Israeli diplomats too diplomatic, FM says
Sun Jan 3, 5:02 pm ET
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel's outspoken foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Jewish state's ambassadors to stop grovelling and defend its national honour, an official at his ministry said on Sunday.I have seen that some ambassadors identify themselves with the other side to such an extent that they are all the time trying to justify and explain, the ultra-nationalist thundered during a closed meeting with some 150 envoys at the foreign ministry last week, the official said on condition of anonymity.Terms like national honour have value in the Middle East, he said as his audience listened in stunned silence.There must not be an attitude of obsequiousness and self-deprecation, and the need to always justify the other side. This is the wrong approach, said the Soviet-born Lieberman in comments that were first reported by the liberal Haaretz daily.The era of grovelling is over, he concluded. We must be on good terms and respect the host nations, but we will not tolerate insults and challenges.We will not turn the other cheek. There will be a response to everything.
The leader of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party is known for controversial statements, including once saying as an MP that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could go to hell if he continued to decline to visit the Jewish state.As a result, Israel's top diplomat is currently not welcome in Egypt, one of only two Arab countries with which the Jewish state has diplomatic relations.His blunt comments, particularly regarding Israel's Arab minority, have earned him a reputation as a needed firm hand among admirers and as a racist bully among critics.
Hamas leader claims progress in Palestinian talks By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer – Sun Jan 3, 10:51 am ET
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – The leader of Hamas said Sunday that significant progress has been made in Egyptian-sponsored talks aimed at reconciling his militant Palestinian group with the rival Fatah movement.The two main Palestinian factions have been bitterly divided since Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, leaving Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah in control only of the West Bank.The split has complicated peace efforts with Israel as well as reconstruction of the impoverished and war-damaged Gaza Strip. Efforts to bring them together in a power-sharing arrangement failed and the Egyptian-mediated talks are now aimed at ending the division by holding new Palestinian elections.Khaled Mashaal, who is based in Damascus, Syria, said Hamas still has reservations over the latest Egyptian proposal, which calls for presidential and legislative elections in the first half of this year as well as a reorganization of the security forces under Abbas' authority. He did not elaborate.Hamas and seven other radical, Damascus-based Palestinian factions have rejected the proposal because it does not state that Palestinians have the right to keep fighting Israel. Fatah, which favors negotiations with Israel, has accepted the Egyptian plan.We have made big strides in the Palestinian-Palestinian negotiations and talks that have taken place in Cairo, Mashaal said.We are in the final stages.The problem is the completion of the (Egyptian) paper ... so it can satisfy everybody's demands, Mashaal said during a visit to Saudi Arabia.The kingdom sponsored a unity agreement between the two factions in February 2007. But that effort fell apart in bickering over implementation, and in June of that year Hamas ousted its rivals from Gaza in a five-day civil war.
The Hamas leader spoke after talks with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal. A week earlier Abbas visited for the kingdom talks with King Abdullah.Mashaal also blamed Israel for a delay in indirect negotiations to exchange hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli Sgt. Gilad Schalit, who was captured by Palestinian militants in 2006.We are still following the negotiations through the German mediator, he said.The Israeli position keeps changing. They take one step forward and two back.
Radical Jewish sect spends Sabbath in Gaza
Sat Jan 2, 2:40 pm ET
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Several members of an anti-Zionist Jewish sect have spent the Jewish Sabbath in Gaza with some of Israel's most bitter enemies, the militant Islamic group Hamas.Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a leader of the radical Neturei Karta, said Saturday that his group was in Gaza to show support for the Palestinian people.The sect decries Israel's existence because they believe Jews must live in exile without a country of their own until the coming of the Messiah.Neturei Karta traditionally supports Israel's enemies — most notably Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom members hugged at a Holocaust denial conference in 2006.They are estimated to have up to a few thousand followers and are mostly shunned by mainstream Judaism.
IF ISRAEL SO CALLED ACTS LIKE SPOILT CHILDREN,ARABS ,MUSLIMS ACT LIKE THE WORLDS CONTROL FREAKS TO BLEND IN COMPLETELY WITH THE NEW WORLD ORDER NUT CONTROL FREAKS.
Israel acts like the world's spoilt child: Saudi Arabia
Sat Jan 2, 12:14 pm ET
RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia said on Saturday said Israel was the world's spoilt child" and got away with what Riyadh said were violations of international law and war crimes without punishment. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal also urged countries to adopt a firm and serious stance to put an end to the policy of settlements in occupied Palestinian territories and in Jerusalem.Not reaching solutions (for the Middle East conflict) is (the result of) the special treatment Israel gets, he said at a news conference with visiting Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu.When they violate international law, other countries get punished but not Israel ... Israel has become like the spoilt child of the international community.
It (Israel) gets away with anything it does without accountability or punishment, he added.Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is backed by Riyadh, has insisted Israel freeze Jewish settlement building before peace talks for a Palestinian state in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war resume. He has rejected a temporary halt to construction ordered by Netanyahu as insufficient.Israel announced on Monday plans to build nearly 700 new Jewish homes in areas of the occupied West Bank it considers part of Jerusalem, prompting strong U.S. criticism implying they could undermine peace talks.Prince Saud said the policy of expanding settlements was a source of deep concern and condemnation for both us and the international community.
