Palestine

When Ariel Sharon slipped into a coma in January 2006, The Spectator was just beginning to rather like him. Days after his stroke, the magazine ran a piece arguing that Sharon’s legacy would be ‘not his military exploits but his final major political act: unilateral withdrawal from Gaza’. Douglas Davis described Gaza as a lawless gangland where terrorism was the major growth industry. Yasser Arafat had sown the seeds of anarchy and Mahmoud Abbas was too weak to do anything about it. ‘The terror war appears to be on the verge of entering a new, more dangerous, phase,’ he wrote. ‘Israelis have cause to be grateful that Sharon dragged them

Amid all the bloodshed in Egypt and Syria at the moment the fact that the Israelis and Palestinians are once again at the negotiating table has received less notice than usual. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The intense international focus on the dispute seems to me a minor contributing reason why the dispute remains unresolved. But there is one aspect of the talks which really ought to be highlighted. That is the Palestinian demand that Israel release 104 Palestinian terrorists from prison before talks commence. While agreeing to this precondition, Israel has not asked for – and is not getting – anything in return. Of course Israel has been here before.

At the (rejuvenated) New Republic, Ben Birnbaum has a comprehensive and comprehensively-depressing survey of the last-gasp prospects for a two-state solution to the Middle East ‘peace process’. If the two-state solution (TSS) is not yet on life-support it is hardly a picture of health. The prognosis is not good and time is running out. According to Birnbaum, Mahmoud Abbas and Bibi Netanyahu are, in their different ways, the last remaining men who could make it work. Yet neither man, as he also demonstrates, has much room for manoeuver. The sketched outlines of a deal remain in place (a divided Jerusalem, land-swaps, a symbolic ‘right of return’ for a few thousand

Today’s Israeli election does not, it is fair to say, take place in at a moment of supreme hope in the Middle East. Quite the contrary. This is an election whose result seems liable to depress most foreign observers. Bibi Netanyahu is no-one’s idea of a moderate but the fact remains that, presuming he is returned for a third term as Prime Minister, he may be one of the more left-wing members of the new Israeli government. Indeed, Netanyahu is liable to be one of the more liberal members returned on the Likud list. Daniel Levy has a very useful primer on the dispiriting ‘facts on the ground’. As Levy

When did the dream of a two-state solution die? When it became clear that there are already two Palestinian states – the Hamas-run Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-governed West Bank? Or when the extremists of Hamas fired thousands of missiles into Israeli cities? Or last week when the ‘moderates’ of Fatah once again refused Israeli offers to go to the negotiating table and instead moved to circumvent their only negotiating partner via a diplomatic coup at the UN? No, in the eyes of portions of the UK government as well as the international community, the two-state solution is threatened not by these consistent, physically and diplomatically violent moves; but by

If anybody still wonders why there has not been a two-state solution long ago to the most famous – albeit least bloody – Middle East conflict, tonight’s UN speech by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is a good learning-curve. Abbas says that his act of unilateralism is the ‘last chance to save the two state solution.’ But of course what he means is that he thinks it is the last chance to save Mahmoud Abbas. For despite his talk of ‘the Palestinians’, ‘the Palestinian people’ and the ‘Palestinian state’ no such monolithic entities exist. There are already at least two major Palestinian entities, the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank,

The latest offensive between Israel and Hamas may only just have begun. But already a set of the usual lies have entered the British coverage. Let me pose a few questions to the people who are propagating them. 1) Why are Hamas firing into undisputed Israeli territory? The territory that Hamas are firing rockets into is not disputed territory. They are firing into Israel proper – that is, into land which absolutely everyone except for Israel’s annihilationist enemies recognises is the land of Israel. Is this Hamas’s way of calling for a two-state solution? Is it their way of trying to persuade Israel to sit down with Hamas’s enemies in

The papers and media are full of the news that Israel has killed a Hamas leader in the Gaza. Why did this happen? Where did it come from? Is it not yet another example of the blood-thirsty Zionists doing their worst? If you read most of the British media that may well be what you think. After all there has been barely any previous mention in the British papers of the massive escalation in rocket fire into Israel in the last month or the even swifter escalation this week. Certainly no British paper or broadcaster has come close to giving these attacks the front-page publicity they grant to Israel’s response