Perspectives Papers

Perspectives Papers provide analysis from BESA Center research associates and other outside experts on the most important issues pertaining to Israel and the Middle East.

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In July 1995, in East Bosnia, Bosnian Serbs massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. In the shadow of this act of evil, attention must also be paid to the gross incompetence, refusal to take responsibility, guilt, and abject failure of both the UN and the Netherlands. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that individuals are responsible for their own actions. It is therefore absurd that belonging to the UN confers impunity on anyone for their own criminal negligence.
Ankara’s moves in the Eastern Mediterranean, while very risky, have partly vindicated President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At a time when his regime is faced with serious challenges at home, his Mediterranean adventures have been good for Turkey at the regional level. Other powers will have to consider how to respond to Turkey’s moves. Washington’s lukewarm support for the trilateral partnership of Israel, Cyprus, and Greece, for example, has not met the high expectations of those countries, which continue to function as a pillar of stability in the Basin.
The questions of the true genomic origin as well as the direct source of the initial SARS-CoV-2 strain that infected Patient Zero in China, an event that ultimately unleashed COVID-19 on the world to devastating effect, are hotly debated and highly consequential. Both science and intelligence will contribute to uncovering the evidence needed to answer these questions conclusively.
Ancient Greece considered athletic ability both a measure of one’s value and a cure for social inequality. Athletics were seen as providing a form of moral education, with Plato advocating for the inclusion of women in sports for their moral enrichment and Aristotle calling physical movement an ethical duty. These are ideals after which Western Civilization still strives, but sports—along with all other cultural spheres—have become politicized.
The World Health Organization (WHO) performed exceptionally poorly during the COVID-19 crisis, which was one of the greatest threats to global public health since the organization’s founding in 1946. It is high time that the WHO was reformed from the ground up. President Donald Trump is taking the first steps by threatening to pull all US funding from the organization, which has become beholden to China to such an extent that it either cannot or will not make independent decisions.
America’s reputation as a credible actor is an essential matter for US foreign policy, but it has weakened significantly throughout this century. George Bush’s war on the “axis of evil” failed, and Barack Obama’s “red line” speech proved empty. Today, Donald Trump is abandoning allies and conducting dangerous diplomacy with anti-democratic tyrants.
Many are wondering: how have retired leading members of the Israeli defense establishment come to locate themselves on the political left, at times even on the radical left? Having devoted their professional lives to the task of defending the country and carried out the orders of the political echelon, they are now spearheading various “anti” movements.

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