Starting with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s signing of 15 international conventions, the dramatic events over the past week indicate that Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have reached yet another impasse. Several officials on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s senior staff and inside the White House believe “it’s time to say enough.” According to them, […]
On Wednesday, February 12, Israel Policy Forum released a letter addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in support of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process initiative. Over 150 prominent American Jewish leaders signed the letter, which included rabbis, formal officials, activists, scholars, and philanthropists. The letter urged Netanyahu to continue negotiations on […]
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Chinese leaders in Beijing on February 14 and 15 as part of a six-day Asian trip that also included visits to South Korea and Indonesia. Kerry then headed to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for talks on Middle East issues before returning to Washington. Among […]
Last weekend, Israeli media sources the Times of Israel and Channel 10 reported that United States President Barack Obama did not support Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace efforts. The Times of Israel article wrote, “Citing unnamed sources close to the negotiations, Channel 10 news said that Kerry sought Obama’s ‘political backing for confrontation […]
Israeli Minister of Justice Tzipi Livni and Israeli lawyer and chief negotiator in the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinians on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Yitzhak Molcho met with United States Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday to discuss the details of the framework that the U.S. wants Israel and […]
After Beijing unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea last month, to include the disputed Tokyo-controlled islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, the reaction by regional neighbors and the U.S. was swift. But with each action, a subsequent and escalating reaction has been triggered. China’s […]
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Israel yesterday for his 10th time in the Middle East region in efforts to move Israeli-Palestinian peace talks forward. Until his scheduled Sunday departure, his visit will include ‘intensive conversations’ with both Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a senior State […]
1. A Bird Does Not Change Its Feathers. The big players are not going anywhere. In 2014, Netanyahu will still be Prime Minister of Israel, Abbas will still head the Palestinian Authority, and Obama will still be the U.S. president. Obama has for some time now removed himself from the scene, with Secretary of […]
By Manuel Langendorf With a heightened sense of urgency to act on Syria, Washington is resorting to moral arguments. What appears to have been a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, has made a potential U.S.-led military strike against the Syrian government a very real possibility. Shocking videos of dozens of dead […]
As I watched Secretary of State John Kerry stand before the lectern last Monday afternoon and give an impassioned speech decrying the use of chemical weapons in Syria, I was briefly transported back in time to about two years ago. I was in the Vietnamese town of Gia Nghia in the province of Dak Nong, […]
Secretary of State John Kerry has the Israelis and Palestinians talking again. In the context of all that is happening in the Middle East, that qualifies as a positive. Kerry does not give up. That has been well documented before. While many see the Israeli-Palestinian issue as a morass, Kerry believes the United States […]
There usually is. The Egyptian military, mirroring, it says, the will of the Egyptian people, has thrown Morsi’s band of Islamists out of office and set in motion the kind of parliamentary and electoral process that millions of neighboring Syrians want to see materialize in their own country. Instead, the Syrian people remain trapped […]
The fact that the end users, the Free Syrian Army, to whom the US government has decided to send ‘lethal aid,’ is closely affiliated with individuals and organizations still listed on the Department of Treasury’s ‘SDN’ List, people and groups the Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC) has banned as importers or recipients of US goods (especially weapons), doesn’t seem to bother the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Perhaps the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is confused? Unaware that a transfer of weapons from the US, directly or through an intermediate buyer, to any organization or individual listed on OFAC’s list would constitute an illegal arms sale?
The first time I wrote a story about John Kerry, in 1986, he got very angry. So did his press person. It was, to paraphrase Richard Blaine, the start of a beautiful professional friendship. It has now been almost three decades since that story and the professional relationship took off, grew strong and beneficial to […]
Am I lucky or what? Made it through Heathrow, UK airport security, and onto the plane headed back for the US a measly 48 hours before a British-born Islamic extremist of Nigerian extraction drove his car over a British soldier outside the Woolwich Artillery Barracks and then tried to hack the victim’s head off with a rusty meat cleaver. Across the pond, before the UK went into shock, and Cameron’s government into an emergency meeting designed to address what common-sense suggests might be the response of the British people: rage and retaliation. . .