January 5th

Almost irreversible
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Bitterlemons
by Ghassan Khatib - January 4, 2010 - 1:00am

The first decade of the twenty-first century, which ended a few days ago, witnessed the undoing of all the positive milestones and achievements that had occurred in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process in the last decade of the twentieth century. That decade started with the first international peace conference in Madrid. This was followed by the first Arab-Israel multilateral and bilateral negotiations, which ended with the signing of the first Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, the Oslo Accords.

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Israeli PM hints at possible improvement in stalemated peace process with Palestinians
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Xinhua
(Editorial) January 4, 2010 - 1:00am

JERUSALEM, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday referred to a "change in the air" over the stalled peace process with the Palestinians, adding to speculation that the two neighbors might resume peace talks soon. "In recent weeks, I have felt that there is a certain change in the air, and I hope that this will mature, allowing the start of the diplomatic process," local daily Ha'aretz quoted Netanyahu as telling lawmakers from his Likud party at an internal meeting.

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Palestinians stop torturing Hamas inmates
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Toronto Star
January 4, 2010 - 1:00am

NABLUS, WEST BANK–Palestinian security forces in the West Bank have stopped torturing Hamas prisoners, ending two years of systematic abuse, Hamas inmates said in jailhouse interviews. The change in practice, said to have taken effect in October, was confirmed by a West Bank Hamas leader, human rights activists and the Palestinian prime minister. It defuses a potential problem for Washington, because the U.S. has been closely involved in training Palestinian troops under the control of Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas, a rival of the Hamas militants.

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Palestinians Bid to Join International Finance Body
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Media Line
by Benjamin Joffe-Walt - January 5, 2010 - 1:00am

The Palestinian Authority is forming a "national team" to drive the bid to gain membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), it was announced on Monday. The team, approved during Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's weekly cabinet meeting in Ramallah, will lead efforts to reform Palestinian economic institutions as part of the campaign to gain permanent observer status and eventually membership in the international trade body.

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January 4th

Rep. Mike Honda says two states are the only path to peace in the Middle East. Hamas prisoners report that abuses in Palestinian jails ceased in October. The LA Times profiles a major West Bank highway that has been closed to Palestinian traffic. Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni says peace is possible. Reports suggest that a new US plan envisages a Palestinian state within two years, but Israeli FM Lieberman calls this "unrealistic" and orders his diplomats not to "grovel." A Ha'aretz commentary asks settlers what kind of future they are building, and another argues there is very little difference between the occupation and apartheid. PM Fayyad looks forward to a Palestinian state free of fences and settlements, and Pres. Abbas reiterates that a settlement freeze is the precondition for renewed negotiations. A commentary in the Guardian says Israel is using water to harass Bedouins. The National says Israel is ready for another war in Gaza which is "ready to explode," and profiles bereaved physician Izzeldin Abuelaish. Hamas says it would join Hezbollah in any future conflict with Israel. Time Magazine reviews a year of Mideast missteps. Egyptian clerics quarrel over the legitimacy of Egypt's new barrier along the Gaza border.

Egypt’s Steel Wall Sparks ‘Fatwa War’
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Media Line
by Rachelle Kliger - January 3, 2010 - 1:00am

A religious ruling in support of the construction of a massive steel wall on the Egypt-Gaza border is drawing fire from fellow clerics. The steel wall intended to stop smuggling across the Egypt-Gaza border was declared permissible in a religious ruling, or fatwa, by the Islamic Studies College of the renowned Al-Azhar institution, drawing angry responses from other Muslim figures in Egypt, including from within Al-Azhar itself.

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Peacemaking in the Mideast: Obama's Year of Missteps
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Time
by Massimo Calabresi - (Opinion) January 1, 2010 - 1:00am

It has taken President Obama just 10 months to achieve something each of his immediate predecessors delivered in their final year in office: failure in the Middle East peace process. Riding a wave of optimism in January, the President on his second day in office named retired Senator George Mitchell as his Middle East special envoy, tasked with kick-starting the dormant negotiations over a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Hamas vows to fight with Hizbullah in next war
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Star
January 4, 2010 - 1:00am

Hamas official in Lebanon Ali Baraka vowed on Sunday to fight alongside Hizbullah in the next Israeli war on Lebanon. “We are guests in Lebanon and our policy will not change,” Baraka said during a memorial service to mark one week since the death of two Hamas members in a mysterious explosion in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “However, we are committed to resisting Israeli occupation” forces,” he added. “Israel should know that if it launched a new attack against Lebanon, we will not stand handcuffed.

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Gaza remains under pressure and ‘waiting to explode’
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The National
by Jonathan Cook - January 2, 2010 - 1:00am

A year on from Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s offensive in Gaza, the threads of a possible Middle East peace are so knotted that they look impossible to disentangle. A right-wing government in Tel Aviv has dared to snub the US administration by barely enforcing what has become a partial and very temporary freeze on the expansion of its settlement programme in the West Bank. Israeli generals, meanwhile, proclaim that they are gearing up for an even fiercer repeat of the attack on Gaza last winter that killed around 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

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‘No one can take me away from Gaza’
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The National
by Hamida Ghafour - January 2, 2010 - 1:00am

For weeks the defining image of Israel’s military siege of the Gaza Strip was a distant haze of smoke rising from the ground, sanitised footage that told nothing of the horrors of war. But in the late afternoon of January 16, Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish broke through the silence imposed by the Israeli government’s news blockade and for a few minutes the raw, unfathomable grief of a father whose three daughters and niece had been killed minutes before rang out to the world.

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