Group items tagged

Analysis Jeremy Bowen BBC Middle East editor It was only last week in New York that President Obama told delegates at the UN General Assembly an independent state of Palestine could be joining them a year from now. Even then, his words didn't sound like a blueprint for the future laid down by the most powerful man in the world. They were more like a plea to both Israelis and Palestinians to keep talking. The crisis over Jewish settlements has been waiting to happen ever since Mr Obama inaugurated this latest round of peace talks in Washington three weeks ago. Mr Netanyahu leads a coalition government dominated by parties supporting the Jewish settler movement. It's the most dynamic political force in Israel, determined that the freeze will not continue. A major reason why the settlements were started after Israel captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1967 was to make it politically impossible for Israel to give up what it claimed as Jewish land to the Palestinians. More than 40 years on that strategy is working in the way the founders of the settlement movement intended.

Both men targeted Monday worked with a regional non-nuclear scientific research unit called Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, or SESAME, reports The New York Times.Unusually, its nine-member council includes representatives from Israel along with Iran and several other Muslim countries. It was not clear whether the killings of the two Iranian scientists were linked to their association with the organization.Another scientist involved with SESAME was assassinated in January. Masoud Ali Mohammadi was also killed in a bomb attack, which Iranian officials also blamed on the US and Israel. But the AFP reports that Tehran’s deputy governor said the two attacks Monday were “different from previous assassinations.”

Britain and Ireland called on the Israeli ambassadors to their countries on Thursday to explain what they knew about the use last month of false British and Irish passports by the suspected assassins of a leading figure of Hamas in Dubai. France also said it was demanding an explanation from the Israeli Embassy in Paris about the use of a false French passport, suggesting that the diplomatic fallout from the incident was widening.

Robert Ford Named US Ambassador to Syria

How the United States supports Egypt's transition to democracy is exactly what worries Tantawi and his underlings on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has run Egypt by decree since Mubarak's fall. The generals, reportedly still miffed at Washington for giving up on Mubarak during the revolt, are furious with U.S. efforts to fund pro-democracy groups in Egypt by circumventing government channels. Scathing stories about American interference in Egypt crop up regularly in local papers, fueling xenophobia and scaring off fledgling nonprofits that otherwise would be receptive to American aid. The United States hasn't fared any better with the millions of anti-Mubarak protesters who are now coalescing into political parties in preparation for parliamentary elections in November. During the 18-day uprising that preceded Mubarak's resignation, chants against America were common, with young Egyptians pointing angrily to the "Made in USA" stamps on the tear-gas canisters that Mubarak's forces fired at them. A Gallup poll released earlier this year found that 75 percent of Egyptians oppose American aid to political groups and that two-thirds think the U.S. isn't serious about encouraging democracy in the Middle East and North Africa.

In June, the military council rejected a proposed budget from its civilian ministers because of its dependence on aid from the United States and other foreign donors

Patterson and her superiors in Washington must recognize that the military council and whatever elected government succeeds it will be accountable to the public in a way that was unfathomable in Mubarak's day

Iran has promised a swift and crushing response to a suicide attack in the country's Sistan-Baluchestan province that killed at least 35 people, including 11 Revolutionary Guards commanders.

a Sunni group called Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, claimed responsibility for the attack.

"We consider the recent terrorist attack to be the result of US action. This is the sign of America's animosity against our country," Ali Larijani, Iran's parliamentary speaker, said.

The leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah has accused Barack Obama, the US president, of "absolute bias" in favour of Israel and of disregard for the dignity of Arabs and Muslims.

the high expectations that followed Obama's election had been "shattered".

Nasrallah said any "illusions" anyone had about the US president being more even-handed in handling the interests of "the Arab nations, Arab and international governments, the Arab Islamic world and in the third world" had collapsed.

