Some 339 Palestinian prisoners may have been taken by bus to checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza last Wednesday, but it still looks like there is no movement in the international peace plan known as the "road map."
The release of the prisoners was due to be an Israeli goodwill gesture to Palestinian Premier Mahmoud Abbas. Instead, it achieved almost the opposite.
It sparked a bitter row as Palestinians accused Israel of trickery and deception and expressed angry dissatisfaction with the number of prisoners released.
Two months after the road map was formally launched at a US-led summit in Jordan and with less than two months to go until the hudna (ceasefire) declared by Palestinian militant groups ends, nothing seems to be moving between Israel and the Palestinians.
Israel says it is not willing to take further steps until the Palestinians do and the Palestinians say they cannot take further steps until Israel does more.
Israel continues accusing the Palestinians of being too weak and compliant to the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups as well as renegade gunmen belonging to Abbas' own Fatah party.
Reports last weekend said that under a deal brokered by the US, Israel was willing to hand over Ramallah to the Palestinians and allow Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to move freely in the central West Bank city, if he transferred to a Palestinian jail Jericho 17 hardcore militants who have been holed up in his headquarters for more than a year.
But although Arafat announced he would do so, or else send them to Gaza, he backed down and the militants have remained in the headquarters.
Israel feels uncomfortable that the quiet achieved since Hamas and the Islamic Jihad declared their unilateral ceasefire, depends entirely on the whim of the militant groups to adhere to -- and extend -- their truce, rather than on the Palestinian Authority (PA).
And after a shooting attack near Jerusalem Sunday night in which four Israelis were injured, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Israel would not withdraw from more reoccupied autonomous West Bank cities until the PA imposed the ceasefire on all factions.
Mofaz and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel would not continue with the road map process until the PA "dismantled the terror infrastructure."
But Abbas and his security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, have said they cannot and will not confront the militant groups so long as the hudna is in place. Any attempts to disarm them would mean "civil war," they argue.
Fending off accusations by right-wing legislators that by releasing prisoners he was giving the Palestinians too much while getting nothing in return, Sharon for his part told a parliamentary committee yesterday that "it's possible to say that we haven't given anything."
For that reason and in particular because of his disappointment at the prisoners' release, Abbas cancelled a meeting with Sharon scheduled for tomorrow.
The Palestinians are also disgruntled about continued Israeli construction within Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Sharon says Israel removed 22 settlement outposts since he first took office in March 2001 and is about to dismantle 12 more.
But the Israeli Peace Now movement says that while eight outposts were removed since the road map was launched, eight new ones have been set up, meaning a zero-sum result.
Nevertheless, the road map has achieved what previous plans failed to do during the last three years of mutual confrontations -- almost absolute calm.
Careful signs of some economic recovery are beginning to show on both sides. A large, modern shopping mall opened in Ramallah and although most shops inside have yet to open, an up-scale supermarket on the first floor is already operating.
And a front-page headline in the Israeli Ma'ariv daily announced that for the first time in months, new jobs are opening up in Israel's high-tech industry.
Anything might happen with the fragile hudna, analyst Ben Caspit said in the Israeli Ma'ariv daily last Wednesday, "but in the meantime the quiet ... has come to us all just when we need it and nobody is thinking about the day after tomorrow."
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs