Israel 2:

(The Continuing failure of Western Diplmacy?)

Miliband urges Middle East action

US confirms Mid-East peace talks

Will Annapolis fail like all the others?

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

Dome of the Rock and Western Wall

Jerusalem at issue: The Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall

A veteran reporter on the Middle East asked me the other day: "Is it too late?"

We had been discussing the prospects for the meeting in Annapolis in the United States scheduled for next week at which the Israelis and Palestinians are supposed to commit themselves to reaching a peace agreement.

My instinct was to agree with him. We had first met in Jerusalem in the mid 1980s and have followed the ups and downs of negotiations since. The experience has not made us optimists. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7103407.stm>

US storm over book on Israel lobby

By Henri Astier
BBC News

The Bush administration - like its predecessors - has stood by Israel

The power of America's "Jewish lobby" is said to be legendary.

Commentators the world over refer to it, as though it were a well-established fact that US Jews wield far more influence than their numbers (2% of the population) would suggest.

But this presumed influence is also a delicate issue in the US, and is rarely analysed.

How does the lobby work? Is its power truly legendary, or just a legend?
Two US academics, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, have set out to answer those questions, and triggered a firestorm of controversy as a result. Their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which builds on a 2006 article in the London Review of Books, says the reasons for US support for Israel need to be explained.

[Many critics] tried to smear us by either saying or hinting that we are anti-Semitic

Stephen Walt

Mearsheimer/Walt interview

America spends $3bn a year in largely military assistance - one-sixth of its direct aid budget - to help a prosperous, nuclear-armed country, and strongly backs Israel in negotiations on Middle East peace.

But according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the US gets remarkably little in return.
They reject the argument that Israel is a key ally in America's "war on terror".
On the contrary, they contend, US patronage of Israel fuels militant anger - as well as fostering resentment in Arab countries that control vital oil supplies. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7104030.stm>

What Palestinians want at Annapolis

By Martin Patience BBC News, Ramallah

Mr Abbas is keen to talk, but not about his Hamas rivals

The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, his negotiating team and other senior Palestinian officials are expressing increasing frustration ahead of the US-sponsored Mid-East conference to be held in Annapolis.

When the conference was first announced by US President George Bush in July, many Palestinian officials hoped it would be the starting point of a process that would quickly lead to the establishment of Palestinian state.

Israeli officials had insisted for several years that there was no partner for peace on the Palestinian side.

But Mr Abbas's stock significantly rose in Israel and in the West following the Hamas takeover in Gaza in June.

Israel, the US, and Europe quickly moved to support Mr Abbas, who heads the mainstream nationalist Fatah faction after he severed ties with Hamas, the militant Islamist movement.

The economic embargo was lifted in the West Bank, which Fatah controls, and the Middle East conference was proposed partly to bolster Mr Abbas's standing amongst his own people.

The implicit message from the West to the Palestinians was stick with Mr Abbas and your lives will get better.

But the prospects of a major breakthrough at the conference have been dampened by both Israel and the United States.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7104008.stm>

David Shamir, a psychiatrist, is accused of offering information on command centres and civilian evacuation plans in exchange for payment.
Court documents indicate Mr Shamir's repeated alleged attempts to offer his services were unsuccessful.
Mr Shamir has not formally responded to the charges yet.

Saudis to attend Mid-East summit

Jerusalem Diary: Monday 19 November

By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem

SWEET SMELL OF ABU DIS

My car smelt wonderful all Tuesday afternoon. It was filled with the aroma of freshly ground Arabic coffee: a fat mound of roasted beans, a good slug of cardamom pods, and a thin topping of more beans, pulverised into a smooth powder, and poured into four paper bags.

JERUSALEM'S FUTURE; JERUSALEM'S PAST

If you peer down the length of the barrier outside Hassan Ekermawi's shop, you can see the top of the grand, windowless building that was erected last decade as the Palestinians' future parliament in East Jerusalem, the putative capital of their putative state.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7101329.stm>

Jerusalem Diary: Monday 26 November

By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem
TIME RUNNING OUT?

Tom Segev is one of Israel's leading historians. He's currently working on a biography of the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal - the first biography that Segev has attempted.

Tom Segev is writing a book that will show Wiesenthal in a new light
He's renowned for his sifting of sources, and his unswerving attempts to chart a certain path through the competing narratives of the region.

His histories can make uncomfortable reading on all sides. His biography of Wiesenthal will do the same.

It would be wrong to steal Segev's thunder: but there will be revelations which will add enigma and venality to one of the heroic figures of 20th-century Jewry.

The cliche is that we read what historians have to tell us in order to understand the present and predict the future.

And when we meet, over lunch at his local cafe, Tom Segev offers his own guess. It's not a prediction, so much as an expression of a lack of certainty.

"Israel," he says, "might not exist in 50 years' time."

He's not stating how exactly that might happen. But he is saying that time is running out for a two-state solution.

