JERUSALEM - The Palestinian Authority has embarked on a new strategic drive to get renewed international recognition for the borders of the future Palestinian state. Last Thursday it gained backing for this approach from the Arab League. Going into a meeting with...
Demolitions Continue in East Jerusalem
OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM "Make sure your father gets this," the municipal inspector tells a 10-year-old boy at the gate of the concrete house in an alleyway in the al-Bustan quarter of Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood right under the shadow of the...
Mideast Peace Plan May Yet Survive New Twists
JERUSALEM -- U.S. President Obama's Middle East engagement policy reverses the unsuccessful policy of his predecessor, but the U.S. is again committing faux pas aplenty. Yet, for all the uncomplimentary ways in which the President's strategy is now viewed by many in...
Netanyahu Unsure How to Contain Gaza Fallout
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself embattled on several fronts as he tries so far unsuccessfully to ward off the enormous international pressure on Israel unleashed by the Goldstone report for its conduct of the war...
Another Nobel Message for Peace
JERUSALEM - In the week of Nobel Prize announcements, the most intriguing comment from the Middle East came not, as one might have expected, as a straight reaction to the shock of U.S. President Barack Obama being awarded this year's Peace Prize. It came from another...
Mideast ‘Peace Partners’ Finally Taking Off Their Gloves
JERUSALEM -- Amazingly, just when all four parties -- the U.S., its allies in the Arab world, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel -- seemed to have hit rock bottom in terms of the prospects of moving the region away from conflict and towards peace, all of a sudden...
Palestinian Voices of Gloom Get Louder
ABU DIS, Occupied West Bank - Three Israeli soldiers, automatic rifles slung across their shoulders, are questioning a group of Palestinian builders. The top floors being added to the concrete house that lies right alongside Israel's security wall, which divides off...
Jerusalem Palestinians Defining Their Own Future
EAST JERUSALEM -- Almost a year ago a barely noticed event took place in Sawarha, a Palestinian neighborhood in the Israeli-occupied part of the city. On that November day, Israeli Jerusalemites were voting in a new mayor and a new city council. On that same day, in...
US Pushing Beyond Settlement Freeze
JERUSALEM - "Nobody can usurp the right to determine the fate of the nation on their own not the Palestine Liberation Organization, nor anyone else. It is the will of the Palestinian people that must determine our future," declares Hamas political...
Israel Struggles to Wriggle Out of the Dock
JERUSALEM - The Goldstone Commission has delivered an unremittingly scathing report on Israel's 22-day war against Hamas in Gaza last December and January. But the outstanding question is what kind of action the report - legal and political - will yield. Will it, in...


