Israel’s fight against Hamas

Elliott Abrams is author of the memoir Tested By Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served, most recently, in the Trump administration State Department as Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela. Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver called on Abrams for a live briefing on the Hamas hostilities against Israel via Zoom yesterday afternoon.

In the briefing Abrams placed the current situation in Israel in its context: explaining the reasons that Hamas decided to launch a war, the implications for the Middle East as a whole and the Abraham Accords in particular, the American response, the potential effects on Israeli politics, and the distortions of the U.S. news media. I found it of interest and have posted the video below. The Times of Israel updates events via live blog here.

I still have my copy of Abrams’s first book, also a memoir: Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned Into Crimes (1993). It chronicles his service in the Reagan administration State Department and his victimization by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh in the Iran-Contra affair.

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