We support peace with everyone, as long as they treat Israel as a useful ally rather than an easy target.
The Oslo negotiating rule that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” holds the solvable issues hostage to the unsolvable ones.
Experience teaches us that a failed attempt at peace can be worse than none.
Most people knew Shimon Peres, who died on September 28, as a president and prime minister with a 60-year career in public service. But to a handful of Israelis, he was also a neighbor.
Mahmoud Abbas assured Dutch Jews that he neither intends to abandon the Oslo Accords nor insist on the absorption of millions of Palestinians into Israel.
Headlines suggested the Palestinians were cutting security ties to Israel. That would be a huge story, but J.J. Goldberg explains why it’s not really what it seems.
We’re in a season of anniversaries and memories, many of them exceedingly melancholy: the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy that ignited the global financial crisis, September 15, 2008 (5 years ago); the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, September 11, 2001 (12 years ago); the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, 10 Tishri 1973 (40 years ago by the Hebrew lunar calendar). And, wandering only a little further afield, the outbreak of World War II, September 1, 1939 (74 years ago). And, on a more ambivalent note, the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, which was either a great hope that’s been dashed (as I believe) or a tragic error (as some of my friends and relations believe), September 13, 1993 (20 years ago).
Israel’s Jewish Home party, for those still trying to follow these things, is a new body that reunites the main elements of the old National Religious Party (NRP, Hebrew Mafdal ), which represented the Modern Orthodox / Religious Zionist constituency in the Knesset for a half-century.
A few months before the 20th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, and with a renewed effort about to be made to kick-start the peace talks − it’s useful to pause for a moment and examine what has happened in the West Bank these past two decades. A series of visits there reinforces the impression that, despite the good intentions of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the reality on the ground could well be the undoing of his new initiative, as happened with that of most of his predecessors since the mid-1990s.