By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

What we can learn from the IDF's farcical attempts to prevent settlers from damaging relations with the U.S.

One of the U.S.'s federal agencies is named USAID, an acronym for United States Agency for International Development. It is one of the "soft power" arms of the American government: it deals with, well, civil development around the world, trying to remind the people of the Third World that the US government possesses not just drones, but also a young people of good intentions with plenty of money. Recently, a USAID project put Israel and the US on a collision course.

Click here for more

by Matt Duss

The opening of talks between Palestinians and Israelis last week marks a small but important step toward resuming the hard work of a long-held U.S. policy goal: two states for two peoples, Palestine and Israel. Since becoming secretary of state, John Kerry has held multiple meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the effort to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. While much work still lies ahead, Secretary Kerry's efforts underscore the importance of the two-state goal for U.S. interests in the region, as well as the urgency of the moment.

What has been derided as a quixotic quest is actually a shrewd bet

By Alan Berger

If you wanted to wager at a London betting shop on success for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that Secretary of State John Kerry convened this week in Washington, you would be entitled to very long odds . . . about the same as a punter might have gotten betting that the new heir to the British throne would be named Billy Bob or Sydney. Nevertheless, Kerry's diplomatic gamble is worth taking, and there are reality-based reasons to suspect that the conventional wisdom -- with it's a priori assumption that the coming Mideast peace talks can produce only a catastrophic failure -- will turn out to be wrong.