Recent published letters The Jerusalem Post, 20 December 2011 SirI find Martin Sherman’s analysis ( “Note to Newt (Part 1): Uninventing Palestinians”, December 16 ) compelling, indeed convincing, but I am sure it would cut little ice with the great majority of opinion-leaders in the UK, who would dub it “special pleading”. Read More »

I closed this blog officially on 31 December last. The book which will be based on it: “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” is due to be published on 1 June.However, the announcement yesterday (Wednesday, 6 April) of the Israeli Peace Initiatve is too significant a development to allow to pass unremarked. Read More »

“A Mid-East Journal” closes I began this blog early in January 2010, and I wrote the last piece on 30 December. Read More »

Neither breakthrough nor breakdown Early in December it became undeniable that the impetus towards achieving a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority had slowed almost to a stop. Read More »

Bradley Burston, an American-born Israeli journalist, is a regular columnist for the influential daily, Ha’aretz . In today’s edition (21 December), he produces a brilliant analysis of the mistakes President Obama has perpetrated in his Middle East strategy. Read More »

The Obama administration clearly has no intention of turning its back on the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Phase One, which climaxed at the end of August in an unparalleled display of bonhomie between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has run itself into the ground. Read More »

That the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has stalled is undeniable. That it has foundered is almost certainly not the case – “almost” because nothing is certain, but the portents for a revival of negotiations are far from unfavourable. Read More »

Following publication of the latest WikiLeaks documents, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that, after sixty years of propaganda painting Israel as the greatest threat to the Middle East, for the first time in history there is agreement that Iran is the threat. Read More »

WikiLeaks, the website dedicated to publishing covertly acquired information, shook the diplomatic world on 28 November by starting to publish excerpts from more than 250,000 confidential documents it claims to have in its possession. Read More »

Israeli-Palestinian stalemate; WikiLeaks doesn’t help So this is what all the high hopes and fine words of Friday, 20 August – the launch of the long-delayed direct face-to-face peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority – have come to: Read More »

Yesterday (Monday, 22 November) Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, by a vote of 65-33, passed into law an Act unique in the nation’s history. In future, any proposal to withdraw from Israeli territory would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Read More »

Barely five weeks after the renewal of direct face-to-face peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, the process came to an untimely – albeit foreseeable – halt. The stumbling block? The end of the temporary 10-month freeze on building in Israel’s West Bank settlements, instituted by prime minister Netanyahu in November 2009. Read More »

“A pointless provocation” – that is how Ha’aretz , perhaps Israel’s most influential daily newspaper, categorises the latest building plan to emanate from the Interior Ministry and the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee, not to mention the planning authorities in the West Bank city of Ariel. Read More »

Neither of the principals in the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative want the process to fail, and nor do the interested powers that back them. All parties are bending over backwards to try to ensure that the current fragile initiative does not founder, even though the principals are each constrained by their separate political imperatives. Read More »

By the middle of the 19th century Britain was in the full flood of its imperial expansion. It genuinely “ruled the waves” and China, losing the first Opium War in 1841, was forced to cede the island of Hong Kong . Following the second Opium War in 1860, Britain also took possession of the Kowloon Peninsula. Read More »

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in suspended animation A strange and untoward calm descended on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the first week of October, and has persisted throughout the month. The appearance of inactivity, however, is deceptive. Read More »

Sefik Dinc is a well-respected photo-journalist, working for the Turkish newspaper, Haberturk . Together with 16 other Turkish journalists, he was on board the Mavi Marmara on its ill-fated voyage last May to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. Read More »

On Monday, 14 February 2005 Saad Hariri, then 35, saw his father Rafik, the former prime minister of Lebanon, together with 22 other people, blown to pieces by a car bomb . Read More »

“By a set of curious chances,” as W S Gilbert has it in The Mikado , we seem finally to have reached the nitty-gritty of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Read More »

A sovereign state of Palestine – the prize is too great to be cast aside in a fit of pique, or recklessly, or without cool hard-headed deliberation. Those must be the sorts of consideration underlying the conclusions of the Arab League last Friday (8 October). Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had arrived in Libya the day before. Read More »