wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

The Middle East Peace Process will face a major hurdle at the United Nations next week. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Friday he would ask the U.N. Security Council next week to recognize a Palestinian state, a move the U.S. has pledged to veto.

The two major Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, the party led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have signed a historic accord to form a unity government. Fatah governs the West Bank, while Hamas, an Islamic group, controls the Gaza Strip. The agreement ends a four-year split.  Back in 2007 Hamas pushed out forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas from Gaza, one year after winning government elections.

It’s been an eventful week in the Middle East, but much of the news has been overshadowed by the unfolding disaster in Japan. Saudi military forces have crossed into Bahrain as protester violence continues; the situation in Libya is escalating; and in Egypt, a referendum on the constitution scheduled for Saturday is the cause of raging debate. Amidst all this change in the Middle East, is the United States taking a strong enough position for democracy?

The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East reveal that Palestinian negotiators secretly told Israel it could keep swathes of occupied East Jerusalem. Thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records of negotiations with Israel and the U.S. have been published by the Guardian and Al Jazeera. The Guardian’s Middle East editor Ian Black says the documents show a weak and desperate Palestinian side offering a string of concessions that will shock Palestinians and the wider Arab world.The former United States Ambassador to Israel and director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institute, Martin Indyk, disagrees.

The United States is backing away from peace talks on the Middle East that are in flux, thanks in part to Israel's refusal to back down on the issue of new Jewish settlements. Palestinians are saying that direct talks may be over for the time being, and the U.S., after high hopes for progress, is suffering a tarnished record as a negotiator. Has the cause for peace hit another dead end? 

Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat, PLO Representative to the US, addresses the Palestinian political situation and weighs in on the Obama administration's efforts to advance the peace process.

Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and David Makovsky, senior fellow and director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at The Washington Institute, discuss the current Middle East peace talks in Washington.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet with President Obama today. Talks between the two leaders were originally scheduled to come on the heels of a meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu cancelled those talks last week after Israeli commandos raided a Gaza-bound ship, killing nine activists.

 

Israel is under fire from friends and foes alike after a raid on a flotilla of Turkish ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza led to the deaths of nine people -- including a 19-year-old American man. The diplomatic fallout continues this morning as Turkey, which up until this week has been Israel's closest ally in the Muslim world, has warned that it may reduce economic and defense ties with Israel as a result of the raid. Meanwhile, the MV Rachel Corrie, another Irish ship full of pro-Palestinian activists, has set sail for Gaza, carrying Nobel Prize laureate Mairead McGuire, among others.

Israel is on the defense, and these developments beg the question, how will Israel respond after near universal criticism from the international community after this week's incident?

 

Vice President Joe Biden spoke in Israel this morning in a speech that was billed as one similar to President Obama's address to the Muslim world while in Cairo last year. But Biden's visit to Israel wasn't without incident.

President Obama is due to bring both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to a meeting at the U.N. in New York today. He'll be looking for ways to restart Middle East peace negotiations. The president wants Israel to stop settlement building in the West Bank, the Palestinians say they won't negotiate until that happens, and the Israelis seem leery of ordering a hard stop. We talk with BBC's Jon Donnison from the West Bank town of Ramallah and hear some Palestinian voices.

In 2002, Saudi King Abdullah proposed a peace plan for Israel and the Palestinian territories. In exchange for peace with the Arab world, Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories and a Palestinian state would be established. Harvard Law Professor and author of "The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State," Noah Feldman joins The Takeaway for a look at what parts of the so-called Arab Peace Initiative the Obama administration is likely to embrace.

As George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East finishes up a day in the West Bank, we're taking a look at the challenges that lie ahead for all the President's envoys. Both Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, have long roads ahead of them. One man who can sympathize: Dan Simpson. Now an editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Simpson served as special envoy to Somalia from 1994 - 1995 and was an Ambassador to Congo and the Central African Republic. He joins us now with his insight into the world of the special envoy.