Middle East

"There is a mood that prevails in political circles in Israel that this is not a time to make concessions but to take a hard line." Daniel Levy, a senior ...

"My sense is, on something like this the no-surprise rule will apply," said Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. "America will have the opportunity to red-light it. Therefore I don't think it's in any way imminent." Original article

In a book about Iran, the writer Afshin Molavi reports that the religious part of the sermon often reinforces the political message. Original article

Daniel Levy, senior fellow and director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation, agreed with Hijab that Israel was stuck. ...

The diplomatic and military surge into South-Central Asia that will define the Obama administration's early years has already begun. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Centcom head Gen. David Petraeus have become regular visitors to Islamabad and Kabul. Vice President Joe Biden recently came through for huddled conversations, and veteran Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke has just embarked on his first trip as special envoy to the region. Enough congressional delegations are passing through that the Pakistani media

President Barack Obama has been thrust into center stage in Israel's general election. Not by choice, of course. Democratic hopeful Obama met with the leading candidates during his own campaign swing through the Middle East last July, and his newly appointed special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, met with them all this week. If it were up to the U.S. president, one assumes that would be it.

One of the first questions that President Obama’s Mideast envoy George Mitchell will have to address is how to deal with a politically empowered Hamas and a politically weakened Fatah.

I hope with all my heart that most of what I am going to write in this article will prove mistaken. President Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East peace process, and of Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (and de facto American broker for the Kashmir issue), are both in themselves very positive moves. The Bush administration’s neglect of these two conflicts was among its more disgraceful foreign-policy omissions. The appointment of such senior, respected and impressive