Free Republic

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is playing with fire. And Israel is getting burned. Over the past week, it has been widely reported that the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are conducting secret negotiations regarding future Israeli land surrenders to the Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem. According to the reports, the Obama administration has presented Netanyahu with a plan whereby Israel will cede its rights to eastern Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians and then lease the areas from the Palestinians for a limited period. The reports on the length of the lease vary. Some claim...

Israel is willing to make a sweeping concession -- dividing control of Jerusalem -- as part of a historic final peace pact with Palestinians, a key Cabinet member revealed yesterday. Defense Minister Ehud Barak signaled that his government is ready to drop its demand that even after the creation of a Palestinian state, Jerusalem would "remain the undivided capital of Israel." "West Jerusalem and 12 Jewish neighborhoods that are home to 200,000 [Israeli] residents will be ours," Barak told the newspaper Haaretz. "The Arab neighborhoods in which close to a quarter million Palestinians live will be theirs," he added, referring...

AP) JERUSALEM In a bold gamble, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Monday asked Israel's president to dissolve parliament, pushing for a quick March election just hours after deciding to leave his hardline Likud Party and form a new centrist party . Sharon's decision to leave Likud sent shock waves through Israel, redrawing the political map, finalizing his transformation from hardliner to moderate and boosting prospects of progress in peacemaking with the Palestinians. His confidants say Sharon felt Likud hardliners, who tried to block this summer's Gaza pullout, were imposing too many constraints and would prevent future peace moves. Palestinian officials...

Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising...

The emerging consensus among observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that any resolution inevitably involves the Palestinians governing themselves under their own flag in their own country. The Bush administration has endorsed an independent Palestinian state and backed UN resolutions to this effect, something that just a few years ago would have seemed improbable even for an administration striving for "even-handedness" toward Yasser Arafat, much less one that is pro-Israel.Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hardly famous for his conciliatory attitude toward the Palestinians, has concluded that at some point in the future, there will be a Palestinian state or at...