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News Analysis The yellow brick road-map October 26th, 2005 -- Writing in the Wall Street Journal on 20 October, Mahmud Abbas was typically candid as to why George Bush occupies such a central place in the Palestinian president’s strategy. The “climate of peace needs the help of the United States and the international community. For without sustained pressure on the Israeli government to sit down and negotiate, Israel will only bolster those within Palestinian society who do not share the majority’s desire for peace… Palestinians cannot pursue the road-map alone,” he wrote, referring to the long dormant peace plan the US leader launched in June 2003.  Sliding towards civil war October 12th, 2005 -- For the first week of October concerted efforts were made to arrange a meeting between Ariel Sharon and Mahmud Abbas, their first since Israel’s successful withdrawal from Gaza and four small settlements in the northern West Bank. On 10 October the meeting was shelved. Instead, joint Israel-Palestinian committees are to be formed to “prepare” adequately for the event, now presumably to be held some time after Abbas’ parley with George Bush in Washington on 24 October. A new era for the Palestinians September 29th, 2005 -- On 15 September Ariel Sharon addressed the United Nations General Assembly, garlanded in tributes for his “brave and historic” decision to remove the Israeli settlers from Gaza and withdraw from four small settlements in the West Bank. In what some registered as a new tone he said Israel had “no aspirations to rule over” the Palestinians, who “are also entitled to freedom and to a national, sovereign existence in a state of their own”. The Israelis take their leave of Gaza September 15th, 2005 -- In the early hours of 12 September 2005 the Israeli army completed its largest logistical operation since it invaded Lebanon in 1982 — the evacuation of settlers and soldiers from the interior of the occupied Gaza Strip. In their wake, the people it had suborned for 38 years reclaimed their land in a rising, gathering and inexorable tide. The theatre of disengagement September 2nd, 2005 -- By and large, Palestinians have met Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza the way the Lebanese met the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — with the politics of spectacle. There were differences. Rewording the "war on terror" August 3rd, 2005 -- Noah Feldman once sat in Baghdad’s Green Zone, advising the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council on the finer points of constitution-drafting. Today he is a law professor and author of a much-acclaimed book on “the ethics of nation-building”. He has nothing directly to do with the present constitutional exercise in Iraq. Still, he has his opinions — these from a recent interview on National Public Radio. Iraq: the scourge of the bombers July 21st, 2005 -- With insurgent suicide bombs already going off at a rate of at least one per day, Iraq witnessed a new upsurge in violence in mid-July, with the bloodiest attacks apparently directed at Shi’ite civilian targets. Iran: all change at the top July 7th, 2005 -- According to conventional political wisdom, Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory represents the triumph of conservative power and values over moderates and reformists. The conservatives can look on the 17 million votes he won as a powerful popular mandate and can relax in the knowledge they now have a stranglehold on power that no single faction has enjoyed since the revolution. Share this page:
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