Yesterday the U.N. Security Council convened on “the Palestinian question.” This is a regular, and regularly absurd, occurrence. The absurdity reached a new level, however, with a theatrical display of pique by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
Three Trump administration officials will soon travel to the Middle East to try brokering peace between Israel and Palestine, the White House announced Friday.
Nathan Thrall is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, where he focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, Thrall has also written for Commentary, which is to say he’s a writer who specializes in…
Ramallah
In a speech to the European Parliament Thursday, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas accused rabbis of "demanding" that the Israeli government poison Palestinian water.
For the moment, the Gaza war of 2014 is over. Anyone trying now to figure out who won and who lost should recall the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Then, Israelis had a great sense of letdown because they had not “won.” They had not destroyed Hezbollah, and the organization loudly claimed a…
Jackson Diehl, writing in the Washington Post:
In President Obama's blindside of an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, finely timed for Prime Minister Netanyahu's arrival in Washington and the opening of the AIPAC conference, Obama made the following, revealing remark, "I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize…
Palestinians and Israelis are meeting in Washington to talk about a peace plan with Secretary of State John Kerry. But the Palestinians leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is in Egypt where he's revealed his thinking on the issue.
John Kerry tried to get the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to buck-up and smile. But he wasn't successful as he tries to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
At a press conference today in Ramallah, President Barack Obama addressed the assembled journalists while standing under a Yasser Arafat banner:
On September 27, the chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas (who is also president of the Palestinian Authority and chairman of the Fatah Party) spoke to the U.N. General Assembly.
The belief that an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is inches away or perhaps only one long negotiating session away never dies. Not even 64 years after the birth of the state of Israel and 45 years after Israel’s conquest of Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem in 1967.
The situation of the Palestinian Authority is grim. Its diplomatic offensive against Israel in the United Nations did not win it statehood, there are no serious negotiations with Israel because the PA refuses them, Hamas controls Gaza, and Palestinian elections keep getting postponed despite the…
The chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas (who is also president of the Palestinian Authority), has drafted a letter to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for delivery this week. What is apparently the current state of the draft is published by Times of Israel, a terrific new web site about…
Mohammed Dahlan, the former security official for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the Gaza Strip, is in a lot of trouble. On January 9, at the behest of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Jordan’s Central Bank reportedly seized Dahlan’s assets, only days after Palestinian Authority…
Some have praised President Obama’s September 20 speech at the U.N. as his most rousing defense of Israel to date. Perhaps so—though that’s not saying much. It rather seems to us that the president merits some credit—but only some—for a growing self-awareness, both of his own limits and of the…
PLO chair Mahmoud Abbas released the prepared text of his U.N. remarks with a curious logo on the top right hand side of the page:
Steve Hayes, with Juan Williams and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:
London—Several days of Middle East discussions in London have not contributed to any sense of optimism about the near, or for that matter medium-range, future on the Israeli-Palestinian front. It did not appear to the officials with whom I spoke that PA president Mahmoud Abbas can be persuaded to…
With the advent of the Arab Spring, several former Arab tyrannies (Egypt, Tunisia, now Libya, perhaps Syria next) have thrown off dictators and are, or will be, moving toward elections. And in Jordan and Morocco, the kings have announced new constitutional arrangements that move powers to elected…
The week of dueling speeches by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu was great political drama, but a key character was missing from the scene: Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. While Abbas was absent, it was in fact his creation on April 27 of a unity government with the…
The Palestinians zealously celebrated last week’s unity deal between Hamas and Fatah. Young men in both the West Bank and Gaza cruised around in their cars, honking and flashing the victory sign out of their windows. There was dancing, singing, and firecrackers. Indeed, the civil war between the…
The agreement between Fatah and Hamas may not last very long. The last agreement, in 2007, failed and led to increased violence between the two groups—and finally to Hamas’s coup in Gaza. Hamas and Fatah militants have been killing each other for decades and reconciliation seems more a ploy for…