Shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration on Sunday that the Golan Heights “will forever remain in Israel’s hands,” presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz (R – Texas) released a statement supporting Netanyahu’s stance.

On August 3, Wall Street Journal reporters Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee broke a story suggesting that contrary to longstanding U.S. policy, the Obama administration paid the Islamic Republic of Iran a ransom for the return of Americans held captive.

As he has in nearly every domain and for most every issue, President-elect Donald Trump has offered blunt assessments and unequivocal opinions about Middle East politics.

If international law is law in the ordinary sense of the term—and not moral posturing, political maneuvering, or personal payback—then it must comprise settled and public requirements, effective and even-handed implementation, and impartial resolution of disputes.

Media coverage of, and academic writings about, Israel routinely betray the intellectual integrity that should govern both. Israel has paid a steep price; the Palestinians perhaps even more so.

A grand jury convened by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has indicted an unidentified person on unspecified charges in Mueller’s off-the-rails investigation into the Trump campaign’s hypothesized electoral collusion with Russia, according to media reports.

Partisanship plagues the humanities. The proliferation of intensely politicized scholarship denouncing Israel as a criminal state exemplifies the conflation of activism with systematic inquiry and analysis. That conflation subverts the dedication to truth indispensable to the university’s mission.

Regardless of what Iran gets out of the nuclear deal, its proxy Hezbollah clearly gains—and Israel clearly loses.

Israel has long sought both a distinctively Jewish identity and modern nationhood. Wise leadership can enable it to achieve each.