Obama’s half step
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jordan Times
by George S. Hishmeh - (Opinion) May 27, 2011 - 12:00am

Why is Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Israeli prime minister, so ungracious to the United Nations, which helped create the state of Israel, and to Barack Obama, the American president who is eager to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and who declared that time may not be on the side of Israel, especially when the Arab Spring is still sweeping the Middle East?

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Mideast Quartet envoy Tony Blair: Obama anxious about Israel's fate
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Associated Press
May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

Middle East envoy Tony Blair says United States President Barack Obama launched his peace initiative because he's concerned about what might happen to Israel if Palestinians unilaterally declare statehood. Blair told an audience of business leaders gathered in central London on Thursday that Obama is "frankly worried about the position that Israel is in."

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Haim Saban: US-Israel relations are 'all good'
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jerusalem Post
May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

Israeli-born billionaire Haim Saban expressed optimism about Israel-American relations in an interview following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress on Tuesday. "I believe we're all good," Saban, Chairman of Univision Spanish Television and one of the Democratic Party's biggest donors, said. However, he added, "the US and Israel need to address points of difference between them in private, not in the UN or in front of cameras. The prime minister of Israel should not be speaking as he has in the Oval Office."

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US is complicit in Netanyahu's fiction
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The National
(Editorial) May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. The US Congress, apparently, will rise for an ovation every time the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves his fist at the podium. For what was billed as a new "vision" for the Middle East, Mr Netanyahu's speech on Tuesday night was depressingly, predictably pedantic. This Israeli administration has no plan for peace, only a series of refusals, and as the show in Congress demonstrated, US politicians are only too willing to follow him down the garden path.

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Israel's US supporters ignore truths of occupation in West Bank and Gaza
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The National
by Micah Zenko - (Analysis) May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

To an outsider, the title of the panel discussion seemed to sum up all that is wrong and depressing about the views of Palestinians that many Israelis and their American supporters hold. "Israel Improving Palestinian Lives," the conference programme read. The occasion for imparting the self-serving message - occupation is good - was the annual policy conference this week of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States.

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Road to Palestine becoming clearer
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jordan Times
by Daoud Kuttab - (Opinion) May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

The marathon of speeches that the US capital Washington witnessed last week cleared the view as to what is needed for Palestinians to reach their coveted independent state. Clearing the view, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that getting a state will be easy or attainable in the near future. People wanting to reach statehood need to be united, set clear and realistic goals as to its borders and have a blueprint for how to reach statehood and not just declare it.

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Bibi's love-fest
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Arab News
(Editorial) May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

If you stand on your head, the world around you is bound to look upside down. This is what Israel's leaders have been doing all these years. And this is what Benjamin Netanyahu did in his speeches before a rapturous and almost acquiescent audience at AIPAC conference on Monday and a joint session of US Congress on Tuesday. The thunderous applause that greeted Netanyahu at AIPAC is understandable. But the love-fest in Congress must have come as a rude shock to the rest of the world.

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What Obama did to Israel
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Washington Post
by Charles Krauthammer - (Opinion) May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.

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Netanyahu's Congress speech could set Middle East peace back another 18 years
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Christian Science Monitor
by Ibrahim Sharqieh - (Opinion) May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

Taking advantage of his New York accent while addressing Congress on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an eloquent speech offering only more obstacles to a lasting and just peace in the Middle East. He not only failed to provide a vision for the peace process in a changing Middle East, but also introduced new terms and phrases that will probably hamper any peace efforts in the future.

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Abbas: Netanyahu pushing back peace
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
May 26, 2011 - 12:00am

President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of pushing the peace process back further than ever, the official Palestinian news agency reported. Speaking at the opening of a meeting for the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, Abbas said Netanyahu “has shown us, in addition to the many mistakes and distortions, that he moved very far from the peace process.” He added: “There was nothing that we could build positively on. We look at his speech negatively.”

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