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An important question needs to be asked: is the Likud party really interested in peace?
When both sides have a claim to this small but strategically significant piece of land, the way to resolve the issue should be through negotiations between the parties, just as the EU is calling for. Why then has the EU prejudged the outcome of those negotiations by taking the Palestinian side of the argument?
The United Nations has voted in favour of upgrading the status of Palestine from entity to non member state in spite of opposition from the US and Isr...
United Nations states are set to vote on Palestinian statehood at the General Assembly on Thursday, as Israeli ministers poured scorn on the move, cal...
We now need to do whatever it takes to break the cycle of despair and empower those who would eschew conflict and take risks for peace. President Bill Clinton as a new special envoy to the region? Bring it on. And even the Palestinian UN bid, viewed with great suspicion by many supporters of Israel. Labour is backing the bid in the hope it will help restart negotiations.
Bolder thinking is needed on all sides if deaths in Gaza are going to produce something positive, and not just another nail in the coffin of the two-state solution.
If Obama doesn't want to go down in history as the American President who missed the last chance for a two state solution he must not only act now to stop the bloodshed but devote serious American engagement to getting peace talks going again. He may fail, as others have before him (although the Arab Spring has changed the Middle East dynamic and should help focus Israeli minds), but at least he will have tried.
The EU spends hundreds of millions of euros in aid each year to support Palestinian state building but then undermines this assistance by trading with illegal settlements, thus contributing to their viability and expansion.
In the short term aid is crucial to address the urgent needs of Palestinians living in poverty. However, it is essential to tackle the root causes of the problem and challenge the structures that keep people trapped in poverty and create the need for aid in the first place. This requires strong political will and conviction.
The two-state compromise has not run out of time, the status quo of conflict management has. As true urgency and pressure returns alongside this new uprising, we should not see the removal of options, but the death of the status quo.
Today will mark another line in the sand in the morbid negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Whether or not this is the date that the quartet has stated its deadline to get each side's documents presented to each other is currently under dispute by the sides themselves.
I read with interest Dr. Joseph Olmert's article Something Is Happening in Jordan. The excellent article raised a number of contentious points and I am not going in this piece to analyse every point but would like to clarify a number of issues which Dr. Olmert touched on in his article.
With such low expectations, the outcome of Tuesday's direct meeting between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators - another meeting scheduled for a week later - has been seen as a positive step.
The New Year is no time for cynicism. It is a time for thinking creatively about how to helping to bring the parties together in direct negotiations and for sustaining the regional environment that can help keep them there.
More than any other UN agency, UNESCO has the ability to further this conflict by reclassifying different sites in the West Bank to ignore their Jewish heritage. If they do this, they will make the painful compromises that the Jews of Israel need to make even harder to get to.
To break from a mould of support that was created 63 years ago with the advent of the State of Israel represents a paradigm shift within not just Jewish communities, but also the wider international community.
US envoys, flanked by Tony Blair and Catherine Ashton, the EU high representative for foreign affairs, headed over on a diplomatic mission to head off...
Can a two state solution still be salvaged after September? Assuming that there is no creative solution to the UN confrontation, the world will need to focus on how to keep the solution alive even while the parties lose faith in it.
The importance of winning recognition for a Palestinian state is that it begins to redress the imbalance in how both Palestinian and Israeli claims are addressed by the international community.
