-
1 week ago | 
intpolicydigest.org | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
Two Israeli embassy staffers, murdered in Washington, D.C. Their killer: Elias Rodriguez, now in custody. A name unfamiliar to most, yet heavy with consequence. For all the headlines that fixate on him, the deeper question remains—one that polite diplomacy rarely dares to voice: Was he a lone actor, or was he a weapon in the hands of something far larger? We must resist the instinct to file this under domestic aberration.
-
2 weeks ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
Let us, for a moment, imagine the headlines: “14,000 Babies to Die in 48 Hours”. Not from disease, nor natural disaster, nor famine — but, by implication, at the hands of the Jewish state. This was not tabloid hysteria. This was not war propaganda from the seventh-century stylings of Iran’s Supreme Leader. This was a claim made by none other than a senior United Nations humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, during a BBC interview.
-
2 weeks ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
In an age awash with hashtags, slogans, and placard profundity, it has become unfashionable—if not positively subversive—to ask that history be treated with care. Today, history must emote. It must rally. It must rattle cages, preferably while rhyming in iambic chants. It must, above all, serve a cause. And so we come, inevitably, to the Nakba. The Arabic word Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” has assumed a near-sacrosanct status in modern discourse on the Middle East.
-
1 month ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
If ever there were a moment in which Britain’s political soul seemed to slip quietly into the Thames, it is surely now. This week, with unnerving synchronicity, senior Conservative MPs—those once presumed to embody gravitas and prudence—joined their Labour counterparts in a call for Britain to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. That they should do so mere days after British security services thwarted a terrorist plot against Israel’s embassy in London is not simply a lapse in judgement.
-
1 month ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
It is a singular misery of our time that brutishness, masquerading as virtue, is now applauded as courage. The recent antics of the Irish rap group Kneecap at Coachella — one of the grand carnivals of Western self-congratulation — ought to serve as a final exhibit in this ongoing farce. Standing before a sea of adoring and mindless faces, Kneecap chose not to challenge power, but to flatter the basest instincts of the mob.
-
1 month ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
By now we ought to have grown wearily familiar with President Emmanuel Macron’s fondness for grandstanding masquerading as statesmanship — that gallant little pirouette he performs each time he wishes to assert France’s moral relevance on the world stage. But his latest venture — the premature “recognition” of a Palestinian state by 2025 and a sanctimonious call for an arms embargo against Israel — is not merely vacuous diplomacy.
-
1 month ago | 
intpolicydigest.org | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
In an era marked by the steady erosion of truth, Belgium’s decision to reject the International Criminal Court’s politically fraught warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands as a rare, timely act of moral clarity. It’s not merely a gesture of solidarity with a particular leader—it’s a firm affirmation of sovereignty, the right to self-defense, and a resolute commitment to justice.
-
2 months ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
Imagine them: the survivors. Their faces hollowed by hunger, their wrists inked with numbers, their language orphaned from the world around them. They emerge not into welcome, but into indifference. From the crematoria of Poland and Germany, from the pits of Ukraine, from the train yards of Hungary—yes. But also from the alleyways of Tunis. From the rooftops of Aleppo. From the streets of Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, and Sana’a.
-
2 months ago | 
blogs.timesofisrael.com | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
On the evening of April 12, Jews across the world will gather to retell our most ancient story. We will speak of slavery and freedom, of cruelty and redemption. We will remember how we were once voiceless, nameless, stripped of dignity—and how, through faith and defiance, we walked into liberty. But this year, the words will catch in our throats. Because in 2025, “Let my people go” is no longer a ritual refrain. It is a living cry.
-
2 months ago | 
intpolicydigest.org | Catherine Perez-Shakdam |Catherine Shakdam
The morning’s light broke over Israel with the unmistakable roar of fighter jets, the latest chapter in a war that has never truly ended. The airstrikes over Gaza signaled not just another military manoeuvre but a profound shift in the tide of history—a reckoning long deferred but now, at last, impossible to ignore. For 16 months, Israel has fought to bring home its stolen sons and daughters, to break the iron grip of Hamas, and to restore security to a nation scarred by terror.