This policy casts doubts on the seriousness of (Israel's) commitment to the peace process,Prince Saud said.Saudi Arabia floated in 2002 an Arab peace plan that calls for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and a fair solution to the crisis of Palestinian refugees in exchange for normalized ties with the Arab world.(Reporting by Souhail Karam)
Israeli warplanes hit Gaza after rocket attack
Sat Jan 2, 2:26 am ET
GAZA CITY (AFP) – Israeli aircraft attacked at least four targets in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip early on Saturday, wounding two people in retaliation for a rocket strike on Israel, officials said.Two explosions were heard in Gaza City, one north of the city and one in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis. Palestinian medics and witnesses said all the missiles appeared to land in open fields.Two people, including a child, were lightly wounded, medics said.An Israeli military spokesman said warplanes had attacked two tunnels militants were digging in the direction of Israel, apparently to infiltrate the country and carry out attacks.Israel routinely retaliates after rocket attacks from Gaza, and the latest air strikes came after a rocket hit the southern town of Netivot on Thursday without causing casualties.We will not tolerate any attempt to disrupt the calm in Israel's southern communities, the spokesman said.
It marked the latest violence along Gaza's border, which has been mostly quiet since a war Israel launched on the Islamist Hamas in Gaza on December 27, 2008 in response to rocket fire ended with mutual ceasefires on January 18.The ceasefires have largely held, despite violations by both sides.
Peacemaking in the Mideast: Obama's Year of Missteps By MASSIMO CALABRESI / WASHINGTON – Fri Jan 1, 2:40 pm ET
It has taken President Obama just 10 months to achieve something each of his immediate predecessors delivered in their final year in office: failure in the Middle East peace process. Riding a wave of optimism in January, the President on his second day in office named retired Senator George Mitchell as his Middle East special envoy, tasked with kick-starting the dormant negotiations over a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite his best intentions, Mitchell's - and Obama's - efforts have managed only to undermine peace advocates on all sides and have pushed hopes for a final agreement into the distant future. The President now faces tough choices over how to proceed.(See pictures of Israeli soldiers sweeping into Gaza.)Obama distinguished himself from his predecessors by attacking the problem early; Bill Clinton and George W. Bush waited until their lame-duck years to do so. Moreover, Obama faced perhaps the worst Middle East peacemaking environment inherited by any President in decades. He took office as Israel was wrapping up its costly and controversial offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, an operation that produced accusations of war crimes by a U.N. human-rights investigation and galvanized anti-Israel sentiment around the world. Within weeks, Israel's electorate had installed a right-wing governing coalition beholden to parties opposed to a Palestinian state and committed to expanding Israeli settlements on territories captured in 1967. On the Palestinian side, he faced an enfeebled and fractured leadership, further burdened by rising expectations owing to a perception that Obama would be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Obama quickly exacerbated these problems with a series of tactical mistakes. He drew a line in the sand over Israeli settlements, insisting that all construction outside Israel's 1967 borders stop in order to revive negotiations. Not only did this set a politically unachievable goal for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it meant that anything short of a full freeze would look like a loss for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was already politically damaged by the Gaza war; anything less than full Israeli compliance - particularly in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians see as the capital of their future state - became politically intolerable for him, and he refused to negotiate until Israel complied with Obama's demand. Washington then made matters worse by pressuring a reluctant Abbas to visit the U.N. General Assembly in New York for a handshake photo opportunity with Obama and Netanyahu, then sending him home with no tangible wins. By the fall, Abbas was talking of resigning.Through either clumsiness or misunderstanding or outright error, they hurt him to the extent that he felt he had to step down, says Robert Malley, a former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator now with the International Crisis Group. By year's end, the process remained in a stalemate: Israel had offered a partial settlement freeze but not enough to get the Palestinians back to the table. And most of the negotiating action was going on via back channels between Israel and Hamas, the radical rulers of Gaza, over an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. (If Hamas succeeds in freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners by playing hardball with the Israelis, a Shalit deal would further undermine Abbas in the eyes of his own people.) (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.)
The Administration's failures have led many to urge scrapping the entire approach and trying something new. Some are pushing for the U.S. to deal separately with Israel and the Palestinians and try to forge a deal in the role of intermediary. The problem with that approach is that failure would be even more costly, since the U.S. would own the process, and would leave nowhere to go. Others say the U.S. should walk away and let the parties go to the table themselves when they are ready to talk - an approach reminiscent of James Baker, but no more likely to succeed now than it did in the early 1990s.Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is emphasizing a bottom-up approach that focuses on creating the infrastructure of Palestinian statehood through economic development and empowering security and administrative structures. Some Western observers even argue that any final-status talks should be abandoned for now to concentrate on backing Fayyad's efforts. But Palestinians are unlikely to remain quiescent without some hope for early statehood. (Fayyad is an independent, rather than a member of President Abbas' Fatah movement, and is not representative of a significant political base.) European Union leaders are taking Fayyad's idea further, pressing in the direction of some form of international recognition of Palestinian claims to a state based on the 1967 borders:We are all in the international community defending the two-state solution, said Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos, whose country on Dec. 18 inherited the E.U. presidency for next year.Why should we wait for a Palestinian state? We have Israel as a state. We want its neighbor, the Palestinians, to have the same status.Moratinos emphasized that this should be achieved through negotiation. But his statement, taken together with a recent E.U. declaration urging negotiation to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states - an idea that Netanyahu refuses to even discuss - signals growing European impatience with Israel.
For now, though, the Administration is sticking with its approach of pushing for direct talks on a two-state solution, hoping that continued pressure will bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the table. If negotiations can be restarted, Washington is confident of making progress. If not, it will face the same kind of full-scale policy review that it undertook on Afghanistan and Iran - only much later, and after much more damage to the process.
