He was barred as a teenager from serving in the Israeli Army because he was considered too extremist. He admires a hard-line rabbi who wanted to strip Arab Israelis of their citizenship. Until recently, he hung a portrait in his home of Baruch Goldstein, who shot dead 29 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque in […]

Israel’s Parliament on Tuesday repealed legislation that barred settlers from four Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank that were evacuated in 2005, a preliminary move for now, but one that comes as tensions rise over government efforts to assert greater control over Palestinian territories. The action, which will now allow visits to the settlements, […]

A Saudi-American dual citizen who spent more than a year in a Saudi prison over Twitter posts critical of the kingdom’s government was released from detention on Tuesday, but will not be able to leave the country, according to his son. Saad Almadi, a 72-year-old Florida resident, is staying with family members in the Saudi […]

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria traveled to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday for an official visit accompanied by his wife, a sign of the growing momentum with which he is returning to the international stage after a decade-long isolation. Viewed as a pariah in many parts of the world for overseeing the bombing and […]

Abdelrahman ElGendy envisioned the ending of his book would be inspiring, despite all the horrors he would have to recount. Starting at age 17, Mr. ElGendy spent six years and three months in squalid prisons in Egypt, and one way he survived, he said, was to imagine the memoir he would publish if he were […]

When a powerful earthquake struck southern Turkey last month, a lawyer concluded that her relatives had been buried in the rubble of their collapsed apartment. Three days later, rescue workers recovered the bodies of her mother and brother, she said, but days, then weeks, then a month passed with no sign of her father. His […]

When Israeli lawmakers passed a law in 1992 that would give judges the power to block future legislation, an argument broke out on the floor of Parliament that foreshadowed the fight over the judiciary that is engulfing Israel today. “You are subjecting Parliament to the Supreme Court,” declared Michael Eitan, a lawmaker and a critic […]

A new wave of mass demonstrations against a government plan to limit judicial independence swept across Israel on Thursday, with protesters restricting road access to the country’s main airport hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to fly to Italy later in the day. Thousands of demonstrators, some of them in a convoy of […]

The Israeli government’s efforts to overhaul the judicial system have divided the country, set off mass protests, prompted the beginnings of capital flight and caused unrest in the military. But amid the turmoil, a group of law professors and lawmakers has been working behind the scenes for weeks toward a goal that, given the heated […]

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Tuesday to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to the country, less than two weeks before the 20th anniversary of the American-led invasion that transformed the Middle Eastern nation. After meetings with Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and his top military and counterterrorism […]