PRINT ALL
EMAIL TO A FRIEND
DOWNLOAD TO PDF
RSSEvents | Daily News | About Us | Resources | Contact Us | Donate | Site Map | Privacy Policy
[5]
The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, suffered a heart attack on Sunday at a hospital in Austin, Tex., where he was attending his son’s college graduation, a spokesman said. Mr. Fayyad, a heavy smoker, underwent tests showing a blockage in a coronary artery, and doctors performed a catheterization to open the artery, the spokesman said. He is expected to leave the hospital in two days. Mr. Fayyad has been prime minister since 2007 and has developed close ties with Western leaders.
Every man has a father, and Binyamin Netanyahu’s is worth knowing. He is Benzion Netanyahu, born 101 years ago in what was soon to become Poland and living now in what has become Israel. He is a historian by profession, the author of a mammoth and well-respected book on the Spanish Inquisition and, most pertinent to today’s events, the former secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a militant Zionist leader whose credo, when it came to the Arabs, could be summarized as: Do nothing. Binyamin Netanyahu is doing precisely that.
The reaction to President Barack Obama's speech on Thursday has largely focused on one line: "The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states." News outlets from across the political spectrum ran headlines highlighting Mr. Obama's demand that Israel return to the "1967 borders," referring to Israel's boundaries before it took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 Six Day War.
Several names have been agreed on for the new technocrat government being compiled by Fatah and Hamas officials in Cairo, a party member told Ma'an on Tuesday.
From Gaza City, Fatah national relations official Diab Al-Loh assured that progress was being made in the now nearly three-week long wait for the announcement of a new government, following the signing of a unity deal on 4 May.
Al-Loh said none of the names would be announced until the government was set, and meetings between all factions were concluded.
A Palestinian unity deal, slammed by Barack Obama as an "enormous obstacle to peace," emerged after Hamas and Fatah agreed on the shared goal of a state on the 1967 lines and the failure of talks with Israel.
"The recent agreement between Fatah and Hamas poses an enormous obstacle to peace," the US president told delegates at the US-Israel lobby group AIPAC in Washington on Sunday, demanding the Islamist movement recognize Israel, reject violence and respect all existing agreements with Israel.
Russia supports Palestinian unity efforts as a step toward regional stability, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavarov told Palestinian factional representatives in Moscow on Monday evening.
The statement came at a meeting with seven faction leaders, many of whom recently refused to appoint members to a new technocrat government saying they were being left out of the reconciliation process and would prefer not to lend it legitimacy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday again rejected U.S. President Barack Obama's vision of a Middle East peace deal based on the country's "indefensible" 1967 borders.
Netanyahu, speaking to Washington's most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, said he planned to outline in a speech to Congress on Tuesday his own vision for an eventual peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
"It must leave Israel with security, and therefore Israel cannot return to the indefensible 1967 lines," Netanyahu said.
Israel's army says it has arrested several Israeli activists who broke into a disputed West Bank building to protest speeches by President Barack Obama and the Israeli prime minister in Washington.
A military spokeswoman says the troops arrested about eight activists early on Tuesday after they holed themselves up in Beit Shapira, a building in the contentious city of Hebron. Israel sealed the building in 2006.
Army radio broadcast one activist at the site yelling: "Tell Obama and (Netanyahu) that Israel won't give up its land."
President Barack Obama threw down a gauntlet this weekend: no vote at the United Nations, he asserted, would ever create a Palestinian state.
The Palestinians hope to prove him wrong. But their planned bid for U.N. recognition this fall of a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 Mideast war — enters largely unknown legal ground, and the Palestinians are still trying to work out how best to work the U.N. labyrinth.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sought Monday to defend his new unity government with the militant Hamas movement, saying criticism by U.S. President Barack Obama represented a "wrong understanding" of the deal.
Abbas' comments followed talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II in the Jordanian capital and were noted in a royal palace statement.
They were his first remarks on major speeches the U.S. president delivered in recent days.
Hamas will not recognize Israel as a state, Hamas Deputy Political Director Mousa Abu-Marzouk said here on Tuesday, according to Interfax news agency.
Slashing the Palestine Liberation Organization's recognition of Israel, Abu-Marzouk said the move was a "historic mistake."
Abu-Marzouk said Hamas was not going to participate in the transitional Palestinian government of national unity, but will help other Palestinian movements to form such a government.
He said the transitional government would be technocratic, but not based on a parliamentary majority.
There's nothing funnier than reading political pundits trying to get to the bottom of the fine points of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speeches. When he said "settlement blocs," did he mean the evacuation of all the rest? When he spoke of a "military presence" in the Jordan Valley, did he mean the Israel Defense Forces, or an international force?
American Jews have been dragged over the past few days into the controversy between their government and Israel's government, and that is neither to their benefit nor to the benefit of the State of Israel. On Sunday, U.S. President Barack Obama addressed the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention and candidly laid out his ideas for a permanent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech Tuesday before the U.S. Congress will be the formative event of his term, if not his entire political career. A statement released by his bureau promises that the speech will "garner major international attention," alluding to a surprise.
The speech, whose purpose is to curb international pressure on Israel, gives Netanyahu a rare opportunity to reboot his leadership. Just a few months ago, he appeared to be directionless. Now, people are hanging on his every word.
Palestinian officials criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's AIPAC address Tuesday, saying that it reflects his "fraudulent policies, which are in contrast with all international laws and agreements."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's advisor Nimr Hammad said that Netanyahu's speech – and the apparent speech he will give before Congress later Tuesday – was a "clear challenge" vis-à-vis Washington's policies and vision.