Britain’s Foreign Office decried the outcome. “It is deeply worrying that civilians are being tried before tribunals chaired by a military judge, with reports of abuse in detention, lack of access to legal counsel and coerced confessions,” Minister Alistair Burt said. The U.S. State Department was more cautious, saying it was “concerned about the severity of the sentences handed down” and about the use of military courts to try civilians. Nabeel Rajab, Bahrain’s most outspoken human rights advocate, told McClatchy that all 21 people “were targeted for their opinions and their political views, for opposing government policy.” He said all “were tortured, many subject to electric shock, many sexually harassed and all were deprived of the normal access to lawyers and families.”

At least 31 people were killed in the violence on the island, and more confrontations seem likely after the sentencing, putting an enormous question mark over a national dialogue between government and opposition that's due to begin July 1.“These sentences today are another indication that the ruling family of Bahrain are completely non-serious about this dialogue,” said Joe Stork, who follows Bahrain closely for Human Rights Watch, the independent U.S. human rights watchdog group. “There are people (in this group) who represent a portion of the political spectrum. Their views should be represented.”Rajab, a one-man human rights watchdog in Bahrain, concurred. “A big part of the people who should be at the table have been sentenced to many years,” he said. “With whom will you have a dialogue?”

Military and intelligence officials are understandably wary of labeling part of another state’s military establishment as terrorists: Officials at the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — which Mr. Pompeo ran in the Trump administration’s first year — oppose designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards or the Iraqi militias as terrorist groups, fearing a backlash that could constrain American troops.

Iraqi opposition to a continued U.S. military presence in the country was on the rise even before Trump put his foot in his mouth about “watching Iran” from Iraq, and that opposition seems certain to increase if these proposed designations of Iraqi militias and officials go ahead.

The proposed terrorist designations are a good example of why the Trump administration is having such difficulty building international support for its “maximum pressure” campaign. They make a habit of insisting that other governments cooperate against Iran. Then, instead of giving them incentives to cooperate, they threaten them with penalties and drive the other governments to find workarounds to increase their cooperation with Iran instead. The U.S. is used to having its allies and clients fall in line when our government tells them what they are supposed to do, but that isn’t happening here.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman opened his historic four-day visit to Moscow by signalling a new era of cooperation with Russia, but demanding that Iran, an ally of the Kremlin, end its “interference” in Middle East politics.

The visit to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Thursday is the first by a ruling Saudi monarch to Moscow and is widely seen as a potential turning point in Middle East politics, and even the conduct of world oil markets. More than 15 cooperation agreements worth billions of pounds were signed, ranging from oil, military and space exploration, leading the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to claim the visit marked the moment when Saudi-Russian relations “reached a new qualitative level”. In one of the most remarkable deals, the Saudis said they would purchase the Russian S-400 defence system.

The Saudis have traditionally seen the US as its chief – if not exclusive – foreign policy partner, but changes inside the Saudi regime, as well as Saudi fears about US reliability, have left the kingdom looking to diversify into wider set of alliances.

It will seem counterintuitive to many that someone would trade “senior official” status for a job in a “think tank” to exert more influence. But I had concluded in the late summer of 2012 that President Barack Obama’s words of a year earlier about Assad stepping aside were empty, and that my efforts in government to bring dead words to life were futile.  Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive, the State Department was saddled in August 2012 by the White House with a make-work, labor-intensive project cataloguing the countless things that would have to be in place for a post-Assad Syria to function. But how to get to post-Assad? The White House had shut down the sole interagency group examining options for achieving that end.

My job since April 2009, as a deputy to Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell, was to build a foundation for Syrian-Israeli and eventually Israeli-Lebanese peace. Progress on the former seemed to be happening. Yet by using deadly force on his own citizens, Assad ended, perhaps forever, a process that might have recovered for Syria the territory lost by his Minister of Defense father in 1967.  When the full story of Syria’s betrayal by a family and its entourage is written, the decision of Assad to sink a potentially promising peace mediation will merit a chapter.

