Israeli and Palestinian leaders were unwilling to make the “gut-wrenching” compromises needed for peace, a top U.S. official said on Thursday, faulting both sides for the collapse of talks last month. Offering his first public account of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed, nine-month effort to strike a peace deal by April 29, U.S….
Israel’s national security adviser said in a letter sent to ambassadors to Israel from around the world that the Palestinians had been planning to foil the peace process long before the breakdown occurred. National Security Adviser Joseph Cohen attached to the letter, dated April 22, a document that Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat submitted to…
(JTA) — Now that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have screeched to a halt, U.S. officials are apportioning blame, and a big share is going to Israel. In an interview with Nahum Barnea, a veteran diplomatic affairs writer for the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, anonymous members of the U.S. negotiating team said Israel’s settlement activity was a principal…
Martin Indyk, U.S. special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, reportedly will resign from his position following the recent failure of the U.S.-backed talks. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported Sunday that Indyk may resign in light of President Obama’s intention to suspend U.S. involvement in seeking a negotiated end to the conflict, citing unnamed Israeli…
We are not, of course, John Kerry. We have not, in the past nine months, met 34 times with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and reportedly twice that many times with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, staking so much personal energy to achieve the two-state solution that these men say they want but are unwilling to…
(Reuters) — To both critics and supporters, it was “classic” John Kerry. A day before the formal end of Kerry’s quixotic, nine-month effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, the Secretary of State was surreptitiously taped making a comment that provoked a political firestorm in Washington. In a closed meeting with foreign policy experts, Kerry…
With even the illusion of a peace process now dead, experts’ predictions of what will fill the vacuum range from a new intifada to continued peace and prosperity for Israel. Israel is, in other words, now on untested ground, and what the future holds is anyone’s guess. Still, some of those guessing about the new…
John Kerry defended his Israel record, but also agreed that his use of the word “apartheid” to describe the dangers of a failed peace process was not appropriate in a U.S. context. “I have been around long enough to also know the power of words to create a misimpression, even when unintentional, and if I…
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