Jewish Policy Center

About Jewish Policy Center

The Jewish Policy Center, a 501c(3) non-profit organization, provides timely perspectives and analysis of foreign and domestic policies by leading scholars, academics, and commentators.

Publisher

Jewish Policy Center

Category

news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Dec 2010

Latest episode

23 Apr 2026

Latest episodes

165 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Apr 2026

   Lebanon’s Gamble on Disarming Hezbollah

   Israel has abandoned the “land for peace” formula that has governed its dealings with Arab neighbors since 1967 and is now telling Lebanon that Beirut must disarm Hezbollah before recovering its territory, according to Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Speaking to a Jewish Policy Center webinar on April 23, Hussain said Israel is “flipping the script” by holding a buffer zone inside southern Lebanon until the Lebanese government takes responsibility for violence originating from its soil. “We will not withdraw and hope that you’ll be peaceful toward us,” he summarized Israel’s new position. “We will keep the land until you become peaceful.” Hussain, who was born and raised in Beirut, Baghdad, and Baalbek and whose new book The Arab Case for Israel was recently published, traced the arc from Israel’s 1982 invasion, through the stillborn May 17, 1983 peace agreement killed by Hafez al-Assad’s militias, to Israel’s UN-certified withdrawal in 2000 and Hezbollah’s October 8, 2023 decision to open a second front “in support of Gaza.” A Buffer Zone and a Yellow Line The IDF now controls 55 depopulated Shia villages in a strip calibrated to the roughly six-mile range of Hezbollah’s shoulder-fired, guided anti-tank missiles, weapons that proved especially lethal to Israelis during the 2023-2024 fighting, Hussain said. The IDF calls it a “forward defensive position.” Roughly half a million displaced Lebanese Shia are now “living as displaced people in tents in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.” Unlike Israel’s security zone of the 1980s and 1990s, he stressed, there will be no Lebanese population to govern and no cover for Hezbollah ambushes. Anyone crossing what both sides call “the yellow line” is “taken out.” Hussain pointed to the IDF killing of a Hezbollah “journalist” who crossed the line as proof Israel intends to enforce it. Talking Past Each Other in Washington Last Thursday produced the first direct Lebanon-Israel talks since 1983, with the two countries’ ambassadors meeting in Washington alongside the U.S. ambassador to Beirut and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the two delegations “are talking past each other,” Hussain said. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam frame the talks as a vehicle to “stop the war and get our territory back” and say little about disarming Hezbollah. Israel’s position is that disarmament is the predicate for peace. Hussain nevertheless praised the Aoun-Salam government for rejecting French and Spanish proposals that Lebanon be folded into the Iran ceasefire, and for a March 2 cabinet resolution instructing the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to disband Hezbollah. Washington, he argued, has long conflated Lebanon with its Iranian occupier and should not “be doing Iran’s job for them” by refusing to engage a weak but distinct Lebanese state. Strings Attached The roughly $1 billion in U.S. aid to the LAF over the past decade has come with almost no conditions, Hussain said, and the LAF commander is “a corrupt guy who’s in Hezbollah’s pocket.” He argued Washington should tie future assistance to measurable benchmarks and to a change in combat doctrine that still designates “the Israeli enemy” rather than the illegally armed Hezbollah as the army’s principal adversary. “We let them get away with saying one thing in English and something else in Arabic,” he said, urging that the U.S. “call them out” and impose “KPIs and benchmarks.” Drawing the lesson from Oslo, Hussain said both the Gaza peace plan — UN Security Council Resolution 2803 — and any Lebanon deal must specify “the sequence of order” so that territory, reconstruction,

2. 

