The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had invaded Lebanon in June 1982 with the goal of pushing out the Palestinian Liberation…
Establishing Relations with the Holy See
The Catholic Church has been a political force in Europe for more than a millennium and more than a fifth…
The PFLP Hijacking of TWA Flight 840
Thomas Boyatt was on his way to Cyprus to resume his post as political officer on August 29, 1969 when…
The Israeli Strike on the Iraqi Reactor at Osirak
Increasingly concerned by Iraq’s illicit program to produce nuclear weapons, Israel ordered its air force on a secret mission on…
Jordan’s Black September, 1970
In 1972, a group of Palestinian terrorists shocked the world by kidnapping eleven Israeli athletes during the Summer Olympics in…
The Road to Madrid — James Baker and the Middle East Peace Talks
The Madrid Peace Conference, held from October 30 to November 1, 1991, marked the first time that Israeli leaders negotiated…
Terror in the Sky — Hezbollah Seizes TWA Flight 847
The summer of 1985 was a particularly gruesome one for terrorist incidents. One of the more memorable was the hijacking…
Rebel With a Cause — Struggling with the Armenian Genocide
2015 marks the 100th anniversary of what a number of international organizations, countries, and even some U.S. states formally recognize…
The Iran-Contra Scandal
One of the biggest foreign policy scandals of the last half-century was the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Reagan Administration,…
Targeted by Germany’s Red Army Faction
An offshoot of the radical Baader-Meinhof Group (named for its founders, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, and Ulrike Meinhof),…