Will Hamas win the peace?
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jordan Times
by Mohammed Yaghi - January 26, 2009 - 1:00am

For generations to come, the Palestinians will remember the horrific war in Gaza with pain and bitterness. But what cannot yet be seen is how Palestinians will view Hamas. Whether Hamas can claim a victory and whether Palestinians will believe them will be determined by the type of ceasefire that is eventually agreed, if a formal one is eventually agreed. The endgame - for both Israel and Hamas - is thus crucially important.

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Peace now?
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Economist
(Editorial) January 23, 2009 - 1:00am

FRANCE’S president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has a reputation for letting his enthusiasm run away with him. Having rushed with other European heads of government to the Middle East to douse the flames of Gaza, he returned home with a characteristically grandiose idea. Now that a truce seems to be taking hold, he wants, “within weeks”, to convene a peace conference to begin solving the whole conflict once and for all.

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What Was the Gaza War About?
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Middle East Times
by Claude Salhani - (Opinion) January 20, 2009 - 1:00am

The 23-day war in Gaza ended almost as abruptly as it began. And it ended in a way that allows for both sides in the conflict to declare victory. That is an important point if the parties involved aspire to move forward toward peace. This is where the lessons of the June, 1967 Six-Day War are important.

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Israel Begins Pullout; Gazans Survey Debris
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Washington Post
by Jonathan Finer, Craig Whitlock - January 19, 2009 - 1:00am

Israeli soldiers flashed the victory sign Sunday as they began withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. Shellshocked Palestinians emerged from shelters and counted their dead. But as a tenuous cease-fire took hold, few people on either side predicted an end to the cycle of violence that has endured for generations. The 22-day war ended without surrender. Neither Israel nor Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, made any concessions, except to stop fighting temporarily.

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Israel is good at using sticks, but its carrot approach needs work
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Alex Sinclair - (Opinion) January 19, 2009 - 1:00am

During its three-week offensive on Hamas, Israel has used a great big stick on the Palestinians of Gaza. Most Israelis, myself included, have supported our right to use that stick, pained as we are at the suffering we have inflicted on many innocent Palestinians. But when the core narrative of the situation was "We got out of Gaza; you continued to attack us" - which, despite Israel's continued blockades and targeted assassinations, remains the basic truth of the Gaza story over the past 3 years - then we were justified in taking action to prevent these attacks.

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Cairo's Bargain
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Washington Post
by Jim Hoagland - January 16, 2009 - 1:00am

CAIRO -- The besieged Palestinians of Gaza matter to the people of Egypt. But peace with Israel has come to matter more. That outcome was not certain when Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat negotiated the Camp David peace treaty nearly 30 years ago. I remember labeling the accord "fragile" on the day it was born. It contained nothing tangible for the Palestinians or other Arabs -- not even for Syria, Egypt's partner in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

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How Not to Make Peace in the Middle East
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Review Of Books
by Hussein Agha, Robert Malley - January 15, 2009 - 1:00am

1. Foreign affairs had no more than a small part in Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and the Middle East peace process only a fraction of that. Yet the sorry prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians make a break with past US policy on this matter imperative, regardless of the new administration's priorities.

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How to beat Hamas
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Akiva Eldar - January 14, 2009 - 1:00am

Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel and yesterday shots were fired from its territory at a Border Police patrol north of Eilat. Shots were fired from Syria at an Israeli unit and Katyusha rockets from Lebanon struck the center of Nahariya. Turkey is furious, Saudi Arabia is boiling and Qatar is boycotting Israel.

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Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times
by Jeffrey Goldberg - (Opinion) January 13, 2009 - 1:00am

IN the summer of 2006, at a moment when Hezbollah rockets were falling virtually without pause on northern Israel, Nizar Rayyan, husband of four, father of 12, scholar of Islam and unblushing executioner, confessed to me one of his frustrations. We were meeting in a concrete mosque in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Mr. Rayyan, who was a member of the Hamas ruling elite, and an important recruiter of suicide bombers until Israel killed him two weeks ago (along with several of his wives and children), arrived late to our meeting from parts unknown.

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Crisis Imperils 2-State Plan, Shifting a Balance
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times
by Michael Slackman - (Analysis) January 11, 2009 - 1:00am

With every image of the dead in Gaza inflaming people across the Arab world, Egyptian and Jordanian officials are worried that they see a fundamental tenet of the Middle East peace process slipping away: the so-called two-state solution, an independent Palestinian state coexisting with Israel.

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