Eight years after mass demonstrations began in Cairo, some observers wonder whether President Abdel Fattah el-Sis has led his country any differently from how his ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak would have had done. Taking a different tack, many others have argued that the Middle East would have followed a dramatically different trajectory had Yitzḥak Rabin or Anwar Sadat not been assassinated. Martin Kramer, seeking to shed light on these questions, examines a series of transitions of power in the last 100 years of Middle Eastern history. He begins with the case of King Faisal I of Iraq, who died unexpectedly of heart failure in 1933:

On Saturday, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed a passerby in Jerusalem, and was then shot dead by two border guards. As the second bullet hit him when he was already on the ground, some Israelis have accused the guards of wrongdoing; a misleadingly edited viral video has also brought more attention to the incident. The editors of the Jerusalem Post comment: