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by its own reckoning, the attack has resurrected Hamas as a political player in the West Bank. In its attacks on settlers on two consecutive nights in different parts of the West Bank, Hamas demonstrated its reach despite a three-year, US-backed PA military campaign and exposed the fallacy of the PA’s claims to have established security control in the West Bank. “It’s not muqawama (resistance) against Israel,” says ‘Adnan Dumayri, a Fatah Revolutionary Council member and PA security force general. “It’s muqawama against Abbas.”  It also enabled the Islamists to catch seeping popular disaffection across the political spectrum toward a process of negotiations that appeared to Palestinians to be leading into a blind alley of continued Israeli control. Should Abbas fail to negotiate a halt to settlement growth, Hamas in its armed attacks against settlers would emerge from its three-year political wasteland to offer Palestinians an alternative. In contrast to the international media, where the attack was roundly condemned, in Palestine the attack earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework. Unlike the Annapolis process or the “road map,” the twin Bush administration initiatives that the Obama administration chose to ditch, the current negotiations lack any terms of reference or agreed-upon script. Palestinians ask why Abbas agreed to meet Netanyahu given that none of the Arab targets required to turn proximity talks into direct ones were reached prior to the Obama administration’s announcement of the meeting. When American elder statesman George Mitchell presented the parties with 16 identical questions on the core issues requiring yes or no answers, Israel responded to each with a question of its own. In his August 31 press briefing before the White House meeting, Mitchell again declined to specify if Israel had agreed even to extend its (partially honored) settlement freeze past the September 26 expiration date.

To maintain stability, the president’s men have resorted to an increasingly oppressive hand. The PA’s security forces suppress not only Islamist unrest but general dissent -- in late August disrupting a meeting called to protest the resumption of negotiations. Detainees emerge from prisons testifying to interrogators drilling through kneecaps. For all of Fayyad’s claims to have built institutions, in his bid to maintain power and prevent a vote of no confidence, he has neutered the most important, the Palestinian Legislative Council, Palestine’s prime expression of sovereignty. Local elections, designed to showcase the West Bank as the more democratic half of the Palestinian polity, were annulled after its main faction, Fatah, lost confidence in its ability to win, even though Hamas had declared a boycott

demographically, Israel is shifting further to the right. Far from shocking Israel into a reality check, the killing of nine civilians from Turkey, a purported ally, in international waters generated an outpouring of self-righteousness. Internationally isolated, Israeli Jews shared the feeling that “the whole world is against us,” and in a surge of patriotism redoubled their support for their government. According to a poll conducted a week after the Gaza flotilla incident, 78 percent of Israeli Jews backed Netanyahu’s policy. Support from Israel’s fastest-growing population sectors, the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious camps, topped 90 percent. The simultaneous news of vast natural gas finds off the coast only underscored these national-religious Jews’ sense of divine protection: They had lost one treasure at sea, gentile approval, and been blessed with another. More trusting in God than Obama, Netanyahu’s government is not configured to sign let alone implement a two-state settlement. For all the external hopes that Kadima leader Tzipi Livni might join the ruling coalition, the prospects for a shake-up in Israel’s political map look at least an election away. Even then, without the emergence of a new, more left-leaning religious force, possibly led by the former ultra-Orthodox leader Aryeh Deri, the nationalist coalition looks set to retain power. Fearful of upsetting his national-religious base, Netanyahu -- always alert to instances of Palestinian incitement -- shied away from condemning Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of Shas, the coalition’s fourth largest party, who on the eve of the Washington parley called on God to kill Abbas and similarly evil Palestinians. Provided he retains the confidence of his nationalist camp, domestically Netanyahu looks secure.

"What Abbas is doing is sending out a message to the Israelis, the Americans, and the Europeans: 'I'm not a president for life,' " Kukali says. "The alternative is a leadership which represents a more radical side of Palestinian politics. Abbas has a very clear agenda for peace and it has a shelf life, and unfortunately the Israelis don't understand that."

"We cannot go to negotiations without a framework," Abbas said. "And we say the framework is U.N. resolutions, meaning a return to the 1967 borders," he said, referring to the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. "What's new in this demand? We want a full stop to settlements, including natural growth and in Jerusalem," Abbas said.Abbas said that resuming negotiations requires an Israeli halt to all settlement activity, including natural growth and settlement activity in Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed and considers its eternal capital.

The delay has brought Abbas under immense criticism, particularly from the Palestinian group Hamas.

The October 2 postponement in endorsing the UN-sponsored report, listing Israeli and Hamas war crimes during Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip last winter, has angered a majority of Palestinians.

Abbas said that Hamas's criticism of the postponement was aimed at bolstering its own position.

The Hamas-run interior ministry in the Gaza Strip has ordered Palestinians in the territory not to take part in elections called by Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based president. 

"Any preparations, any committees, any collecting of names will be regarded as an illegal action that we will pursue," he said.

Abbas himself was elected on January 9, 2005, for a four-year term. The Palestinian Authority extended his presidency by one year so presidential and parliamentary elections could be held on the same date, as required by Palestinian Basic Law.

A Hamas delegation is meeting Egyptian officials in Cairo to try to set a new date for the signing of a Palestinian unity deal

Egypt had earlier announced that Hamas and Fatah of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would travel to Cairo to sign the long-delayed reconciliation deal on October 25-26.

The postponement was requested because of the decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) delegation at the UN Human Rights Council to drop its backing for an immediate vote on a report on the Gaza war, the Hamas source said.

The Peace Index for March 2016, published by the Israel Democracy Institute, shows that a sizable majority of the Jewish public rejects the distinction between global terrorism, nurtured by radical Islam, and Palestinian terrorism, nurtured by the desire to shake off the Israeli occupation. Of those polled, 64% said they agree with the idea espoused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that global terrorism and Palestinian terrorism are one and the same.

Israelis are in no rush to change the status quo

Some 78% think Israel should not take into consideration international demands to refrain from “targeted killings” (as the Israel Defense Forces calls the killing of wanted Palestinians), demolitions of family homes of Palestinians involved in attacks on Israelis and other questionable means used by the Israeli defense establishment in the fight against terrorism.

Many Palestinians have expressed anger at PA President Mahmoud Abbas for seeming to let Israelis off the hook following Goldstone's trenchant criticism of Israel's blockade of Gaza and attacks on its citizens.

Academics and rights workers held a street protest on Monday.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has lashed out at the decision as "shameful and irresponsible", and posters saying "to the trash heap of history, you traitor, Mahmoud Abbas" have appeared in the Strip.

Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made weapons to al Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen, in violation of their agreements with the United States, a CNN investigation has found.

The weapons have also made their way into the hands of Iranian-backed rebels battling the coalition for control of the country, exposing some of America's sensitive military technology to Tehran and potentially endangering the lives of US troops in other conflict zones.

The revelations raise fresh questions about whether the US has lost control over a key ally presiding over one of the most horrific wars of the past decade, and whether Saudi Arabia is responsible enough to be allowed to continue buying the sophisticated arms and fighting hardware

The terms of the deal that Olmert and Abbas will strike are rather obvious to anyone who has followed this issue over the years. They, and their advisers know what that eventual compromise is. The issue isn’t reaching that compromise, the issue is politically legitimating that compromise to the respective societies in a way that both Olmert and Abbas can be seen as having achieved a victory and not having sold out their people.

What is needed is a reshaping of the rhetorical-identity topography. Someone, perhaps a US president (though perhaps not), needs to offer the Israelis a vision of an Israeli identity with a shared Jerusalem. Someone needs to offer the Palestinians a vision of a Palestinian identity without a right of return. Someone on each side needs to enact such an identity, producing the interests that support a peace deal. Then, and only then, is the potential for compromise possible.

The Obama White House's interest in spreading this falsehood is multi-fold and obvious:For one, the claim that this attack was just about anger over an anti-Muhammad video completely absolves the US government of any responsibility or even role in provoking the anti-American rage driving it. After all, if the violence that erupted in that region is driven only by anger over some independent film about Muhammad, then no rational person would blame the US government for it, and there could be no suggestion that its actions in the region – things like this, and this, and this, and this – had any role to play.

it's deeply satisfying to point over there at those Muslims and scorn their primitive religious violence, while ignoring the massive amounts of violence to which one's own country continuously subjects them. It's much more fun and self-affirming to scoff: "can you believe those Muslims are so primitive that they killed our ambassador over a film?" than it is to acknowledge: "our country and its allies have continually bombed, killed, invaded, and occupied their countries and supported their tyrants."

the self-loving mindset that enables the New York Times to write an entire editorial today purporting to analyze Muslim rage without once mentioning the numerous acts of American violence aimed at them

it’s the least-dead the peace process has been since the short direct talks of the late summer 2010, or perhaps even the secret talks of 2008

Netanyahu pressured members of his own party—in a sign that with the new coalition he feels more secure leading a Likud Party that is to the right of himself—to block a bill that would apply Israeli civil instead of military law to settlements, effectively annexing them. It’s a real setback for Rep. Joe Walsh, Republican from Illinois, who advocates a full-on one-state solution.