Friday 3rd of May 2024
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killing hope ....

killing hope .....

What does Washington expect when Israel is allowed to brutalise the Palestinians, drone attacks are killing countless civilians and Arab dictatorships are warmly embraced?

The hope that the Arab world had not long ago put in the United States and President Obama has all but evaporated.

Two and a half years after Obama came to office, raising expectations for change among many in the Arab world, favorable ratings of the United States have plummeted in the Middle East, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation.

In most countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration. The killing of Osama bin Laden also worsened attitudes toward the United States.

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, 30 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the United States (compared with 41 percent in 2009), while roughly 5 percent said the same in Egypt (compared with 30 percent in 2009).

"The very high expectations that were created in 2009 - there's been a letdown since then," said James Zogby, the president and founder of the Arab American Institute, of which the foundation is an affiliate.

Fewer than 10 percent of respondents described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama. The president's ratings were the lowest on "the Palestinian issue" and "engagement with the Muslim world," as the categories were described in the survey.

The poll was conducted over the course of a month among 4,000 respondents in six countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. Pollsters began their work shortly after a major speech Obama gave on the Middle East, in which he spoke broadly of his vision in the Middle East and pressed Israel, in unusually frank terms, to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.

The findings are largely in line with those of a poll conducted in the spring of 2010 by the Pew Research Center, which also found favorable views of the United States and Obama slipping. As with the new poll, Obama got his worst ratings for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Zogby said he saw the president about a month ago and mentioned that he was conducting another poll of views in the Arab world. The president, Zogby said, predicted that views of the United States would remain unfavorable because of the intractable nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Antony Loewenstein

more snakes & ladders .....

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has bowed to US pressure by agreeing for the first time that a Palestinian state should roughly follow the contours of the 1967 ceasefire lines separating the West Bank and Israel.

The offer appeared to represent a major climb-down by Mr Netanyahu, who has consistently refused to discuss specific borders of a future state.

A government official in Jerusalem said the offer was dependent on the Palestinians dropping their campaign for statehood at the United Nations next month and accepting Israel as a Jewish state.

This means that while the offer from Mr Netanyahu covers new ground, it appears to cross Palestinian ''red lines'' and seems likely to be rejected, although the onus is now likely to be placed on the Palestinians to present a counter offer.

Mr Netanyahu reacted angrily when the 1967 proposal was made by the US President, Barack Obama, in May but was now said to be offering to trade Israeli territory on its side of the line for West Bank land where its main settlements are.

In remarks to about 11,000 American Israel Public Affairs Committee delegates at the Washington Convention Centre on May 23, Mr Netanyahu stressed that ''Israel cannot return to the indefensible 1967 borders''.

Netanyahu Gives Way To Obama On 1967 Borders ...

keeping up appearances .....

For the first time, Israel's Supreme Court has formally ordered the dismantling of an illegal West Bank settlement, brushing aside requests from the government for more time in order to organize the evacuation and construct alternative housing.

The government had already conceded that the Migron outpost, just north of Jerusalem and home to about 250 settlers, was illegally built in 1999 on top of private Palestinian land.

But since 2006, when the advocacy group Peace Now first filed a lawsuit against the settlement, the government has sought delays and broken deadlines to evacuate the settlers.

In frustration, the justices decided Tuesday that the settlement should be demolished by March 2012. If it happens, it would be the first evacuation of an entire settlement since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip.

But other court orders, including one to evacuate an illegally built, Jewish-occupied apartment building in an Arab-dominated Jerusalem neighborhood, have not been enforced.

Supreme Court orders demolition of West Bank settlement

the shell game continues .....

Israel's interior ministry has given final approval for the construction of 900 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement neighbourhood of Har Homa, a ministry spokeswoman told AFP on Thursday.

"This is a programme which was approved by the regional (planning and construction) committee two years ago," spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said.

"According to the planning process in Israel, (it) needed the completion of amendments, therefore it was finally approved today."

The approval marks the final planning stage for a project that has garnered fierce criticism from the Palestinians and the international community.

It will significantly expand the hilltop neighbourhood, which lies in Jerusalem's southwest and is defined as being within the municipal boundaries despite lying directly next to the Palestinian West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Hagit Ofran, who monitors settlement activity for the Israeli group Peace Now, described the final approval of the project as "a very dramatic development" because of where the new housing will be located.

"It adds a new ridge to Har Homa which blocks the territorial contiguity between east Jerusalem and Bethlehem and adds a further barrier to the possibility of east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital in a two-state solution," she told AFP.

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai, quoted on the Israeli news site Ynet, linked the new project to ongoing protests in Israel over the cost of housing.

Israel approves 900 E.Jerusalem settlement homes