Segev's voice is not alone inside Israel. There are others who warn that if a Palestinian state were to become unviable, for whatever reason, Israel might find it enormously difficult to keep the Palestinians in a stateless limbo.

In which case, Israel itself will find it more and more difficult to remain what it describes as a "Jewish and democratic" state.  <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7112731.stm>

Mr Bush wants a peace deal agreed before he leaves office in 2009 Bush statement

The US, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have voiced hope that a conference in Maryland could produce a starting point for serious peace negotiations.

Speaking at a dinner for participants, US President George W Bush expressed his "personal commitment" towards resolving the conflict.

But he warned "difficult compromises" lay ahead for both sides.

Correspondents say expectations for Tuesday's meeting in the city of Annapolis are modest.

More than 40 organisations and countries, including Saudi Arabia and Syria, are attending the conference at a US naval academy.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has been meeting Israeli and Palestinian teams in an effort to clinch a joint statement that sets out an outline for how negotiations will proceed post-Annapolis. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7113670.stm>

Leaders of the Islamist movement Hamas, which governs Gaza, said the summit was "doomed to failure".

Smaller demonstrations, staged in the Fatah-governed West Bank, were broken up by police loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Earlier, three people were killed in Gaza, in two attacks by Israel's army. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7114515.stm>

Olmert warns of 'end of Israel'

Mr Bush wants a Middle East peace deal by the end of 2008

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said failure to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians would spell the end of the State of Israel.

He warned of a "South African-style struggle" which Israel would lose if a Palestinian state was not established.
Mr Olmert was returning from the Annapolis conference in the US where he and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas pledged to launch formal peace talks.

The two leaders set a goal of reaching a peace deal with US support in 2008.

If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished

Ehud Olmert

Reactions to Annapolis

US President George W Bush called Annapolis, the first substantive Arab-Israeli peace talks in seven years, a "hopeful beginning" for Mid-East peace.
Mr Olmert said it was not the first time he had articulated his fears about the demographic threat to Israel as a Jewish state from a faster growing Palestinian population.

He made similar comments in 2003 when justifying the failed strategy of unilateral withdrawals from Israeli-occupied land which holds large Palestinian populations.

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Mr Olmert is quoted saying in Haaretz newspaper. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7118937.stm>

Annapolis: The end of the beginning

By Paul Reynolds World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

The handshake: now for the hard work

Annapolis is the end of the beginning for the new Middle East peace talks, not necessarily the beginning of the end.

That was the easy bit. Now for the hard work.

All the old unresolved issues have to be tackled - the borders of Israel and the new state of Palestine, Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugees.

A pessimist, a realist maybe, can look at the target date for an agreement - December 2008, the end of the Bush presidency - and say that the agenda is too large and the room for manoeuvre too little for success to be likely, let alone assured.

The concept is to create a critical mass of opinion that will enable the centre ground to be held.

For this to happen, great compromises will have to be made by each side, leaving them open to being outflanked by critics within their own camps.

Already Hamas in Gaza is saying that it will not respect any agreement.

In Israel, the Likud opposition has denounced the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for agreeing to discuss core issues without insisting, as a spokesman put it, "on the Palestinians first of all breaking up the terrorist infrastructure". <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7116572.stm>

Court approves Gaza fuel cutbacks

Gaza residents are bracing themselves for further hardships

The Supreme Court in Israel has ruled that the government can continue its cutbacks of fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip, but must delay electricity cuts.

Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups had challenged the move, calling it an illegal collective punishment.
The Israeli government argues the cutbacks are used as economic sanctions in retaliation for rocket attacks by Palestinian militants in Gaza.

The strip has been under the control of the Islamist movement Hamas since June.

"We are convinced that, for now, there is no need to issue a stay, especially as the (government) respondents undertook from the outset to ensure that the (fuel) reductions do not cause humanitarian harm," the Israeli Supreme Court wrote in its ruling. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7121313.stm>

Israeli air strike kills 5 militants in Gaza

12/02/2007 | 02:04 PM

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip

Gaza militants threatened to fire longer-range rockets and target larger Israeli communities, after five Hamas members were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

A spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group said its engineers are trying to produce local copies of Russian-made 122mm Katyusha rockets, which have a reach of up to 19 miles (30.6 kilometers), or halfway from Gaza to Tel Aviv.

Israel carries out regular military operations in Gaza, targeting militants launching near-daily rocket barrages into Israel. Its pinpoint airstrikes have intensified in the past week. Some 17 Gaza militants have been killed in strikes or clashes with the army since the U.S.-hosted Mideast conference began Monday in Annapolis, Maryland.

At the meeting, Israel and the Palestinians, in the presence of representatives of nearly 50 nations, announced that peace talks would resume after a violent seven-year hiatus. <http://www.gmanews.tv/story/71037/Israeli-air-strike-kills-5-militants-in-Gaza>