“I believe that Iran will have concluded the Biden team is not first-rate and wants to avoid confrontations, so Iran is more likely to test them now than it was six months ago," said Elliott Abrams, who served as Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela during the Donald Trump administration.
Ariel Ben Solomon: “If this pro-Taliban rhetoric is a harbinger of things to come, it’s not unreasonable to expect that jihadist networks will be established in the West once again,” said Sam Westrop of the Middle East Forum.
Ariel Ben Solomon: “The political discourse in Iran since 2017 has shifted from reform to revolution,” said Saeed Ghasseminejad, an Iran expert and senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Ariel Ben Solomon: It’s unlikely that Jerusalem will jettison its new Arab allies after a wave of normalization agreements, bolstered by its relations with Greece, Cyprus and Egypt in the Eastern Mediterranean, in exchange for some recent warm words from the Turkish president.
Ariel Ben Solomon: “The Gulf states are not considered ‘kosher’ for leading the Sunnis,” according to Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, an expert on Turkey at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University.
Ariel Ben Solomon: The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority “has hit rock bottom and is in its worst political position since the first Gulf War,” said Middle East expert Ido Zelkovitz.
Ariel Ben Solomon: Despite no direct evidence tying Hezbollah to the explosions, Lebanon’s increased instability has the terror group scrambling to maintain the status quo and its position in the country.
Ariel Ben Solomon: “Turkey sees that its old adversaries, Greece and Cyprus, and its new adversaries, Israel and Egypt, are forming a maritime axis that is blocking [it],” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told JNS.
Ariel Ben Solomon: Each of the two Arab blocs could each get from between four and six seats, and “could serve as a safety net for a left-wing government so that it could pass certain legislation.”
Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani announced in December that roughly $70 million would be spent to restore Jewish heritage sites, though Israel’s former ambassador to the country says that won’t happen.
