Egypt

Talking Past Each Other: Hamas Broaches Peace While Israel Sees Only Terror

Almost unnoticed on Wednesday, as two rival Palestinian factions agreed to bury the hatchet, was the head of Hamas announcing that his group, which exists for armed struggle against Israel, was willing to give peace with the Jewish state a chance, too. The statement from Khaled Mashal was grudging and hardly optimistic, but cut enough …

Fatah-Hamas Agreement Starts Palestinians on a Rocky Road to Independence

Ignoring the objections of Israel and the United States, the rival Palestinian movements Fatah and Hamas have agreed to bury their differences – well, not exactly bury them, but at least to pursue them through democratic competition, rather than via a civil war. Hamas won the last elections, in January 2006, but Fatah — spurred on by …

In a Zero-Sum Relationship, Obama’s bin Laden Bump is Bibi’s Loss

Few if any nations follow American domestic politics more avidly than Israel, so reaction here to the death of Osama bin Laden arrived laced with worried warnings to Bibi, as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is universally known. So strained are relations between his government and Barack Obama that the American President’s political …

Miffed by Palestinian unity, Israel stands on the money hose

As it does when a Palestinian government makes a move Israel doesn’t much like, the Jewish state is withholding millions in tax revenues ordinarily passed along as a matter of course. In this case, the government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is holding back $89 million from the faction that runs the West Bank, Fatah, because it …

The Other Shoe? Egypt Moves to Ease Gaza Siege

Egypt’s announcement that it will open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip — loosening the siege of the Palestinian enclave Egypt has helped Israel carry out — has the sound of the other shoe dropping. Coming one day after word that the post-Mubarak government had brokered a tentative unity accord between rival Palestinian …

The Palestinian Reconciliation: A Shotgun Marriage

Fatah and Hamas, the leading Palestinian factions that parted ways amid much bloodshed four years ago, are announcing a tentative agreement to form a unity government. If it holds up, the reconciliation would mark a dramatic shift in the Israeli-Palestinian equation, in which the Palestinians move away from endless rounds of largely …

Why Egypt’s Generals Need Mubarak – as a Whipping Boy

The decision by Egypt’s current rulers to drag former President Hosni Mubarak and his sons into court next week to investigate allegations of corruption and abuses of power is certainly a crowd-pleaser: The demand for action against the leading lights of the ancien regime had been the key demand of the tens of thousands of protestors who …

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