   12 Mar 2026

   Inside Israel – Strategy and Society in a Shifting Region

   Editor’s Note: We apologize for not having been able to bring you this webinar live yesterday. David Weinberg’s assessment, however, shouldn’t be missed – so we recorded the conversation and are pleased to be sending it to you. A U.S.-Israeli ground raid on Iran’s nuclear sites at Isfahan and elsewhere is under active discussion to seize more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that aerial bombardment alone cannot neutralize, David Weinberg told a Jewish Policy Center webinar on March 12. Weinberg, a government relations and foreign affairs specialist at the Misgav Institute, said the absence of American heavy strategic bombers over Iran’s nuclear plants during the current campaign was itself telling. “Something more needs to be done about the stockpiles,” he said. “You can’t just leave this as a loose end.” Weinberg spoke from the Israeli home front as the country entered its second week of direct war with Iran under Operation Epic Fury. He described an Israeli home front absorbing punishing Iranian strikes while maintaining overwhelming public support for the war. More than 46,000 missile and attack drone alerts had sounded across the country, he noted, with 18 Israelis killed, 2,300 wounded, and 3,400 civilians made homeless. He singled out Iranian cluster munitions—carried by more than half of the incoming missiles—as particularly devastating, citing one strike earlier in the week that scattered destruction across 16 sites and killed two Israelis. Roughly 35 percent of the population lacks access to a bomb shelter. Despite the toll, Weinberg said polling showed well over 80 percent of Israelis supported extending the war “until a more decisive crushing of Iran and its offensive abilities is achieved.” He described families locked down at home for a second week, dashing into shelters day and night, and noted wryly that Israeli entrepreneurs had produced apps calculating total shelter time and the statistically safest moment to risk a shower. His own app, he said, logged more than 20 hours in shelter across some 60 alerts in the previous week. Gaza, Hezbollah, and the Northern Front Weinberg stressed that Gaza remained a significant confrontation front even as attention shifted to Iran. More than 50 percent of the territory is under Israeli control, he said, with Hamas entrenched in the remainder, including Gaza City—the one major area Israeli forces had not operated in intensively over the past two years. He expressed deep skepticism about the Trump administration’s plan for international investment and peacekeeping forces in the territory, and doubting international troops would succeed in disarming and demilitarizing the enclave. Meanwhile, Hezbollah had launched 200 missiles into Israel the previous night, and Weinberg predicted that “even if the war with Iran dials down in the coming days or the coming weeks, the war with Hezbollah is just beginning.” The Regional Chessboard Turning to the broader region, Weinberg identified a “radical Sunni axis” of Turkey and Qatar as a significant strategic threat to the Jewish state, warning that confrontation with that axis could come in the years ahead. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had placed himself squarely on Iran’s side, he observed, and threatened to seize parts of northern Syria and move against the Kurds. “Somebody’s going to have to put Erdogan in a box,” Weinberg said. On the Abraham Accords, he noted that behind-the-scenes coordination between Israel and Gulf states was “closer than ever,” but cautioned that open normalization would take time. Saudi Arabia, he argued, had scaled back from its pre-October 7 trajectory toward Israel, and he faulted the Trump administration for granting Riyadh major concessions—including a path to F-35 purchases and understandings on civilian nuclear enrichment—without conditioning them on movement toward the Jewish state. Movement with countries like Indonesia and smaller Gulf states was more likely in the near term, h

3. 

   5 Mar 2026

   Keeping the War in Focus – The Strategic Ripples of the Iran Conflict

   The war with Iran is closing multiple fronts for Israel, but the strategic aftershocks — from a resurgent Sunni Islamist movement to a fracturing Jordan — may reshape the Middle East for decades. The current conflict is not an isolated campaign against Tehran but the catalyst for a broader regional realignment, with “the haunting black cloud over the West” finally lifting, Dr. David Wurmser told a Jewish Policy Center webinar on March 5, 2026. Wurmser, a senior analyst for Middle East Affairs at the Center for Security Policy and a former senior advisor at the White House and State Department, began with Lebanon, where Hezbollah had provoked Israel by launching missiles — what he called submitting “the winning entry for this year’s Darwin Awards.” Hezbollah is not its own front, he argued, but an extension of the broader Iranian war, and Israel intends to see the fight through to the end. Northern Israeli towns remain largely depopulated, and every Israeli knows the war was unfinished. The Sunni Threat After Iran While the Iranian regime is being brought down, a dangerous Sunni Islamist bloc is taking shape. The new government in Damascus represents the first time Arab Islamic forces have controlled that city in a thousand years — evoking the Umayyad Caliphate of 1,300 years ago and “creating a civilizational confidence that the Turks are buying into.” Wurmser identified a strategic triad of Turkey under Erdogan, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood as the animating force, one that also maintains ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through the Belt and Road initiative. Qatar is trying to reposition itself after refusing US airspace and attempting to sabotage wartime diplomacy. Having chosen the losing side, the Qataris now want to claim credit for an American victory. Meanwhile, Tehran is deliberately stoking Sunni-Shiite tensions to frighten its own population into rallying behind the regime — a desperate strategy Wurmser said would likely fail. Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq Egypt is navigating between rival camps, and the long-term trajectory is troubling. President al-Sisi recognizes that the military rank and file are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Cairo has been drifting toward Turkey on issues from the Horn of Africa to North Africa. Egypt’s peace with Israel, Wurmser argued, has always been anchored to its desire to be part of the American alliance — a commitment that eroded under Presidents Obama and Biden but that President Trump has helped shore up by reasserting American leadership. Jordan faces an even more immediate danger. Forces aligned with the Damascus government and the Muslim Brotherhood are fracturing the tribal structure that forms the regime’s core, pulling Iraqi tribes away from their traditional Hashemite alignment. Iraq, by contrast, may benefit from Iran’s fall: traditional Shiism could reemerge, Iranian-backed militias are being targeted by US and Israeli operations, and the 20-year Iraqi conundrum — which Wurmser characterized as an Iranian-sponsored insurgency rather than an Iraqi one — may finally see resolution. Israel’s Post-War Horizon Drawing a historical parallel to the United States between 1865 and 1890, Wurmser argued that Israel is entering a transformative era. The external wars that defined its first 80 years are winding down, and the country is poised for significant immigration, demographic growth, and “civilizational solidity.” He pointed to an emerging alignment of Israel, India, and Japan — “the League of Rising Ancients” — three ancient, democratic nations that have reconciled tradition with modernity, forming a strategic arc that boxes in Chinese and Turkish ambitions from the south. The 47-year Iranian threat is nearing its end, he concluded, calling the coming resolution “almost as big as the Berlin Wall” and a major blow to China. Israel and the United States are being handed a circumstance of immense positive potential — if they are prepared to seize it. Written wit

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