Category Archives: West Bank

Migron: Deal or no deal?

Posted on February 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

Reuters has a good feature story today on the Israeli settlement of Migron. The showdown over the fate of this so-called illegal outpost near the West Bank city of Ramallah is a big deal for the settlers, their Israeli opponents, the Palestinians and, potentially, peace process itself (or at least for the hopes of bringing something like a peace process back to life).

Here’s the radio piece about Migron we put on the air at the end of last month. What’s still not clear is how the Netanyahu government is going to come down on this thing. As the Reuters story explains, Bibi is stuck between the Israeli Supreme Court and the pro-settlement wing of his own party. The Obama administration would say there is a great deal at stake for the US here as well. But an election year is no time to talk about all that.

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Posted in BBC News, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, West Bank

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Peace talks are dead. Probably. Yet Again.

Posted on January 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

Israel is rounding up Hamas people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Nobody gave the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation effort much of a chance of actually working. And few would have bet real money that the Palestinians would manage to pull off real elections in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem later this year. But the Israelis might be thinking, let’s not take any chances. These arrests might also be a way to add pressure on Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to stick with embryonic – and also most probably doomed – peace talks with Israel.

 

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Posted in Israel, Jordan, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, West Bank

The will of the Egyptian revolution

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Speaking in Cairo today, the leader and co-founder of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, who is from the Gaza Strip, suggested that today’s reconciliation agreement with Fatah would succeed where past attempts had failed because in part the deal represented the “will of the revolution (in Egypt).”

Zahar was asked if Hamas will maintain a ceasefire with Israel. He said that is up to the Israelis. And he repeated the Hamas line that blames Israel for the violence, saying that Hamas will hold its fire as long as Israel refrains from attacking Gaza or the West Bank.

As for recognizing the state of Israel, Zahar ruled that out. He said Hamas could never recognize Israel because such a move would undermine the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

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Posted in BBC News, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, West Bank

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Nevermind the “diplomatic tsunami”

Posted on April 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

The Obama administration does not want to put forward its own plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It doesn’t want the Europeans to present their own ideas for doing so. Meanwhile, this September 2011 deadline looms, when the Palestinians aim to win recognition as a state at the United Nations.

Israel’s prime minister is sending signals that he’s thinking about doing something, but nothing that would appear to satisfy the Palestinians, Europe or the US administration. Benjamin Netanyahu is said to be mulling over three options. The Ha’aretz kicker quotes an anonymous source saying that Netanyahu views the problem as a strategic one.

“Many near Netanyahu, especially some of the advisers in his bureau, are not helping him to take the right decisions. They are convincing him there is no need to take substantive moves, and that things will be fine.”

The source added: “Netanyahu is not willing to negotiate on 1967 borders with exchange of territory, and in the end he will be faced with a UN decision on a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, without territorial exchanges.”

 

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Posted in BBC News, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, West Bank

Egypt’s crisis could be Israel’s gain

Posted on February 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

Daniel Levy has a counter-intuitive take on how changes in Egypt might present an opportunity for Israel. He points out that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty was not very popular with Egyptians for some good reasons. The 1978 agreement, for example, was supposed put Israel and the Palestinians on track to resolve their conflict in five years. So much for that. What has remained in place all these years, Levy explains, is a chilly peace between Israel and an Egyptian dictator that made it unnecessary for the two governments to deal with their differences in ways that Arabs could support. That’s what could – and should, Levy argues – change in the future.

While Israeli-Egyptian peace has often been described as a cold peace, it could perhaps be more accurately framed as a pyramid peace – in which only the very tips of the respective societies met and forged narrow common interests. It is high time to reverse that equation and build a democratic peace between the bases of those pyramids.

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Posted in BBC News, Egypt, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, West Bank

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An evil wave

Posted on January 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

If you think political rhetoric has gotten overheated in the US, check out Israel. Just in the last couple of days, the foreign minister has accused a whole host of Israeli NGOs of supporting terrorist groups, trying to undermine the Israeli military and endangering the Jewish State. The leader of the opposition responded by saying there’s an “evil wave” sweeping Israel under the current leadership. Keep in mind, this is Jewish Israelis talking about Jewish Israelis.

