We'd like to blog about Joe Biden's Tel Aviv speech, but the White House still hasn't e-mailed a transcript to reporters (perhaps because it was undergoing some last-minute revisions?).
News reports say Biden urged Israel and the Palestinians to begin proximity talks without delay. But they're already in doubt: The Arab League held an emergency meeting in Cairo last night (عربي), and decided to withdraw its support for the talks because of the new construction in Ramot Shlomo.
Several Palestinians were injured in Hebron this morning (عربي) in fighting between protesters and Israeli security forces.
Dozens of marchers allegedly threw rocks at Israeli soldiers near the Tomb of the Patriarchs; the IDF fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at the crowd. Four Palestinians were detained, according to an AFP report. None of the injuries sound serious (عربي).
I've only been to Hebron once. It was one of the stranger experiences in my travels in the Middle East -- the overwhelming military presence to protect a few hundred settlers, the settler-only road, the grave of Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein. The tension is palpable.
The city is a flashpoint again this week, after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to add two West Bank religious sites -- the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem -- to a national heritage plan. The list includes other religious sites and "historic sites in Zionist history"; the Israeli government has earmarked NIS400 million (US$106 million) to refurbish the sites.
Well -- not exactly. The Palestinian Authority announced today (عربي) that it arrested six "al-Qaeda sympathizers"; the men reportedly had a cache of explosives and were planning to attack targets in the West Bank.
But Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Ramadan, the head of preventive security in Jenin, said that men have no known connections to al-Qaeda. They're allegedly inspired by Osama bin Laden -- but they were operating autonomously.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh wants the other armed groups in Gaza to stop firing rockets into Israel.
The group, worried about the potential for Israeli retaliation, has spent weeks trying to broker a Gaza-wide cease-fire. Haniyeh said in late November that he had reached a deal, but Islamic Jihad and the PFLP quickly denied those reports.
Violence in Gaza, a stalled peace process, deepening tension between Hamas and Fatah: 2010, so far, looks like a bad rerun of 2009.
Israeli jets bombed targets in Gaza overnight in response to three days of sporadic rocket and mortar attacks from the Strip. A mortar fired on Wednesday landed in the northwestern Negev; on Thursday, a rocket landed near Netivot; and yesterday, two mortars landed in the western Negev (one of them on the Palestinian side of the border).
None of the attacks caused any damage or injuries, according to Israeli authorities. The Salah ad-Din Brigades have claimed responsibility for the attacks, which ended two weeks of relative calm in Gaza.
Andrew Exum came out of his semi-retirement to post some thoughts on Hizballah's new policy platform. He makes some points which are narrowly correct but sorely lacking in context, and I think he gets too hung up on the parts of the document where Hizballah says mean things about America.
The Jerusalem Post reports that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, has canceled his trip to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage, raising hopes that a prisoner swap deal for captured Israel Defense Forces Corporal Gilad Shalit is going to happen soon.
Anticipation that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners might soon be released in a deal with Israel was so high in Gaza that Haniyeh had been asked to remain in the Gaza Strip to greet the prisoners, said a Hamas legislator in Gaza City.
"We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation ... [Operation Cast Lead] has restored Israel's deterrence ... Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing." - Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Jan. 12, 2009
"I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society." - Lawrence Wright
I finally got around to reading Wright's big New Yorker take out on the situation in the Gaza Strip and highly recommend it. Though Wright's story is subtitled "What really happened during the Israeli attacks?", the piece is more of a tour de misère of what ails Gaza than an investigation into the veracity of the Goldstone report. The unavoidable conclusion one draws is that Israel is building its own worst enemy.
Not that he was ever terribly popular, of course. But Mahmoud Abbas's bumbling response to the Goldstone Report appears to have hurt his approval rating: He's polling at just 12.1 percent, according to a Jerusalem Media and Communications Center poll, down from 17.8 percent in June.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's approval rating remained steady -- at an equally unimpressive 14.2 percent.
Neither man fared well on a "mock ballot" question, either. Abbas would receive just 16.8 percent of the vote if elections were held tomorrow, with Haniyeh at a statistically identical 16 percent.
The poll was based on 1,200 interviews in Gaza and the West Bank. It's starkly different from last month's International Peace Institute poll, which found much stronger support for both men.
The International Peace Institute has a new survey out that finds strong Palestinian support for a two-state solution and for the Arab Peace Initiative. Full data is available in a PowerPoint presentation on their Web site.
55 percent of respondents favor a two-state solution; 66 percent support the peace initiative, which calls for Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and Arab recognition of Israel.
