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 …
Hamas
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 …
Why Palestinian President Abbas is Bucking the White House
The current priority of the Obama Administration’s Middle East peace policy is to prevent the Palestinian leadership seeking UN recognition of Palestinian sovereignty over all of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But evidence is mounting that the Administration will fail, because even the moderate Palestinian Authority President …
Why Goldstone’s ‘Edit’ Won’t Ease Pressure on Israel
Judge Richard Goldstone’s Sunday op ed in the Washington Post reconsidering the allegation in his 2009 UN report that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians in its 2008/9 Gaza war was greeted with premature euphoria in Israeli circles. Goldstone himself made clear, Wednesday, that he has no intention of withdrawing any …
Why a New Gaza War is Possible, But Unlikely
In a conflict that has raged for 63 years, all violence can be termed “retaliation”. Israeli warplanes and tanks pound targets inside the densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave of Gaza in response to the dozens of rockets and mortars fired by militants over the past ten days; Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other smaller Palestinian …
An ‘Interim’ Peace Deal? Israel’s Netanyahu Tries to Reheat a Souffle
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could be forgiven for feeling just a wee bit lonely, right now. Events in the Middle East are increasingly passing him by, leaving him on the sidelines as the region’s history is being remade. And on Wednesday, one of Israel’s most senior veteran diplomats, Ilan Baruch, resigned from the …
‘Peace Process’ – What Peace Process?
It ought to have come as no surprise that the Western-backed Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad this week offered to bring the Islamist Hamas movement into a unity government: Sure, Hamas participation in a Palestinian government has long been a red line for both Israel and the United States, but in case nobody noticed, the …