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Ben Cohen. Credit: Courtesy.

Ben Cohen

Featured Columnist

Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director of FDD’s rapid response outreach, specializing in global antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Middle East/European Union relations. A London-born journalist with 30 years of experience, he previously worked for BBC World and has contributed to Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet and Congressional Quarterly. He was a senior correspondent at The Algemeiner for more than a decade and is a weekly columnist for JNS. Cohen has reported from conflict zones worldwide and held leadership roles at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. His books include Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through 21st Century Antisemitism.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Polish-Jewish relations step back from the brink
Be confident, though, that the debate about World War II will continue to reverberate into the country’s contemporary politics.
June 29, 2018
Ben Cohen
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives joint press statements with his Macedonian counterpart, Zoran Zaev, at Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Sept. 4, 2017. Photo by Marc Israel Sellem/POOL
Featured Columnist
What Macedonia and Israel have in common
Like the Jews, the Macedonians have been in the unusual position of having to justify their status as a nation entitled to join the international society of states.
June 24, 2018
Ben Cohen
U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the Capella Hotel in Singapore on June 12, 2018. Photo courtesy of White House via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Trump, Kim and the ‘good citizen’
We had absorbed the certain knowledge that any political system in which opposition is proscribed and dissidents are locked up in atrocious conditions can never be truly legitimate because, as 1989 reminded us with a jolt, political legitimacy is rooted in the informed consent of the people.
June 15, 2018
Ben Cohen
Head of the Palestinian Football Association Jibril Rajoub speaks during a press conference in Ramallah on June 6, 2018. Photo by Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Why a soccer hooligan is smiling
Israel’s leaders need to think strategically about every major event that is staged in the country, with the first principle being “do no harm.”
June 6, 2018
Ben Cohen
Palestinians clash with security forces during a protest to mark the 70th anniversary of the “nakba” (“catastrophe”), the term used to mark the events leading to Israel’s founding in 1948, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, May 15, 2018. Photo by Wisam ashlamoun/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
‘Nakba,’ ‘Naksa’ . . . nowhere
Both concepts are built around the Palestinian logic that Israel is the eternal enemy. That is why Israel’s creation was a “catastrophe.” But what precisely was the “setback”?
June 1, 2018
Ben Cohen
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Behind Erdoğan’s boycott threat against Israel
Were he to suspend trade with Israel by imposing politically motivated sanctions, the consequences of such a vendetta for Turkey—for its currency, for foreign investor confidence, for its already frayed relations with the United States and Europe, and for the domestic livelihoods that have become reliant on the Israeli market—would be disastrous.
May 24, 2018
Ben Cohen
The terrace garden at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Another leading Iranian export? Religious persecution
Like the Yezidi and Christian minorities elsewhere in the Middle East, followers of the Baha’i faith have experienced horrendous persecution at the hands of Islamists—in their specific case, the Shi’a disciples of Ayatollah Khomeini who have ruled Iran since 1979.
May 18, 2018
Ben Cohen
U.S. President Donald Trump announcing America’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal on May 8, 2018. Credit: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
‘Trump’s war’ isn’t coming
U.S. President Donald Trump has shown himself to be an advocate of regime reform, rather than regime change.
May 11, 2018
Ben Cohen
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas speaks during a meeting with members of the Fatah Central Committee in Ramallah on Jan. 14, 2018. Photo by Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Time to abandon the ‘original sin’ theory
It is not possible to separate Abbas’s grotesque views about supposed Jewish culpability for the Holocaust from his equally grotesque views about the origins of the State of Israel.
May 4, 2018
Ben Cohen
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, May 12, 2017. Photo by Chatham House, London/Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
‘Anti-Zionist and Jew:’ Behind Jeremy Corbyn’s apology
For all the apparent differences between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, we spend an enormous amount of time thinking and speaking negatively about Jews as a group.
April 26, 2018
Ben Cohen
From left: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Environmental Protection Minister Ze'ev Elkin and Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar meet in Moscow at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Jan. 29, 2018. Credit: Kobi Gideon/GPO.
Featured Columnist
Russia and Israel, seven decades on
Israel’s leaders understood pretty clearly by the early 1950s that the Soviet embrace could easily turn into a noose.
April 19, 2018
Ben Cohen
The Mordechai Anielewicz statue at the Yad Mordechai kibbutz in southern Israel. Anielewicz was the young leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization, which led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against Nazi Germans for a month from April into May of 1943. Credit: Bukvoed via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
The Warsaw Ghetto: The epitome of rightful resistance
As the 75th anniversary of the uprising approaches, there will be a great deal of solemn commemoration of its heroes and victims. Yet the passage of time should encourage us to think a little less mournfully.
April 16, 2018
Ben Cohen
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