Throughout the Arab-Israeli peace process over the years two key elements have been constant and remain critical today as Israelis and Palestinians gather again around the same table. First, recognition that direct talks between Israel and credible Arab partners can achieve durable peace accords. Second, the critical role of the United States in facilitating the direct talks and sealing the peace deal.
From my latest column on Fox News.
Now, with active prodding by President Obama, including individual White House meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu in July, the Palestinian leader found that he could no longer remain unresponsive to the West’s entreaties to accept Israel’s continual overtures to return to direct talks, lest the Palestinians be perceived, correctly, as the obstacle to peace.Mahmoud Abbas, however, may be able to salvage his strategy. The one-year timeline the U.S. set to conclude direct talks creates an aura of expectation, but also conveys to Abbas that he has more time to be indecisive, with all the perils that entails.
From my latest op-ed on Fox News, here.
This article by Terry Glavin is crossposted from The Mark.
“It’s over.”
You could hear the heartbreak in his voice. The shattered dreams of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, the lost opportunities for genuine global solidarity with that gallant cause - it was all there in Yossi Klein Halevi’s voice.
After a week in which the Israeli government displayed its exquisite sense of timing, Vice-President Biden delivered a major speech at Tel Aviv University today. For those who don’t have time to watch the video, here are the bullet points.
This is a guest post by Petra Marquardt-Bigman.
On Thursday, December 10, President Obama will deliver the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture in Oslo. Prominent among the issues that the president may want to bring up is the failed quest for peace that began in Oslo back in 1993, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held a series of meetings in the Norwegian capital to formulate the accords that launched the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The feeling that it is time to give up on this process - and perhaps even on peace - is widespread, but claims that everything has been tried are not quite true.
Daniel Levy is the latest in a long line of misguided pundits who have drawn analogies between how the Northern Ireland conflict was solved and how the Israel-Palestine one might be. I’m not going to repeat why these analogies are false, useless and the product of wooly minds yearning to believe that all problems can be solved by decent chaps like themselves getting together over tea and digestive biscuits for a good chinwag; if you want have chapter and verse on the matter just look here.
Continue reading ‘The Northern Ireland Analogy Surfaces Yet Again’
Much is being made in the public prints about the two conditions set out by Netanyahu for Palestinian statehood in his recent speech at Bar Ilan University. One is a demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the other is that the future Palestinian state be demilitarized. I’ll leave the former for another day and say something about the question of what a demilitarized state might actually mean in practice.
Max Hastings doesn’t love Israel or Israelis anymore. That’s the general drift of this article in which starts by describing his coverage of the Yom Kippur War as a war correspondent.
This is the final of three guest posts by Henry McDonald, who has covered Irish politics for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, examining the flaws in the frequently-drawn comparison between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Islamist terror groups like Hamas. The posts are drawn from the final chapter of Henry’s recent book, Gunsmoke and Mirrors - How Sinn Fein Dressed up Defeat as Victory, available here. You can now read the entire piece or download a handy PDF version over on the main Z Word site.
The narrative of the Irish peace process suggests a leadership driven by entirely practical concerns, willing when necessary to dump old ideological certainties in the pursuit of limited goals. Dissidents jibe that Sinn Fein’s entry into and embrace of the parliament at Stormont would be akin in the Middle East to Hamas entering the Knesset. In that at least the dissidents have a point.
Continue reading ‘The Limits of the Northern Ireland Analogy (3)’
This is the second of three guest posts by Henry McDonald, who has covered Irish politics for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, examining the flaws in the frequently-drawn comparison between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Islamist terror groups like Hamas. The posts are drawn from the final chapter of Henry’s recent book, Gunsmoke and Mirrors - How Sinn Fein Dressed up Defeat as Victory, available here. You can read Henry’s earlier post here.
Irish republicans throughout the generations have never lacked physical courage in pursuit of their goals. They have however been subject to certain boundaries imposed by their own particular background and culture. Throughout the hunger strike the prisoners’ supporters insisted that their fast for political status was not slow drawn out suicide, which for centuries was regarded as a sin in Catholic theology. It seems puzzling none the less that a political movement that produced activists willing to starve themselves to death for a cause would regard still suicide bombing as anathema.
Continue reading ‘The Limits of the Northern Ireland Analogy (2)’
This is the first in a series of three guest posts by Henry McDonald, who has covered Irish politics for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, examining the flaws in the frequently-drawn comparison between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Islamist terror groups like Hamas. The posts are drawn from the final chapter of Henry’s recent book, Gunsmoke and Mirrors - How Sinn Fein Dressed up Defeat as Victory, available here.
It was arguably the most unlikeliest of places to illuminate the chasm between Irish republican and Islamist terrorism. The ‘Star Letter’ of the January 2008 edition of the British toilet humour magazine/comic ‘Viz’ counterposed the terrorism of the IRA and Al Qaeda.
Continue reading ‘The Limits of the Northern Ireland Analogy (1)’
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