A sense of the absurd hovers over the current negotiations
to form a new governing coalition in Israel. After previously serving in
governments together, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas are belatedly discovering that
they might just be incompatible. Having secured a clear mandate for a
government composed of right, ultra-right and religious-right partners,
Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be distinctly unenthusiastic about such a
prospect. While Tzipi Livni's principal stance seems principled rather than
absurd, it too contains an element of the unreal.
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.
Just the thought of another book about Middle East policy
under President Bill Clinton might make the most stout-hearted reader quake;
but he or she would be well advised to consider Innocent Abroad: An Intimate
Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,
by Martin Indyk. Indyk, who was (twice) U.S.
ambassador to Israel, and now
directs the Saban Center of Middle East Policy at the Brookings
Institution, has managed to write a new, very readable chronicle of Mideast
policy during the Clinton
