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President Obama starts his much anticipated Middle East tour on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, where he is expected to press the Arab nations to offer a gesture to the Israelis to entice them to accelerate the peace process.
On the eve of a visit to the Middle East and Europe, President Obama on Tuesday played down a dispute with Israel over his demand for a suspension of further Jewish settlement in the West Bank but reiterated his call for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians that Israel’s hawkish leaders have not accepted.
Even as it publicly stakes out a hard-line position against Israeli settlement expansion, the Obama administration is avoiding serious criticism from most U.S. Jewish groups and pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers.
Key pro-Israel Jewish Democrats have backed the president on the importance of an Israeli settlement freeze while also suggesting there is room for a compromise between the Netanyahu government and the White House.
After George W. Bush’s terms of endearment for Israel — a country he once described as a “light unto nations” — a different terminology is being used to describe its cloudy relationship with his successor, Barack Obama.
At odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Palestinian statehood and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the new US president will try to patch ties with the Muslim world in an address he will deliver in Egypt tomorrow.
Sirens blared across Israel on Tuesday as the nation carried out its biggest-ever "doomsday" drill meant to simulate a catastrophic attack.
The faux fears, however, were overshadowed by deepening anxiety in Jerusalem that Israel is heading for an unavoidable political showdown with President Barack Obama over the center-right government's refusal to stop building Jewish homes in the predominantly Palestinian West Bank.
Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily newspaper, carried a front-page story Tuesday bluntly titled: "The American Threat."
It had been at least 20 years since I was in New York for a Salute to Israel Parade. But it was a happy coincidence.
I was scheduled to be in New York on Monday for a meeting of the board of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America. I came into the city a day early with my wife and 20 year old daughter to enjoy the parade. My daughter marched with a delegation from the University of Maryland Hillel. My wife and I enjoyed being part of the crowd, hearing the Israeli music and watching the floats and delegations of students from synagogues and schools from all around the area.
There are some hypocrisies so grand, so utterly defiant of awareness of the world and of oneself, that it takes days -- sometimes weeks -- for we mere mortals even to discern them.
That's my excuse anyway. I've been following the issue of "natural growth" in the settlements with mixed feelings: I know people who live in the settlements, and whatever one thinks of their politics (and not all of them necessarily hew to a rigid political view) squeezing them out because they want to add a room for a new baby seems unconscionable.
President Barack Obama has an opportunity on his visits to several Arab countries this week to clarify American strategic aims and core policies in the Middle East. However, to do so he will have to make a few key decisions that his government has avoided to date. The most important on the conceptual level is to break free from the psychological chokehold of religion that continues to constrain American thinking vis-a-vis the Arab world and other Muslim-majority societies.
Either Barack Obama is the most intelligent president that has ever entered the White House, or he is trying his luck in his first presidential months by walking into the dangerous minefield, the Middle East. So far, it seems that everything he has done has been successful in a region in which hatred of everything American has become deep rooted since the era of Lyndon Johnson until today.
When Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, described a Right-wing parliamentarian’s proposal that Jordan serve as a Palestinian state as “baseless hallucination”, it did little to quell concern here.
The proposal by Arieh Eldad, a member of the Knesset, last week sent a shudder through political circles and sparked calls for Jordan to abrogate its 1994 peace treaty with Israel.
US President Barack Obama’s Middle East visit is certain to stir interest in many quarters, and definitely much more of it in this conflict-ridden part of the world.
His much-anticipated speech in Cairo has been prefigured by laymen and pundits alike. The president, they say, will announce his administration’s idea on how the Arab-Israeli conflict can be managed to finally bring about peace in the region and put an end to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian problem.
United States President Barack Obama intends to give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu four to six weeks to provide an "updated position" regarding construction in West Bank settlements and the two-state principle.
Obama made a surprise appearance on Tuesday at a meeting Defense Minister Ehud Barak was holding in Washington, shortly before the U.S. leader was set to leave on a five-day trip to the Middle East.
For the first time in America's decades of jousting with Israel over West Bank settlements, an American president seems to have succeeded in isolating the settlements issue and disconnecting it from other elements of support for Israel.
Two weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's trip to Washington, on the eve of U.S. President Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, matters are becoming clearer. Israeli-American relations are entering their most serious tailspin in a decade - the decade since Netanyahu's previous term as prime minister.
With the public spat between Jerusalem and Washington over construction in the settlements intensifying daily, US President Barack Obama dropped in unannounced on Defense Minister Ehud Barak while he was meeting National Security Adviser James Jones in the White House on Tuesday.
Reports about growing tensions between Jerusalem and Washington over the revival of the peace process in the Middle East are being hailed by many Palestinians as a sign of US President Barack Obama's determination to change American policy toward Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who met with Obama in Washington last week, was quoted as saying he had emerged from the talks with a feeling that the new US administration was "extremely serious" about its intention to solve the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Illegal West Bank outposts are still up and running despite the American demand, but on Wednesday morning the security forces once again destroyed several improvised buildings in the Binyamin area.
Also Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces removed two roadblocks in the Ramallah area in a bid to ease the restrictions on the Palestinian population, and issued an order preventing left-wing activists from entering sensitive areas in checkpoints near Nablus.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/7315
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/7315
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/7315
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] http://www.americantaskforce.org/gala_2009
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/world/middleeast/03saudi.html?_r=3&ref=middleeast&pagewanted=print
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/world/middleeast/03prexy.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast
[8] http://jta.org/news/article/2009/06/02/1005572/groups-silent-in-face-of-obama-calls-for-settlement-freeze
[9] http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=123196&d=3&m=6&y=2009
[10] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/255/story/69296.html
[11] http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a15922/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
[12] http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/02/1005585/growth-and-narratives-natural-and-unnatural
[13] http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=102590
[14] http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=16944
[15] http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090603/FOREIGN/706029859/1135
[16] http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=17233
[17] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090067.html
[18] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090066.html
[19] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090035.html
[20] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1243872317944&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[21] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1243872319475&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[22] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3725514,00.html
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