Benjamin Netanyahu seemed last week to have come to Washington to party like it’s 1998. That was the year he came to the U.S. as a rejectionist Israeli prime minister elected on the promise of burying the Oslo Accords, and sought to make an end-run around President Bill Clinton by talking over his head to a joint session of both …
Palestine
Expect Neither Sparks, Nor Warmth When Obama Meets Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to be feeling lucky even before President Barack Obama gave him much of what he wanted in Thursday’s Middle East policy speech. There’s little love lost between the two men, of course, but political circumstance forces them to cooperate. And even if Netanyahu was annoyed by Obama’s …
Israel’s Concerns in the Jordan Valley Are Not Just About Security
When he addresses a joint session of Congress next week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sure to mention the Jordan River Valley. He usually does when the topic is peace talks and Israel’s security. Netanyahu is among those who insist that, as a condition for withdrawing Israeli troops from the high ground that makes up …
Why Obama’s Mideast Speech is For Domestic, Not Arab Consumption
The question among Middle East watchers over Thursday’s planned speech on the Arab Spring by President Obama has been this: Why would he address the Arab world at a moment when his policies have little hope of reversing diminished U.S. standing? After all, the Arab consensus views Obama has having failed miserably to deliver on the …
Amid U.S. Doubts, Pakistan Finds Old Friends in China
The visit to China by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has been widely described as an effort to seek support from an old friend at a time when Pakistan’s government and military are facing difficult questions over the degree of official complicity in sheltering Osama bin Laden. But even as China has defended Pakistan’s …
Behind the Israel Protest Turmoil: A Middle East Without a Peace Process
Welcome to the post-peace process: The drama that unfolded on Israel’s boundaries on Sunday as 12 Palestinians were killed in a wave of unarmed civil disobedience was but a taste of things to come. That was the warning from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Sunday night, and he’s certainly got reason to worry: Rather than pin their …
Mideast Peace Envoy Mitchell to Resign: Who Knew He Was Still on the Job?
Senator George Mitchell is no fool, so it should come as no surprise that he’s no longer prepared to undertake the fool’s-errand assignment of being President Barack Obama’s Special Envoy on Middle East peace. News that the 77-year-old retired senator who brokered the Northern Ireland peace agreement will on Friday resign the position …
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 …
Would a Palestinian Unity Government Preclude Negotiations With Israel?
Anyone paying a modicum of attention to Israeli-Palestinian issues knows that the reason there’s little prospect of progress in negotiations between the two sides is not the decision by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party to form a unity government with Hamas. Negotiations have been deadlocked because of the chasm between the two sides …
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 …