December 11, 2007

Middle East News: World Press Roundup

A New York Times editorial urges Israelis and Palestinians to begin the work necessary to break out of old patterns detrimental to peace negotiations (2.) In Israel Policy Forum, MJ Rosenberg takes heart in growing indications that the more conservative American Jewish institutions are adopting the two-state solution paradigm (4.) A Jewish Telegraphic Agency opinion by AMEINU president Kenneth Bob calls on U.S. Jews to support Israeli government decisions on the future of Jerusalem (6.) The New Statesman (UK) reports on the critical shortages affecting Gaza and its civilian population (7.) The Australian (Australia) reports on an open letter from Hamas to Secretary of State Rice asking that the sanctions against Gaza be lifted (8.) In Haaretz (Israel) Amira Haas reports on how the takeover of three institutions in Gaza by Hamas has deepened the Gaza-West Bank split (9.) Also in Haaretz are the results of a survey of the Israeli public post-Annapolis (10.) A Jordan Times (Jordan) editorial is critical of the reported Israeli offer of a provisional Palestinian state made at Annapolis (13.)

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Starting The Peace Process

Israelis and Palestinians are supposed to begin serious negotiations tomorrow after last month’s long-on-optics, short-on-specifics Annapolis peace meeting. Despite all the smiles and handshakes, both sides went home and fell back into some familiar, counterproductive patterns.

 

If this effort has any chance of success, everyone who attended Annapolis — including the Americans and Arab leaders — are going to have to work a lot harder at breaking those patterns.

Palestinians To Urge Settlement Freeze At Talks

Palestinians will attend peace talks this week despite a plan by Israel to build new homes on occupied land, but will focus on demanding a settlement freeze, senior Palestinian officials said on Tuesday.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are due to meet on Wednesday two weeks after their leaders relaunched long-stalled peace talks at a U.S.-hosted conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

Utility Cuts Increase Misery In Gaza

Israeli cuts in fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip are hitting home, affecting schools, hospitals and businesses as officials from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority exchange blame for the suffering.

Utility cuts are intended to pressure Hamas to halt rocket fire into Israel.

Filling stations across this seaside territory have shut down, crippling public transportation systems.

Hamas Asks Us To Free Gaza 'ghetto'

THE Hamas rulers of Gaza have implored the US to bring an end to the crippling boycott of the Gaza Strip, which they have likened to the World War II siege of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto.

Just Another Forgotten Peace Summit

Many assume that if the Israeli decision-makers were to openly change their position on the conflict and its resolution, the public would throng after them en masse and support an agreement. The present survey, like earlier surveys we conducted, shows that this assumption is very flimsy and that people are not hurrying to get on the Olmert government's peace train.

Iran Is No Threat And That’s Official

“They stole our threat” goes a headline in the Israeli daily Haaretz. The author is, of course, referring to the recently published US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) composed by 16 American intelligence agencies. It counters US and Israeli assertions that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. There’s been no such program since 2003, it states.

Time-wasting Manoeuvres

It has been reported that during the Annapolis conference, Israel offered the Palestinian side recognition of a Palestinian state with provisional borders and that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas quickly rejected the offer.

It is not hard to guess why Abbas refused such an offer; its acceptance would be tantamount to consolidating Israel’s grip on Palestinian territories for an indefinite period of time and would put the border issue in deep freeze.

Annapolis

To my alarm, and possibly for the first and only time, I found myself agreeing with a comment by John Bolton, President George Bush's former and totally miscast Ambassador to the United Nations.  Speaking of the Annapolis summit, which collected together the representatives of 44 countries in Maryland, he said:-
"Normally, you have substantive actions and then you bring in the television cameras - they reversed that order."

Splinter Group Bids To Keep The Outpost Movement Alive

Her heart pounding, the 15-year-old girl with a long, honey-colored braid down her back scrambled down the steep hillside in the black of night, running from police who had swarmed in to evacuate her and others who had come to set up an illegal settlement outpost.

It was a scene that has become familiar in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between youths determined to spread Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the police charged with stopping them.

Israel's Palestinians Speak Out

The Annapolis peace talks regard me as an interloper in my own land. Israel's deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, argues that I should "take [my] bundles and get lost." Henry Kissinger thinks I ought to be summarily swapped from inside Israel to the would-be Palestinian state.

Creative Approaches Needed In Mideast Peace Talks

The Annapolis Conference heralded a new strategy in Middle East peacemaking. Whereas conventional wisdom held that domestically strong Israeli and Arab leaders were a prerequisite for fruitful negotiations, Annapolis attempted to work backward, using negotiations to strengthen two very weak leaders.

Laughing All The Way To The (west) Bank

The Axis of Evil arrived in Lebanon last week. No, not in the form of some Iran-backed coup d' état, but as a stand-up comedy team made up of three Americans of Middle Eastern descent. (They couldn't find a funny North Korean.) On the last leg of a regional tour playing to sold-out venues in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, they arrived at the Casino Du Liban outside of Beirut with a certain sense of relief. Lebanon was the only country that allowed them to perform their routine with expletives undeleted — no small challenge for a modern American comedy act.

Har Homa Is Not In Jerusalem

Israel announced a plan last week to build 307 new housing units in what most international media are calling "a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem."

Har Homa's white apartment blocs are draped on a hillside overlooking the city of Bethlehem, where I work. Like other West Bank settlements, it was erected on high ground, with the intention of intimidating the Palestinian population below. Spatially speaking, Har Homa is no more in Jerusalem than Bethehem itself is.

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