The outright rejection of the entire Trump plan puts the PA president on the same footing as his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, as a peace obstructionist who would rather go down in history as refusing to give an inch over ending the bloody conflict through fair compromise.
Arab leaders have more pressing domestic and international issues to attend to than the obstinacy of the Palestinian leadership, which has consistently rejected every peace plan ever presented to it.
The political aspects of the American president's peace initiative have been kept under wraps. The $50 billion regional development plan already introduced as part of it has been spurned by the Palestinians.
“You simply can’t have a serious discussion about an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and only invite one side to come talk about it," says Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum. "This is more about the politics inside Israel and inside the US than it is about any real efforts to get these two sides to an agreement."
Israel's current regional status and its economic, diplomatic and military clout allow it to advance strategic and even historic initiatives it could only have dreamed of in the past. It seems such initiatives are fundamentally palatable to the US administration and even coincide with the general outlines of its peace plan.
The inauguration of a new Egyptian naval base on the Red Sea was a symbol of the rivalries shaping the future of the Middle East, as well as north and east Africa.
It went from being a hybrid terror organization that controls its own territory to a classical decentralized terror network. Yet the ISIS branch in Sinai remains one of the most effective in the world.
The Iran-backed terrorist organization remains deterred by Israel’s military might, but pursuing precision missile factories would be taking an enormous risk of escalation. The coming months will reveal whether Hassan Nasrallah realizes the extent of the danger and decides to step back from the brink.
A small bomb on Tel Aviv would kill 84,000 instantly and wound 250,000, an interactive map shows.
Iran has two naval forces – its official one, and the secret maritime forces of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. How far is it willing to push the envelope in the Persian Gulf to retaliate for the death of Qassem Soleimani?
