Unesco’s approval of full membership for Palestine is not without practical significance: The U.N. organization bestows and enforces the status of World Heritage Site, and with portions of the Heritage-aspirant Dead Sea located in Palestinian territory, as well as Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and the Hebron tomb of Abraham and …
Everyone talks about the United States using its Security Council veto to stop the Palestinian application for UN membership, but there’s another calculation driving the most intense diplomacy now bubbling around the UN bid: If the Palestinian bid doesn’t get nine votes from other members of the Security Council, Washington won’t have …
Some days reality defies improvement. Tuesday may have been such a day in Jerusalem, where the actor Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” fame paid a call on Shimon Peres, the president of Israel. Alexander was visiting the Holy Land as part of a pro-peace delegation from a grassroots group called OneVoice, dedicated to finding a two-state …
The tents seem to be everywhere now — Wall Street, London, Hong Kong, Madrid — but very little really comes close to what happened in Israel this summer: thousands camping out, hundreds of thousands marching, a society transformed. “It’s all part of the same thing. It’s people saying, ‘We want to be in charge,'” says Stav Shaffir, …
When rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas agreed to bury the hatchet in Cairo , the reconciliation pact promised two things: New elections by May 2012, and a caretaker government of technocrats to run the Palestinian Authority until then. That was more than five months ago, and ever since the two sides have been jammed up on the …
Just how good for Hamas was the Gilad Shalit deal? A good place to inquire was downtown Ramallah, the West Bank city, just north of Jerusalem. It’s the main stronghold for Hamas’ rival faction, the secular Fatah party led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen. If Hamas is getting props around …
It used to feel like tunnels were the only way to get into Gaza. And on the Strip’s western boundary, they still are – dozens of actual subterranean passages that run from sovereign Egypt on one side to the Palestinian territory on the other, freightways to haul in everything from tuna to Toyotas to lions.
But the way in from …
In the wake of the Palestinian application for full United Nations membership, the game is catch-me-if-you-can. Israel and Washington are painting the UN bid as an effort to achieve the dream of statehood without negotiations. The Palestinians argue that it’s a way to assure future negotiations are meaningful, the previous 18 years …
How long will it take the United Nations Security Council to answer the Palestinian application for membership in the global organization? “Technical procedures require about a month,” Mahmoud Abbas replies when the question comes up in Strasbourg, where the president of the Palestinian Authority has come to make the most of the time …
The man who lives in Yasser Arafat’s shadow returned from New York to a reception that suggested a measure of newfound respect from a Palestinian public that likes its leaders to show some steel.
Abu Mazen, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is known here, always had the respect of the population that elected him in …
At one end of Ramallah, Israeli riot police line up behind barricades, stubby tear gas rifles leveled at shoulder height toward the few dozen young Palestinian men who reliably emerge from the Qalandia refugee camp when Israeli soldiers emerge from the checkpoint of the same name two blocks away. Camera crews set up between them, …
One of the pleasures of covering Florida politics in Washington used to be Sam Gibbons, D-Tampa, the only Democrat reliably elected to the House from the Gulf Coast, and a dedicated teller of war stories. Gibbons parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne and what followed would inspire certain quality entertainments from …
Comes now a report in the Israeli press that purports to solve the mystery stubbornly trailing the unusual Aug. 18 terror attack on a desert highway in the far south of Israel — but the answer suggests even deeper problems for Israel: Though Israel bombed the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the attack that left eight Israelis dead, an …