My radio story that aired on Friday is related to the aforementioned wave.

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Posted in BBC News, Israel, Middle East, PRI's The World, West Bank

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Not knowing the enemy

Posted on December 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Time correspondent Karl Vick has a great story about how Israel’s separation barrier along the border with the West Bank has had an impact on the way young Palestinians view Israelis. These views are not based on firsthand experience, because most Palestinians never go to Israel or meet Israelis face-to-face. That knowledge vacuum is fertile ground for attitudes that are not very conducive to peaceful coexistence. Vick mentions Israeli activists who’ve been smuggling Palestinians across the barrier, into Israel, to give them some experience with the people and place. Interestingly, this is precisely the kind of thing that an Israeli army officer told me needs to happen on a large scale. He said Israeli Jews need to start filling buses with Palestinian kids in the West Bank and taking them on field trips into Israel to the beach, the zoo, the mall, and so on. The goal, he said, was to counteract the kind of rejectionism and prejudice that Vick writes about.

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Posted in BBC News, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, West Bank

Jewish Jericho

Posted on December 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

Boaz Barad (above, wearing skullcap and talking on mobile phone), along with a few other 20-something Israelis got up at the crack of dawn one morning last week and climbed onto a bus heading into a Palestinian-controlled West Bank city so they could pray in an empty basement.

“We believe in our religion that the whole land of Israel is Jewish land,” Barad told me. “So, if we get a chance to go into places that aren’t necessarily under Jewish authority right now, like Jericho,” he explained, “we do that, because we show the world, the Arabs, whoever looks – God above – that we still care about the holy land.”

What allows Barad  and his fellow pilgrims to visit an ancient synagogue in the middle of Jericho without making a “mess,” as he puts it, is careful coordination between the Israeli military and Palestinian security forces. Once a month, Israeli soldiers in armored vehicles escort Jewish pilgrims through a Palestinian-run checkpoint and into Jericho, to the Shalom Al Israel synagogue, which translates as “Peace Upon Israel.” I went along on one of these visits last week. My radio story goes on the air today and goes online soon after 5 PM (EST).

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Posted in Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, Uncategorized, West Bank

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Kerry on Syria, Golan, Hamas and Jerusalem

Posted on November 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

The summary of John Kerry’s meeting with the Qatari amir back in February reflects a “yes we can” attitude from the Obama administration on the Middle East. Kerry asked several questions about Hamas. He seemed to hold out hope that Syria could be brought around if Israel gave back the Golan Heights. And then, Kerry dropped this line:

Yasser Arafat went from living as a terrorist in Tunisia to signing an agreement with Israel on the White House lawn. The transformation of Arafat is an example of how actors in the region need to take risks if we are to move forward in advancing regional peace.

Kerry also said he understands the Palestinian insistence on getting a capital in East Jerusalem and on controlling the Al Aqsa mosque (which, by the way, Jews consider to be sitting on the holiest site on earth, the Temple Mount). This stuff will no doubt provide fuel to Israelis on the right who already distrust Barack Obama. But the question is, how much of the Obama administration’s “can-do” attitude remains at the end of 2010, when it’s got so little progress to show for its efforts?

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Posted in BBC News, Gaza, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, Religion, Syria, West Bank

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Who cares about peace in the Middle East?

Posted on November 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Everybody, really. Which seems like a no-brainer. But with the consensus being what it is right now, namely that Barack Obama has the same chance of finally delivering a two-state solution on the Israel-Palestinian conflict (and by extension, vastly improving the broader Arab-Israeli stalemate) as Sarah Palin has of securing an endorsement from Noam Chomsky, it is worth pointing out why most of the major players actually might want the peace process to succeed. For the Obama adminisration, as Ethan Bronner explains, there are big strategic gains at stake. And the same goes for the Israelis and Palestinian Authority, as Noah Feldman writes.

The current hang up, however, has everything to do with haggling between the US and Israel over, yes you guessed it, Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Feldman points out that Hezbollah is major wild card in all this. But here’s another place where things could spin out of control, and quick.

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Posted in BBC News, Gaza, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, PRI's The World, Syria, West Bank

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