Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni flew to the Qatari capital of Doha in the Persian Gulf this week with an ambitious goal: changing moderate Arab attitudes toward Israel.
For the first time since the Annapolis peace parley last November, the United States is leaning heavily on Israel to move ahead in peacemaking with the Palestinians.
With U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in Israel this week talking about Iran, the big question was whether President Bush would be willing to use military force in the waning days of his presidency to stop Iran\’s nuclear weapons program.
Last week\’s terrorist attack at a Jerusalem yeshiva and the new Israeli national intelligence assessment presented to the Cabinet on Sunday underscore the acute security problems Israel faces this year and beyond.
With Israel still facing Hamas rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip following the end of the army\’s limited ground operation there, the Israeli government is considering stronger follow-up measures.
Irked by the slow rate of progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, major Arab players are threatening to withdraw their offer to normalize ties with Israel once a Palestinian state is established. Underlying the Arab reassessment is a deeper problem: Arab belief in the viability of \”the two-state solution\” is diminishing. And the worry in Jerusalem is that this growing lack of confidence could undermine the fragile negotiating process so carefully put in place at the regional peace conference in Annapolis, Md., last November.
In the wake of last week\’s assassination of arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, there are fears in the region that a massive attack by Hezbollah against Israeli interests could spark a new Middle East war.
After a Qassam rocket attack seriously injured two brothers in the Israeli border town of Sderot, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert again came under intense pressure to launch a major military strike against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
After the long-awaited final report of the Winograd Commission of inquiry into the Second Lebanon War was published last week, all eyes turned toward Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Barak, the Labor Party leader, was the one man whose withdrawal of his party from the governing coalition could topple Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose wartime performance was the subject of much criticism in the report.
The collapse of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt has done much more than break Israel\’s siege of the Hamas-run strip. It also has opened up new, far-reaching strategic options for Israel while exposing it to grave new dangers.
Some strategists say Israel should use the opportunity to force Gaza to look outward to Egypt, its natural Arab hinterland, and thereby reduce and eventually end Israeli responsibility for Gaza\’s fate. Others say such a handover of responsibility would expose Israel to worse terrorism than ever and that Israel instead should clamp down on all crossing points: between Israel and Gaza, Gaza and Egypt, and Israel and Egypt.
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