Gulf leaders told Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati what they said to Palestinians when he asked the region’s wealthy energy exporters to fund the reconstruction of areas devastated by Israel’s war machine: “We will not pour money into a black hole. Call us when you have put your house in order.."

Israeli commander’s West Bank woes spotlight a military tied up in knots by James M. Dorsey

Major General Avi Bluth, the head of Israel’s Central Command, switched roles this weekend. Suddenly, Mr. Bluth, in occupied Hebron to protect Israeli worshippers and settlers during a controversial annual pilgrimage, was not the guardian of vigilante youth but their target.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s world just shrunk considerably.

Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, elevated to new heights the symbiotic relationship between hardliners on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Their actions helped one another sabotage compromise resolutions of their perennial dispute.

Appalled by Israel’s carpet bombing of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war, US President Ronald Reagan didn’t mince his words with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin.

“I was angry. I told him it had to stop, or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off,” Mr. Reagan noted in his diary.

The August 1982 phone call between Messrs. Reagan and Begin provides a template for the United States’ ability to twist Israel’s arm and the limits of America’s influence.

Gaza is gearing up to be a war on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s watch that he doesn’t want but may be unable to end.

Predicting President Donald J. Trump’s Middle East policy and his attitude toward Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu amounts to reading tea leaves.

The leaves are the cast of characters included in Mr. Trump’s administration when he takes office and who he excluded.

Yet even that could prove to be misleading.

Israel may soon return tens of thousands of evacuees to their homes along the border with Lebanon, with or without a ceasefire with Hezbollah.

The return of the evacuees would allow Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to tout a significant success in his 13-month-long war in Gaza and Lebanon, even if it may be short-lived without a ceasefire, if not in an equitable negotiated resolution of Israel’s disputes with Lebanon and the Palestinians.

The Middle East may not preoccupy Donald J. Trump. Still, the president-elect preoccupies the Middle East as it attempts to figure out how he will handle the wars ravaging Gaza and Lebanon and threatening to spark an all-out conflagration between Israel and Iran.