Algeria may be the latest target in efforts to garner further Arab recognition of the Jewish state, despite its Gaza war conduct and rejection of Palestinian national aspirations.
To that end, a Philadelphia-based far-right pro-Israeli organisation, the Middle East Forum, has put Algeria in its crosshairs in an apparent attempt to build pressure on the North African state to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
Algeria would be a prize catch.


Is Algeria Next

US-mediated talks between Israel and Syria serve as a bellwether for the extent to which Israel can reshape the Middle East and impose its will on the region. They also are likely to indicate the degree to which US and Israeli interests diverge in Syria.
Syrian Foreign Minister Assad al-Shaiibani and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, a confidante of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, focussed this week on security arrangements in southern Syria in a round of talks in Paris chaired by Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey and the Trump administration's Syria envoy.
The talks were the highest-level meeting between officials of the two countries in 25 years and the first since the latest clashes in the southern Syrian city of As-Suwayda between the country’s Druze minority, Bedouin militias, and Syrian security forces, and Israel’s bombing of military targets, including the defence ministry, in the capital Damascus. 
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the clashes’ death toll at 1,399 people, 196 of whom were summarily executed.
Mr. Netanyahu dispatched Mr. Dermer to Paris following several meetings in Azerbaijan between Mr. Al-Shaibani and the prime minister’s national security advisor, Tzachi Hangebi, that fuelled Israeli and US hopes that security arrangements could be a first step toward Syrian recognition of Israel.
The Paris talks are likely to establish whether Israel can dictate to President Ahmed al-Sharaa where in Syria his military can operate and the degree to which Israel can successfully project itself as the protector of Syrian minorities, such as the Druze, a secretive monotheistic group based In Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, and the Kurds in the north.


Testing Israel’s Limits

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and  Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa.

Testing Israel’s Limits

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