Mideast political conundrum: Settlement expansion is a threat to peace negotiations
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Washington Times
by Ziad Asali - (Opinion) January 6, 2009 - 1:00am

The renewed violence between Israel and Hamas, in which 1.5 million innocent Palestinians are caught, is yet another definitive demonstration that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel will not be able to secure its future, normalize its relations with the region and live in peace without an agreement with the Palestinians; Palestinians will not achieve liberation and independence without an agreement with Israel.

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Mideast political conundrum: Settlement expansion is a threat to peace negotiations
In Print by Ziad Asali - The Washington Times (Opinion) - January 6, 2009 - 1:00am

The renewed violence between Israel and Hamas, in which 1.5 million innocent Palestinians are caught, is yet another definitive demonstration that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel will not be able to secure its future, normalize its relations with the region and live in peace without an agreement with the Palestinians; Palestinians will not achieve liberation and independence without an agreement with Israel.

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The New Meaning of an Old Battle
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times
by Steven Lee Myers - January 3, 2009 - 1:00am

WASHINGTON — In unleashing a series of punishing attacks in Gaza last week, Israel clearly aimed to hand Hamas a defeat from which it could not recover anytime soon. The campaign may succeed, experts here and in Israel say, but it could also backfire. Either way, the political consequences could reverberate throughout the Middle East, all the way to Iran, and help determine the ability of President-elect Barack Obama to pursue his stated goals of calming the Middle East through diplomacy.

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Bush Legacy in Gaza
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Time
by Scott MacLeod - December 29, 2008 - 1:00am

The shoe throwing episode in Baghdad almost quaintly summed up the disaster the Bush administration leaves in its wake in Iraq--thousands dead in an ill-conceived and ill-planned invasion, thousands more dead in the explosion of sectarian and factional violence unleashed by the power vacuum, the strategic gains handed to Iran on a silver platter, the moral abomination of Abu Ghraib, and on and on.

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Palestine's Guernica and the Myths of Israeli Victimhood
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from
by Mustafa Barghouthi - December 29, 2008 - 1:00am

Palestine's Guernica and the Myths of Israeli Victimhood The Israeli campaign of 'death from above' began around 11 am, on Saturday morning, the 27th of December, and stretched straight through the night into this morning. The massacre continues Sunday as I write these words.

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UN Security Council calls for immediate halt to Gaza violence
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Natasha Mozgovaya - December 28, 2008 - 1:00am

The United Nations Security Council called early on Sunday for an immediate end to all violence in Gaza after the death toll climbed past 270 on the second day of Israeli air strikes in retaliation for rocket and mortar fire by Gaza militants. The statement, agreed upon after four hours of closed-door council discussions, called on all parties to address "the serious humanitarian and economic needs in Gaza."

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Obama Defers to Bush, for Now, on Gaza Crisis
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times
by Helene Cooper, Steven Lee Myers - December 28, 2008 - 1:00am

WASHINGTON — When President-elect Barack Obama went to Israel in July — to the very town, in fact, whose repeated shelling culminated in this weekend’s new fighting in Gaza — he all but endorsed the punishing Israeli attacks now unfolding. “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” he told reporters in Sderot, a small city on the edge of Gaza that has been hit repeatedly by rocket fire. “And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

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Obama Defers to Bush, for Now, on Gaza Crisis
Media Mention of Ghaith al-Omari In The New York Times - December 28, 2008 - 1:00am

WASHINGTON — When President-elect Barack Obama went to Israel in July — to the very town, in fact, whose repeated shelling culminated in this weekend’s new fighting in

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Lift the siege of Gaza
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Economist
(Editorial) December 19, 2008 - 1:00am

Contrary to the absurd claim of the rapporteur of the UN’s Human Rights Council, to whom Israel refused entry this week, the Gaza Strip is not facing a Nazi-like “Holocaust” at Israel’s hands. But the lot of the 1.5m Palestinians cooped up in this miserable scrap of desert is undeniably awful. Locked in on one side by Israel and on the other by Egypt, the Palestinians of Gaza have been subjected to an ever-tightening economic siege since the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, booted the secular Fatah movement out of the strip in June 2007.

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U.N. Resolution Is Bush’s Last Attempt To Save Annapolis Peace Process
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jewish Daily Forward
by Marc Perelman - (Opinion) December 19, 2008 - 1:00am

With its days in office running out, the Bush administration turned to the United Nations to put its imprimatur on the struggling peace initiative that the United States launched in Annapolis, Md., a little more than a year ago. In a resolution co-sponsored by the United States and Russia, the U.N. Security Council declared its support for the process initiated at Annapolis and its commitment to the “irreversibility of the bilateral negotiations” between Israelis and Palestinians.

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