President Obama would caricature external alternatives by creating and debating straw men: invented idiots calling for the invasion and occupation of Syria.  He would deal with internal dissent by taking officials through multi-step, worst-case, hypothetical scenarios of what might happen in the wake of any American attempt, no matter how modest, to complicate regime mass murder. The ‘logical’ result would inevitably involve something between World War III and an open-ended, treasury-draining American commitment.  The result of these exercises in self-disarmament would be Vladimir Putin and his ilk concluding that American power was, as a practical matter, equal to Palau’s; Ukraine could be dismembered, NATO allies threatened, and the United States itself harassed with impunity. He did not mean to do it, but Barack Obama’s performance in Syria produced global destabilization.

optimism is raging about the potential energy bounty lying underneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea. But energy development could as easily become a casualty as the cure for the region’s tortured geopolitics

Lebanon and Israel are at daggers drawn over new plans for exploration in offshore gas fields in disputed waters, and Hezbollah is using the energy dispute to ratchet up rhetoric against Israel. And this month, a Turkish naval ship intercepted an exploration vessel working in waters off Cyrus, threatening to escalate tensions between the Greek and Turkish halves of the divided island.

Israel’s first two gas fields are running at full speed, and two more could see investment decisions this year, notes Nikos Tsafos, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Meanwhile, Egypt brought the Zohr field, its own mammoth gas discovery, online in record time, which promises to ease a cash crunch in Cairo aggravated by importing pricey gas.

The real estate firm tied to the family of presidential son-in-law and top White House adviser Jared Kushner made a direct pitch to Qatar’s minister of finance in April 2017 in an attempt to secure investment in a critically distressed asset in the company’s portfolio

The failure to broker the deal would be followed only a month later by a Middle Eastern diplomatic row in which Jared Kushner provided critical support to Qatar’s neighbors. Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.

The Gulf crisis involving Qatar and its neighbors will likely be Kushner’s defining foreign policy legacy. The crisis followed a May visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by Kushner and President Donald Trump, who subsequently took credit for Saudi Arabia and its allies’ efforts against Qatar. The fallout has reshaped geopolitical alliances in the region, splitting the Gulf Cooperation Council and pushing Qatar, home to the Middle East’s largest U.S. military base, closer to Turkey and Iran. 

With Trump warning of a last chance for “the worst deal ever negotiated”, Britain, France and Germany have begun talks on a plan to satisfy him by addressing Iran’s ballistic missile tests and its regional influence while preserving the 2015 accord that curbed Iran’s nuclear ambitions for at least a decade. It is hard to say what might mollify the Trump administration, which is split between those who would like to tear up the agreement and those who wish to preserve it and which has said inconsistent things about its demands to keep the accord, U.S. and European officials said. Under U.S. law, Trump must decide again whether to renew the U.S. sanctions relief every 120 days, giving Congress, as well as U.S. and European diplomats, until mid-May to see if there is a way to finesse the issue. But the Brussels meeting has left European powers wary that whatever they agree, it may not be enough.

A collapse of the nuclear deal could see a breakdown in the relations between the United States and Europe that have underpinned the West’s security since World War Two, European diplomats and the senior U.S. official said, and could confirm Europe’s fears that it can no longer count on U.S. leadership

Washington wants U.N. nuclear inspectors to be able to visit military sites as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s verification of the nuclear deal. The IAEA says it does not distinguish between military and non-military sites and has repeatedly said Iran is honoring its commitments under the deal.

A dispute between Turkey and the United States over control of a north Syrian town has put the NATO allies on opposing sides of the conflict’s front line, deepening a diplomatic rift ahead of a visit to Turkey by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Turkish and U.S. troops, deployed alongside local fighters, have carved out rival areas of influence on Syria’s northern border. To Ankara’s fury, Washington allied itself with a force led by the Kurdish YPG, a militia which Turkey says is commanded by the same leaders overseeing an insurgency in its southeast.

Washington says it has no plans to withdraw its soldiers from Manbij, and two U.S. commanders visited the town last week to reinforce that message