“There’s no greater cliché,” I wrote in this column a month ago, “than the one that keeps insisting that the settlements are an obstacle to peace. They may have been that once, when they were few and sparsely populated enough to be removed. Now that they’ve long passed that point, any peace agreement will have…
Late on the night of September 13, 1993 — the day the Oslo Accords were signed on the South Lawn at the White House — I was making my way to the door of a hotel suite where a dozen American Jews were talking with Yasser Arafat, when a young man in Arafat’s security entourage…
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a rare if symbolic concession to Israel on Thursday, saying he had no permanent claim on the town from which he was driven as a child during the 1948 war of the Jewish state’s founding. Among several disputes deadlocking Middle East peace talks has been the Palestinians’ demand that as…
In comments that may stir Israel’s election campaign, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday that he and Ehud Olmert were “two months” away from a peace deal before Olmert had to resign as Israeli prime minister. With Olmert lately cleared of several graft charges and considering a challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at…
President Obama seems to be perfecting the art of drop-in diplomacy, at least when it comes to Jewish and Israeli leaders. Obama, in recent weeks, took the liberty of dropping into the meetings White House officials held with Jewish Conservative and Orthodox leaders. Then last Thursday he popped into a meeting National Security Adviser Tom…
A leading Palestinian negotiator says that for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state would “adversely impact the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Not at all, say Yosef Kuperwasser, director general of Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs and Shalom Lipner, special coordinator for public diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office. This, they…
Once seen as heresy, proposals for bypassing the Middle East peace process — or even jettisoning a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are increasingly making their way into mainstream discourse while the peace process itself remains mired in a deep freeze. The spectrum of ideas now being voiced in prominent and respected political…
I’m not one for political conventions. Good policy is subtle, but effective politics is broad — and I, for one, prefer the former. When friends of mine returned from the AIPAC conference in early March, inspired by (in the words of one of them) “thousands of Jews all united by a love of Israel,” I…
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