The telephone in Benjamin Netanyahu’s world has become a source of torment. For weeks, according to a detailed Financial Times report, the Israeli Prime Minister has been dialing Donald Trump almost every day, sometimes more than once, trying to reignite the very conflict the White House would rather let die. Netanyahu, the self-styled “Mr. Security” of Israeli politics, has a message: America must attack Iran now, target its nuclear sites, and reassert the kind of overwhelming force that would once have made Israeli opponents tremble. But the answer on the other end of the line is not the enthusiastic support…

The publication of Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, was always going to stir more than literary curiosity. For decades, the name Gandhi has been inseparable from the most painful and contested chapters of modern Indian history, and no chapter is more raw than the violence and state action of 1984. In her book, Sonia Gandhi reportedly writes about the deep sorrow that her mother-in-law, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, felt after the military assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, an operation known as Operation Blue Star. She describes a woman who was visibly shaken, who wept at…