Episodes

  • Marco Rubio treats himself to a Middle East reality check

    Marco Rubio treats himself to a Middle East reality check
    Feb 11 2025
    Marco Rubio is likely in for a reality check when he visits the Middle East for the first time this week as US Secretary of State.
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    9 mins
  • Trump plays with fire in Gaza

    Trump plays with fire in Gaza
    Feb 9 2025
    US President Donald J. Trump’s Gaza plan could change the nature of the Gaza war and prolong rather than end the hostilities. Amid calls for a unified Arab response to Mr. Trump’s plan to resettle or ethnically cleanse Gazan Palestinians, according to many Middle Easterners, officials, journalists, analysts, and social media activists are mulling options. The options under discussion range from approaches that would give US companies a significant stake in Gaza’s reconstruction to the fuelling of a Hamas-led armed guerilla-style resistance.
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    14 mins
  • Palestinian prisoners released by Israel arrive in Ramallah_TRT 9 Feb 2025

    Palestinian prisoners released by Israel arrive in Ramallah_TRT 9 Feb 2025
    Feb 8 2025
    Hamas has released the fifth batch of hostages to the Red Cross. In exchange, Israel will release 183 Palestinian prisoners, some convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people, including 18 serving life sentences, and 111 detained in Gaza during the war, according to Hamas. James M. Dorsey, an adjunct Senior Fellow, at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies give us more analysis on the story.
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    6 mins
  • Trump focuses Middle Eastern minds with potentially unintended consequences

    Trump focuses Middle Eastern minds with potentially unintended consequences
    Feb 8 2025
    US President Donald J. Trump’s call for the permanent resettlement of Gazan Palestinians has focused regional minds, even if the White House and senior officials have walked back key elements of the president’s proposal
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    11 mins
  • Trump’s Gaza plan turns the Middle East on its head

    Trump’s Gaza plan turns the Middle East on its head
    Feb 5 2025
    US President Donald J. Trump’s plan to expel Palestinians and take control of Gaza threatens to render second phase ceasefire negotiations to the dustbin of history and kill prospects for Saudi recognition of Israel. So has Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would decide in the next month whether to endorse Israeli annexation of the West Bank occupied by Israel since 1967. Mr. Trump’s propositions take Palestinian aspirations off the table. They fulfill visiting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s wildest dreams.
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    11 mins
  • Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu could decide the Gaza ceasefire’s fate

    Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu could decide the Gaza ceasefire’s fate
    Feb 3 2025
    Donald Trump’s Oval Office could be Binyamin Netanyahu’s brick wall. That is if the president uses Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit Washington since Mr. Trump returned to office, to ensure a successful Israeli-Hamas negotiation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement’s second phase.
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    10 mins
  • Trump’s Middle East plan may have legs

    Trump’s Middle East plan may have legs
    Feb 1 2025
    US President Donald J. Trump’s approach to managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may have legs, even if Arabs and Muslims reject his call for the resettlement of Gazan Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan, and Palestinians have rejected resettlement in no uncertain terms. So have non-Arab Muslim countries like Indonesia and Albania, who the United States reportedly approached with a request to take in Palestinians. Palestinians say they voted with their feet with hundreds of thousands of Gazans returning this week to their ruined homes in the north of the Strip. Even so, Egypt and Turkey, a more strident Middle Eastern state, see geopolitical and geostrategic advantage and commercial opportunity in working with the Trump administration on a plan first tabled during Mr. Trump’s first term in office that falls short of Palestinian aspirations but would serve Egyptian and Turkish interests.
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    11 mins
  • Netanyahu flaunts his ties to the global far-right

    Netanyahu flaunts his ties to the global far-right
    Jan 29 2025
    Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ultra-nationalists and ultra-conservatives have turned Israel into a ‘haven’ for some Jews rather than all Jews. Not only by encouraging an intolerant, supremacist domestic environment hostile to vigorous public debate and equality for all but also by endorsing the far-right’s flirt with language and imagery that risks stoking ant-Semitism, and efforts to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, Jews’ worst calamity in modern history.
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    9 mins