In reviewing more than six decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a cost/benefit analysis of the two sides' reliance on violence produces a very mixed record. Whereas Israel has generally triumphed in its conventional wars against neighboring Arab (...)
In recent weeks and months, we have confronted a growing number of worrisome possible precursors of a new intifada or some similar round of violence on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. While the previous two intifadas were seemingly triggered by (...)
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process was dead well before the Arab revolutionary wave began a little over a year ago. Nor does it appear likely that the Arab revolutions, in and of themselves, will catalyze its revival. Still, they have affected (...)
Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is currently managing two very different and in many ways contradictory negotiating tracks. Neither has produced any sort of substantive success thus far. If one does produce a breakthrough, (...)
The year 2012 will almost certainly not witness any progress toward agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. We'll be lucky if there is no serious backsliding in the form of violence or formal withdrawal from negotiating frameworks. Meanwhile, (...)
The notion of integrating Hamas, and with it the Gaza Strip, into a Palestinian unity government reflects the primary trend that has thus far defined the Arab revolutionary wave: Arab Islamist movements are entering government. In this sense, Hamas' (...)
Revelations concerning the Palestinian financial crisis of recent weeks touch upon three issues. The most obvious one is the seeming inability of the Palestinian Authority under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to accumulate sufficient reserves to (...)
Last week, representatives of the Quartet met with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and declared they had extracted a commitment from both sides to submit their final status negotiating positions on borders and security within three months. Chief (...)
The best hint the Middle East could provide as to the ramifications of last week's prisoner exchange for the overall conflict came two days after the exchange itself. It was the dramatic death of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. The pace of events in the (...)
Last week, we heard three dramatic speeches at the United Nations General Assembly that were ostensibly intended to offer new ideas for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. They did not.
United States President Barack Obama made an (...)
Egypt escalated its involvement in the Israel-Gaza conflict following the August 18 attack from Sinai against Israelis near Eilat, which caused Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian casualties. Cairo demanded (and got) an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, clamped (...)
September 20 is the day the PLO has targeted for submitting to the United Nations its request for state recognition. It is still not clear how that request will be worded and whether it will be submitted first to the Security Council or directly to (...)
Successive Israeli governments since those of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have made nearly every mistake possible in creating the West Bank security fence. Yet the fence has not only served its original security purpose well; it has also delineated (...)
The Quartet failed to find a formula for restarting the peace process because it is either unable or unwilling to recognize that both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships are uninterested right now. It failed because all four of its component (...)
The Palestine Liberation Organization has now officially decided to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
Leaving aside speculation as to whether this really will happen in September and what the (...)
President Barack Obama's two recent speeches on the Middle East, at the State Department and the AIPAC conference, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's response and related rhetoric, indicate that neither really understands that September at the (...)
The Fatah-Hamas reconciliation announced last week is yet another by-product of the revolutionary wave sweeping the Arab world. As such, it is not a finished product: it is subject to change and evolution. Moreover, in the particular case of the (...)
There is a certain formalistic justification in Israel's standoffish attitude toward the Arab Peace Initiative. After all, the API was never seriously "marketed" to Israel. The concluding paragraph of the API asks every relevant institution in the (...)
The question why there is no peace progress offers a good opportunity to review the obstacles to peace that have emerged in the course of the past two and a half years. During that time, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President (...)
"I'll speak in vague sentences," stated Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last week at a meeting in Ramallah when asked to discuss Palestinian plans for the period beginning September 2011. That is when the United Nations General Assembly (...)
The brutal murder some 10 days ago of five members of an Israeli family in the settlement of Itamar, presumably by Palestinian terrorists, has to be seen in several contexts. They seemingly form concentric circles of ramifications, beginning with (...)
Because the events in Egypt continue to fall into the category of "revolutionary situation", we know they will affect Israeli-Palestinian relations, but we do not yet know in what way. We can only speculate. This requires caution, but is (...)
The demand to submit an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement to a popular referendum is not exclusive to either side. Last November, the Israeli Knesset passed a law mandating a referendum under certain circumstances. Hamas leaders have from time to (...)
Wikileaks leak of December 2011: Secret cable from DCM, US Embassy Tel Aviv, to deputy under secretary of state for Middle East affairs, State Department, Washington. Dec. 28, 2010: I exploited the Christmas/New Years lull here at the embassy, where (...)
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's "Jewish state" or "nation state of the Jewish people" demand is popular with the Israeli public. The right wing likes it because it is patriotic and seemingly "anti-Arab". The left and center cannot easily (...)