Sublime

The proposal prompted a series of increasingly bitter controversies. First, when one of his fellow tribunes, Marcus Octavius, repeatedly tried to veto it (some right of veto had been given to these ‘people’s representatives’ centuries earlier), Tiberius rode roughshod over the objection and had the people vote his opponent out of office. This enabl

an effort to control this violence, the British appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the spiritual and effectively political leader of the Muslims in Palestine.6 The hope was that by centralizing the religious and political power in one man, whom the British thought they could control, they could limit the passions of the mo

As someone who had spent several years on American campuses, all of these ideas rang familiar to me. They echoed the sixties’ revulsion to military strength, the romance with developing societies, and the questioning of American primacy. Regarding the Middle East, in particular, one could discern the reverberations of Edward Said’s Orientalism, whi

Much writing in the ancient Near East was anonymous. Beyond that, there was no conception that a work…

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Reagan cared more about the functions of self-government than his most ideological supporters. He knew how to persuade and when to compromise. But after he was gone, and the Soviet Union not long after him, Free America lost the narrative thread. Without Reagan’s smile and the Cold War’s clarity, its vision grew darker and more extreme. Its spirit

Israel now had a policy known as the “Begin Doctrine,” which would endure long after Begin himself was gone from the political arena. It held that Israel would not countenance any of its mortal enemies seeking to develop or acquire a weapon of mass destruction.