacohen
Publication Date:
04-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
This study explores the strategic-military implications of the establishment of a Palestinian state along the pre-June 1967 lines. Its central thesis is that the creation of such a state, on the heels of the IDF’s total withdrawal from the West Bank, will not only deprive Israel of defensible borders but will almost certainly lead to the advent of a terrorist entity like the one created in the Gaza Strip – at a stone’s throw from the Israeli heartland.
Topic:
Security, Terrorism, Military Strategy, Self Determination, and Occupation
Political Geography:
Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and West Bank

8. Israeli Nuclear Deterrence in Context: Effects of the US-Russian Rivalry

Author:
Louis René Beres
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
Israel’s presumptive nuclear deterrence posture depends upon several separate but intersecting factors. Most important, of course, are the country’s weapons, infrastructures, and missile defense capabilities. Less conspicuously urgent, but still important, are the principal defining structures of world politics. These include (as ever) the fundamentally anarchic system created after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (“The State System”) and the more transient or temporary US-Russian rivalry. This essay casts attention on the latter set of factors, or “Cold War II.” Israel’s strategists should pay close attention to this critical expression of geopolitical “context.”
Topic:
National Security, Nuclear Weapons, Infrastructure, and Deterrence
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, Middle East, Israel, North America, and United States of America

9. A Geopolitical Crossfire: Al-Azhar Struggles to Balance Politics and Tradition

Author:
James M Dorsey
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
When Pope Francis I visited Egypt in 2017 to stimulate interfaith dialogue he walked into a religious and geopolitical minefield at the heart of which was Al-Azhar, one of the world’s oldest and foremost seats of Islamic learning. The pope’s visit took on added significance with Al-Azhar standing accused of promoting the kind of ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam that potentially creates an environment conducive to breeding extremism.
Topic:
Islam, Politics, Religion, Violent Extremism, and Geopolitics
Political Geography:
Middle East, North Africa, and Egypt

10. EU Funding of Illegal Palestinian Settlement in Area C

Author:
Edwin Black
Publication Date:
09-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
Abstract:
“Area C,” which makes up about 60% of the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria (known as the West Bank since their 1950 annexation by Jordan), is making news these days. This time, the hot button issue is the illegal Palestinian settlements that are sprouting up across the region. These settlements shred the last scraps that remain of the Oslo Accords, which propelled the idea of the “two-state solution” for a generation. The funding for these illegal Palestinian settlements, which amounts to hundreds of millions of euros annually, comes from the EU. According to the Oslo Accords, only Israel can issue construction permits in Area C. In joining forces to promote the rapid expansion of illegal Palestinian settlement in Area C, the EU and the PA have dispensed entirely with any coordination with Israel, in direct contravention of the Accords.
Topic:
International Law, Treaties and Agreements, and Settlements
Political Geography:
Palestine, European Union, and West Bank