Book review: "(In)sights: Thirty Years of Peacemaking in the Oslo Process" by Gidi Grinstein

Diplomacy and peacemaking is not a smooth process. It requires a huge amount of preparation, planning and flexibility. It is always illuminating to look behind the scenes of the Oslo process. Gidi Grinstein, the youngest person at Camp David in 2000, is releasing his account of the events that he witnessed as well as his opinions of what to do moving forward to mark the...

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Did Ehud Barak plan the mass protests in Israel years before "judicial reform" in a bid to return to power?

Akiva Bigman in Mida writes that Ehud Barak had been planning to bring Benjamin Netanyahu down via mass protests long before the judicial reform issue was brought up.Ehud Barak is a central figure in the protest movement against judicial reform. If you have been following the media, you may get the impression that although he is adamantly against Netanyahu and judicial reform,...

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12/31 Links: Where is the Middle East heading now?; Israel calls UN 'morally bankrupt' as assembly refers 'occupation' to Hague court; Happy 50th anniversary of the Dry Bones cartoons

From Ian: Dore Gold: Where is the Middle East heading now? Dr. Ebtisam Al-Ketbi, who heads the leading research center in Abu Dhabi, the Emirates Policy Center, pointed out that the overlapping crises afflicting the Middle East have made strictly bilateral solutions completely ineffective, which drew the major players in the region to try the Baghdad II mechanism. Perhaps...

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Arabs love Haaretz article saying Jews should go back into exile

Earlier this week, Haaretz published an op-ed by B. Michael which I still cannot tell if it is parody or not. Excerpts:I’m a proud exilic Jew. I’m an internationalist and a cosmopolitan. I’m also devoid of any relationship to my geographic birthplace, and “land” to me is just the dirt in which food grows and people are buried. It doesn’t have a single milligram of sanctity,...

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