Give peace a chance: The two-state solution is good for Israel and is the only way to maintain a state that is both Jewish and democratic, Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni told the AIPAC conference in Washington Monday.
The notion of two states, Israel and Palestine, is not just a slogan or a move that would be beneficial for other parties, such as the US president, Livni said.
"It is not an anti-Israeli policy – it is vital for Israel’s interests," she said.
A handful of Israelis marked Jordanian Independence Day on Tuesday by attempting to present the Jordanian embassy in Ramat Gan with a petition to make the country the official national homeland of the Palestinian people.
The initiator of the petition, Arye Eldad (National Union) said that the petition "requests that King Abdullah declare Jordan as the national homeland of the Palestinian people. His father said Jordan is Palestine, Palestine is Jordan. Unfortunately Abdullah doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps on this."
Egyptian presidential likely Amr Moussa said that the Israeli refusal to negotiate a peaceful settlement with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas is illegitimate. He said that the current Israeli leadership "is not serious" about negotiating with any Palestinian faction.
Speaking to CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Moussa said that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has to "take into consideration that the Arab world is changing," and that the new Arab leadership will not represent the old status quo. He said now is the time for the Israeli government to "seize this opportunity."
For months I have been hearing about disproportionate use of force by the army against weekly demonstrations in Nabi Saleh – a small pastoral Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah. Last week, I watched several YouTube videos filmed by activists in the village, providing vivid visual images of the forceful arrests of protesters by the army. I was disturbed because all of the clips showed how the demonstrations ended; none showed how they began. I was convinced that there must have been stone-throwing by the shabab in the village which provoked the violent army responses.
Palestinians were left confused and divided over U.S. President Barack Obama after he made two major policy addresses on Israel, the Palestinians and the peace process in the space of four days.
The Obama speeches – one at the State Department largely devoted to broader Middle East issues an a second in front of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) left a trail of confusion for policy analysts and political figures, especially over the U.S. leader’s meaning when he called for negotiation a future Palestinian state to be based on “1967 lines.”
In a break from its stance in recent years, the pro-Israel lobby is pursuing a hard-line agenda toward the Palestinian Authority at its annual conference, as 10,000 activists prepare to carry its message to Capitol Hill.
The lobbying agenda of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee traditionally includes two elements over the past several years — ensuring foreign aid to Israel and tightening sanctions against Iran in order to block its nuclear ambitions — that are once again being stressed this year.
The first four days of the US visit of Benjamin Netanyahu have drawn much speculation of an open dispute between the Israeli prime ministerr and Barack Obama, the US president, over the borders of a future Palestinian state.
Barely 48 hours after he called for a “viable Palestine” on the basis of the 1967 borders and exchanged cold vibes and hot words with Benjamin Netanyahu, poor Barack Obama found himself doing what successive US presidents and leading politicians have always done: Offer obeisance at the altar of almighty AIPAC and sing endless hosannas to the “Great State of Israel.”
The so-called historic speech of the US president on Thursday was seen as “too little, too late” by the Arabs. However, even that timid “audacity of hope” was apparently too much for Israel’s friends in the US establishment.
US President Barack Obama's long-awaited speech on the "Arab spring" and the Arab-Israel conflict has created controversy and spurred contradicting reactions in Israel, Palestine and the Arab world.
The immediate and most prominent reaction was that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who objected publicly to Obama's reference to the borders of 1967 as the basis for negotiations. This automatically made this part of the speech the most dramatic.
President Barack Obama's two recent speeches on the Middle East, at the State Department and the AIPAC conference, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's response and related rhetoric, indicate that neither really understands that September at the United Nations is the only relevant arena they should be addressing. Meanwhile, Netanyahu picked a totally superfluous fight with the American president.
President Barack Obama’s Middle East speech last Thursday did not break any particularly new ground on Israeli-Palestinian peace or Washington’s basic positions on negotiations. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of his supporters reacted furiously. Why? The reasons are deeply illuminating.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/19267
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/19267
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/19267
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] https://www.americantaskforce.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/world/middleeast/24briefs-Palestinians.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast
[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/time-for-netanyahu-to-ditch-his-do-nothing-policy/2011/05/23/AFHgP49G_story.html
[8] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704904604576335443187566906.html
[9] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=390524
[10] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=390498
[11] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=390529
[12] http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/netanyahu-repeats-israel-cannot-return-to-67-borders/
[13] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/army-arrests-israeli-activists-in-west-bank-1494088.html
[14] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/palestinian-un-bid-enters-unknown-territory-1493543.html
[15] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/abbas-defends-unity-deal-against-us-criticism-1492630.html
[16] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-05/24/c_13891788.htm
[17] http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/netanyahu-is-not-ready-for-any-deal-with-the-palestinians-1.363666
[18] http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/u-s-jews-must-support-obama-s-mideast-vision-1.363665
[19] http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/netanyahu-s-congress-speech-will-it-change-his-relationship-with-obama-or-ruin-it-forever-1.363625
[20] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4073244,00.html
[21] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4072962,00.html
[22] http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=221999
[23] http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=221974
[24] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=221897
[25] http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=32254
[26] http://forward.com/articles/138032/
[27] http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/wary-netanyahu-may-offer-concessions-on-west-bank
[28] http://arabnews.com/opinion/editorial/article424755.ece
[29] http://www.bitterlemons.org/inside.php?id=82
[30] http://www.bitterlemons.org/inside.php?id=81
[31] http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=274288
Front Page Features