Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are likely to begin in the near future. The international community under the conductor’s wand of the Obama Administration has applied considerable pressure to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to withdraw from all of his demands for setting the conditions for his participation in the negotiations.
Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are likely to resume in the near future. Both sides will reluctantly pay a price to enter the room even though neither side is too anxious to actually be there.
Not one country in the world recognizes our capital, Jerusalem, as the capital of Israel. Even the United States footnotes the following on the State Department Web page: Israel proclaimed Jerusalem as its capital in 1950. The US, like nearly all other countries, maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv. UN Security Council Resolution 478 declared the 1980 Jerusalem Law that declared Jerusalem to be Israel’s “eternal and indivisible” capital null and void, affirming that it was a violation of international law.
For the past two weeks I have traveled cross-country in the US speaking in synagogues, churches, mosques and universities. My message to my audiences has been one of hope. I have met Jewish communities in deep division. I have found communities (Jews and non-Jews) in deep conflict between those who define themselves as “pro-Israeli” and those who are “pro-Palestinian.” Some of the organizers who brought me to speak used my presence to enable these two groups to speak to each other, because the divide over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has removed civility from their ability to communicate.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has issued a presidential decree that elections will be held in January. This followed his decision to sign the Egyptian plan for intra-Palestinian reconciliation, knowing that Hamas would refuse to sign.
Abbas is demonstrating decisive leadership. After 20 years, he convened the Fatah conference that even Yasser Arafat feared would fragment the movement and destroy the struggle for national liberation. The conference ended in relative unity behind Abbas. With the exception of the blunder – from the Palestinian point of view – of briefly withdrawing the Goldstone report from the UN Human Rights Council, Abbas’s popularity is higher than that of any other Palestinian personality.
Writing this week in the Jerusalem Post, Gershon Baskin, co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, disclosed that for more than two years he had been in contact with a “senior Hamas personality” in Europe over the release of Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas and held in Gaza since 2006. The Israeli government knew of those contacts and gave him permission to continue, Baskin says.
The current water crisis is extremely serious. Years of mismanagement and irresponsible water policies are now being investigated by the state comptroller. This is not the first time that the water sector is under the scrutiny of a public investigatory committee. In June 2001 the Knesset conducted a similar investigation and reported on serious dysfunctionality, but it seems that very little has changed since then.
The Israeli domestic political scene is looking more and more chaotic. The decision to hold early elections on February 10 has sent politicians and would-be politicians into a frenzy to find their political home and to try to guarantee themselves a seat among the 120 available in the Knesset. Old names are popping up and [...]
