As I was doing research last week for a column on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I stumbled on a story in The New Republic titled “Darfur Is Getting Worse: Why Aren’t the U.N. and U.S. Pressuring Khartoum to Reverse This Horrific Trend?”
The PLO representative to Washington called for a new approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying the two sides are far from resolution. “We are not close to ending this conflict,” the representative, Maen Rashid Areikat, said Wednesday at a kosher luncheon organized by New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies and the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.
With public bickering over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict already having spilled over into university student senates, corporate pension boards and even local farmers markets, the latest battlefield in the debate over the conflict is municipal transit systems.
Just weeks after his first presidential visit to Israel, President Bush made clear his priority for his final year in office: the economy, stupid.
If the president has a Middle East breakthrough up his sleeve, he was not ready to reveal it Monday in the State of the Union address that precedes his last year in office.
After the pomp and circumstance of Annapolis, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are gearing up for tough bargaining over the minutiae of a two-state settlement.
Not only will they have to agree on core issues like borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, but they\’ll also have to find common ground on a host of lesser concerns regulating relations between the two states, ranging from shared sewage systems to allocations on the electromagnetic spectrum.
On the surface, it seems that the recent public quarrel between Israel and the Bush administration over Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank could have been put off until Israelis and Palestinians get around to negotiating permanent borders.
Regardless of his true intentions, Sharon, by marking most of the Gaza Strip for evacuation, has almost completely given up on meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the near future. There is a small chance that negotiations may still occur, precluding Sharon\’s withdrawal from occurring in a vacuum. However, if Israel chooses to navigate the risky path of unilateralism, America\’s goal should be to encourage a safe and secure outcome through hands-on engagement.
Israeli leaders were heartened in late December, when Egypt\’s foreign minister announced that he would come to Jerusalem for talks on promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace.
At the same time, however, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was moving in Cairo to galvanize international pressure on Israel to dismantle the nuclear weapons it is presumed to possess.Â
These seemingly contradictory thrusts in Egyptian policy highlight the deep ambivalence that has characterized Egypt\’s attitude to Israel since the two countries made peace in 1979.
After years of mutual distrust and periodic acrimony, there are signs of a thaw in relations between Israel and Europe.
Those inclined to look on the bright side might say that Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is alive and kicking: Israelis and Palestinians allegedly joined ranks to make big money, until one of them woke up with a bad conscience.
The joint venture in question began in February 1997, when Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat transferred official Palestinian Authority funds from the Arab Bank in Ramallah to private accounts in Swiss banks. The money was Palestinian, mostly customs and levies on products imported into the Palestinian Authority via Israel.
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