Ra'fat Al-Dajani

More than a year since a blockade was imposed, Qatar has not only managed to resist the attack on its national sovereignty, but has emerged from the crisis better-positioned.

A review of how President Trump has fared in the Mideast is mixed at best as even the relative successes are short-term and are attached to a long-term cost to American interests.

NCR Today: U.S. President Donald Trump has demonstrated a close affinity to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Israel should remember that it is dealing with an American president who feels no loyalty to anyone but himself.

With the maturing of millennials into adulthood and the proliferation of social media, entertainers' support for the cause of Palestinian justice has found a wider, receptive audience.

From the outset, the Jerusalem embassy move was ill-conceived and extremely premature. Trump has effectively preempted the outcome of the Jerusalem issue and made a mockery of U.S. mediation and impartiality by declaring solely for the Israeli side.  

On March 30, Palestinians began six weeks of demonstrations on the Gaza-Israel border. The result was more violence, bloodshed and death. 

Pro-Israeli leaders and groups have picked up on the danger of support for Israel becoming one more point of sharp divide in the polarizing Trump era.

Thirteen years after Israel withdrew its settlers and military from the Gaza Strip, this 140-square-mile narrow patch of land that is one 10th the size of the smallest U.S. state of Rhode Island, is on the verge of a total infrastructural and economic collapse. 

I will not get into a point by point rebuttal to Michael Sean Winters' response to my latest NCR column. Instead I would like to make myself very clear on three issues.

Three basic tenets allow Israel to both justify and ignore an occupation unprecedented in modern times in terms of its length and oppression.

Trump did not make his Jerusalem announcement out of his desire for Mideast peace, his respecting the views of most Americans, or safeguarding U.S. interests.

The cold proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran is rapidly heating up; and could herald more dangers for the surrounding region and beyond.

Attempting to unilaterally renegotiate a functioning multilateral international agreement through domestic legislation, when none of the other parties to the agreement support the renegotiation, is doomed to fail, with serious consequences if Trump were to then pull the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal with Iran. 

Barely 14 years after the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq began, we are witnessing an eerily unwelcome echo of the lead-up to the Iraq War, as the president appears set against the Iran nuclear deal.

The importance of finding common ground has become particularly apparent after the events in Charlottesville this month, which laid bare real and deep divisions in our country.