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[5]
A handshake across a table and a spray of camera flashes will probably serve as starting gun of the first official Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in seven years Wednesday – talks aimed at producing a treaty on Palestinian statehood in 2008.
Over the coming months, the talks will break into about a half-dozen subcommittees to tackle such issues as dividing Jerusalem and dealing with Palestinian refugees. But none of those discussions are likely to lead to breakthroughs necessary to clinch a final agreement, analysts say.
It is not the volume of traffic, much less the issue of distance, that puts a pair of dents each day into the life of Mouse Hindi.I
It is the city of Jerusalem.
"There is no limit to the time it takes," says the 40-year-old Palestinian consulting engineer. "It could take two hours. It could take three hours. We don't know."
The round-faced husband and father of five is talking about the daily journey he makes from his home in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem to his office in Ramallah.
The first formal Middle East peace negotiations in seven years got off to a tense start today with the Palestinian Authority demanding a halt to Israeli plans to build settlements on disputed territory.
Palestinian negotiators said the planned construction in the Har Homa neighbourhood in disputed east Jerusalem, along with Israeli military activity in Gaza, threatened to undermine the new peace talks.
The light in the night sky near Bethlehem this Christmas will be no heavenly portent but a safety beacon on a crane in a nearby Jewish community so controversial it threatens to derail the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Har Homa, largely overlooked on the world stage since construction began roughly ten years ago, has surged up the international agenda since Israeli authorities decided this week to build 307 new homes there.
The United States Congress will soon debate the decision of the Bush administration to sell $20 billion in sophisticated weapons to several Arab countries. This package is being presented by the White House as a way of promoting stability in a Middle East threatened by Iran's ambitions and the rise of terrorism. Congress should flatly decline the sale on the grounds that arming the Arab world is neither in the best interest of the region nor that of the US in the long run.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was just back from the Annapolis summit where President George W. Bush tried to reboot the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. More importantly, November 29 was also the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote that divided British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. That promised Arab state still doesn’t exist, of course, but if the peace talks fail to produce it in the end, Olmert told the newspaper Haaretz, then Israel is “finished”.
Call their bluff.
Hamas this week inched one notch further toward some form of accommodation with a reality it cannot bring itself to stomach. Israel should do no less.
In an open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Ahmed Youssef, senior political advisor to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, wrote at the weekend that the Bush administration cannot at once "preach about exporting democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and ignore the democratic process in Palestine."
Who says there is no cooperation between the Palestinian Authority/Fatah and Hamas? Indeed, ever since June the two sides have been working energetically, in a kind of pas de deux of demonstrative pirouettes, so that the Gaza Strip will become another quasi-state entity with its three governing authorities - executive, legislative and judiciary - separate from those in Ramallah. All three branches are acting outside the delegated powers of the PA president, with the help of a separate police force and a system of taxation, collection and other payments. Two non-states for one people.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded explanations from her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, last week about the plan to build another 300 apartments in the Har Homa neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Rice did not make do with posing a question to Livni; she hastened to go public with the Bush Administration's objections to the plan.
As negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians reached their peak at the Camp David summit of 2000, the Clinton administration was facing such a shortage of manpower that a translator who had no diplomatic experience was drafted to fulfill diplomatic missions in the most delicate moment of the negotiation process.
U.S. Jews appear to have become more opposed both to Israel's making key concessions in renewed peace talks with Palestinians and to the U.S. carrying out a military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities, according to the latest in an annual series of surveys of Jewish opinion released here this week by the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
It's never easy writing about media freedom.
Even in countries where there is no official censorship, all reporters know there will always be some restraints on what they can say - editors need to be persuaded, owners need to be kept happy, the law has to be obeyed.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/5851
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/5851
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/5851
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] http://www.americantaskforce.org/world_press_roundup/20071212t000000
[6] http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1212/p06s04-wome.htm
[7] http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/284793
[8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2226280,00.html
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/12/wmid212.xml
[10] http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=87420
[11] http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=4292
[12] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/933031.html
[13] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/933623.html
[14] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/933625.html
[15] http://www.forward.com/articles/12255/
[16] http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40452
[17] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7139622.stm
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