israel-palestine

A big cross-section of the American Jewish community’s leadership met with President Obama today at the White House, from J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami on the left to Abraham Foxman on the right. Obama talked about a lot more than Israel, Palestine and Iran, including domestic issues like health care as well. You can read all [...]

In advance of President Obama’s long-awaited address to the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, the administration appears to be seeding the public-diplomacy bed. I can’t read Arabic, but my friend Marc Lynch can, and here’s how Marc puts it in the course of a longer (and quite valuable) post about Obama’s approach to Israel-Palestine:
General [...]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington for his first head-of-state meeting with the Obama administration. He’ll be at the White House meeting with President Obama later this morning. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will host a working dinner for him tonight. The basic dynamic at work is that the Obama administration supports [...]

President Obama’s Israel/Palestine envoy, George Mitchell, is heading back to the Mideast. Why?
State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the purpose of Mr. Mitchell’s trip is “to advance the goal of the two-state solution and comprehensive peace in the region,” and that he would be discussing “next steps” toward that end.
At which point Israel Prime Minister [...]

Via Andrew Sullivan, Haaretz’s Aluf Benn reports on some preemptive Obama administration brushback to members of Congress who’d take an anti-peace process position at the (real or presumed) behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In recent weeks, American officials have briefed senior Democratic congressmen and prepared the ground for the possibility of disagreements with Israel [...]

There used to be this line among Iraq war supporters that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad,” meaning that the intractable problems of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict required the invasion of Iraq to be resolved. Or something. And so it’s noteworthy that this is what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in his press conference [...]