An increasingly irrelevant Mideast peace broker

Here's my take on PM Salam Fayyad's visit to DC this week and where the "peace process" game stands, published at Inter Press Service:

WASHINGTON, Oct 21, 2011 (IPS) - While a growing number of influential voices here and in the region insist that the nearly 20-year, U.S.-sponsored "peace process" has reached its terminal phase, the administration of President Barack Obama remains committed to reviving direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

"…[M]oving forward, we want to see progress on the peace talks," State Department spokesman Mark Toner has emphasised repeatedly over the last two weeks, which have seen Washington's special envoy David Hale shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah. 

"We want to see the two parties, the Palestinians and the Israelis, get back into direct negotiations. And that's where are our focus remains," he said.

But there is little reason at this point to believe that Washington's efforts will bear fruit.

That conclusion was reinforced here Wednesday night by none other than one of the process's strongest Palestinian advocates. In a speech at the annual gala of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad indicated no great eagerness on the part of his regime to resume talks with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Our own assessment is that the conditions are not ripe at this juncture for a meaningful resumption of talks," Fayyad told the upper-crust crowd.

Plus Ça Change… Israel-Palestine after September at the U.N.

Originally published at Foreign Policy

Today I hosted an interesting panel with Yossi Alpher, Rob Malley, and Nadia Bilbassy at the think tank. Malley urged the audience to "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.


Will post a video of the discussion once its archived. In the meantime, here is one of my favorite Mideast cartoons...

Lulav diplomacy

My talmudic take on Succot and Egyptian-Israeli relations in Haaretz:

"Palm fronds and political thickets"

In late August, after extended verbal clashes between Israel and Egypt, which followed a deadly terror attack on Israel emanating from Sinai and Israel's aggressive response to it, a Saudi newspaper already foresaw "the ghost of a new crisis ... on the horizons of the two countries." No, the paper wasn't anticipating an Egyptian mob's shocking September 9 siege of Israel's Cairo embassy. Rather, it was the effects of a ban issued by the Egyptian agriculture minister on the export of lulavs, a key ingredient in the observance of the festival of Sukkot.

Egyptian palm-frond production is big business. Israel imports somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 lulavs annually and has come to depend on Egypt's crop for Sukkot. This year's harvest holiday, which begins next Wednesday evening, comes as Israel is still coming to terms with the Egypt emerging in a post-Mubarak era.

It's not the first time that lulav sales have been a bone of contention. Egypt stopped exports to Israel in 2005, claiming that harvest of palm fronds hurt date output. A year later, though only a short time after the Second Lebanon War, Cairo and Jerusalem were able to find a quiet solution to the lulav issue, according to a confidential missive from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in 2006, revealed by Wikileaks. "[D]espite the suspension of the [Egypt-Israel agricultural] working group's activities," Ambassador Frank Ricciardone reported to Washington, "Egypt would permit export of 500,000 palm fronds to Israel in time for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot."

Talking with BBC about the drone that killed Awlaki

How will Anwar al-Awlaki's death impact al Qaeda—and US-Yemen relations?

That's what I talked to BBC5 about on Friday. Listen here.

There's plenty of controversy over the illegality of drone strikes. But what I find interesting is the timing of Awlaki's death—the targeted killing of the prominent cleric comes just a week after beleaguered Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned home from rehab in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile in Sana'a, protests are ongoing and are increasingly being met by brutal violence at the hands of Saleh supporters.

 

But US-Yemen counter-terror cooperation has never been better. Laura Kasinof reports from Sana'a:

A high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Yemen had provided the United States with intelligence on the location of the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by an American drone strike on Friday. 

And for more some cartoons of the US's shadow war in Yemen, here you go.