Secretary of State John Kerry broke from his travel schedule for the second time in a week to rush back to the Middle East on Monday to try to salvage Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The U.S.-brokered negotiations faced a crisis at the weekend when Israel, saying it was seeking a Palestinian commitment to continue negotiations beyond…
A rabbi and an imam walk into a bookstore. That may sound like the first line of a joke, but these aren’t any old rabbi and imam, and they’re not joking around. Rabbi Marc Schneier, the prominent Hampton Synagogue founder and Imam Shamsi Ali, former leader of the Islamic Cultural Center, a major Manhattan mosque,…
Nobody, it’s fair to say, ever went broke betting against the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. You could put even money on a sudden meltdown, a theatrical explosion or a quiet fade-out. Just don’t bet on success. Nobody wins. Right now the heavy betting is on how soon the Kerry initiative will collapse and who’ll be blamed….
John Kerry said Israelis and Palestinian mistrust remained high and expressed frustration with the issue of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. The U.S. secretary of state fielded questions Wednesday and Thursday from congressional committees probing his department’s budget requests. “I do believe both parties are serious,” Kerry told the foreign operations subcommittee of the…
Something was off-kilter in Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 4 appearance before the annual Washington policy conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying powerhouse. After five years of raging that the Obama administration was too hard on Israel and too soft on Iran, the Israeli leader faced a record crowd of 14,000 activists ready to storm the barricades…
When peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians resumed last July, everyone assumed that the main sticking points would remain, as ever, security, borders, the status of Jerusalem and the plight of refugees. It looks like everyone was wrong. As the United States struggles to put together a framework deal that will allow negotiations to…
The tendentious exchange between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu these last few days underscores how differently each man views the third party in the on-again, off-again Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. That would be Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. So diametrically opposed are Obama and Netanyahu in their public assessment of the Palestinian leader that there…
The latest coalition of Israelis and Palestinians hoping to affect the settlement of the conflict is not your usual bunch of peace activists. They are wealthy businesspeople who work in a broad range of sectors, from construction to high-tech. They don’t need to struggle to be heard in the halls of power — they already…
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