All Policy Analysis by Robert Satloff

Yesterday, facing a mounting death toll among Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the contours of an international report on the ongoing conflict and issued what he termed a "clarion call" for an "unconditional cessation of violence." The sequence of events he proposed — a complete ceasefire

Last week, President George W. Bush pointedly called upon Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to "stop the violence," and Assistant Secretary of State Edward Walker testified that Arafat has "made no statements that would indicate that he is opposed to violence or that he even wants to see it stop." Yesterday

In the Middle East, this week witnessed a series of events occurring at such breakneck speed that it is important not to lose the significance of each: • On Thursday, President Bush issued an unprecedented statement calling on Chairman Yasir Arafat to "stop the violence," a statement that could lay

Five months after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, the U.S. government yesterday issued its first systematic assessment of the intifada-related actions of Israelis and Palestinians in the form of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for the year 2000. A close reading of the twenty-four page

Meaning of the ElectionThe Israeli people spoke in the most dramatic and convincing fashion. Viewed in the U.S. context, Ariel Sharon won a larger share of the vote 62.5 percent than any presidential candidate in history. Essentially, Israel voted to express one word: "enough!" enough violence, enough concessions, enough perception

While the White House has made no comment on the substance of President Bill Clinton’s proposal for Israeli-Palestinian peace, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Palestinian Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JMCC) have published what they say are respectively the Israeli and Palestinian minutes of the president’s December 23 oral

With President Clinton due to meet Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat today for a last-ditch diplomatic effort, attention is focused mainly on two aspects of the U.S. bridging proposals: the division of Jerusalem and the future status of Palestinian refugees. In contrast, little attention has so far been devoted to the

In recent weeks, Arab parties from the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the Arab League summit have called for the dispatch of a United Nations force to the West Bank and Gaza in order to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli military force. Rather than reject this idea because of its contribution

When Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat meets with President Clinton tomorrow, his message will be, "The Oslo accords are dead long live the Arab-Israeli peace process!" For Clinton, the priority should be to reject a new form of "peace process" that could make a bad situation even worse. That Oslo is

Background to the Current Violence There are five "macro" factors that explain the collapse of the Oslo process as we have known it: 1) the complementarity of violence and diplomacy in Palestinian strategy; 2) the U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian collusion on sidestepping any serious focus on compliance with past agreements before pursuing new

Arab heads-of-state meeting this weekend added one more nail in the coffin of the Arab-Israeli peace process by lending full support to the ongoing Palestinian uprising, suspending all further political, diplomatic and economic links with Israel, and fueling the propaganda war by labeling Israeli leaders and military officers as "war

By Saturday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will determine whether the Middle East inches closer to, or further from, the brink of regional conflict.This time period is critical because it comes between the two major summit meetings hosted in Egypt this week. On Tuesday, President Clinton announced an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire after

President Clinton announced bare-bones understandings today on Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire-plus-disengagement. The test of success of this understanding will be in the swift and full implementation of its objectives on the ground, with today's shooting at a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem boding ill for the success of this process. Even if fully

On October 13, 2000, Robert Satloff addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum along with David Makovsky. The following is a rapporteur's summary of his remarks. Read a summary of Mr. Makovsky's remarks. General Context The last two weeks have been symptomatic of the different sort of Middle East the

After eight years of Herculean effort to build Arab-Israeli peace, President Clinton faces the cruel irony that the level of violence in the Middle East may be higher when he leaves office than when he entered it. The region not only faces the prospect of the collapse of the peace

The fact that U.S. and Israeli officials--not Yasir Arafat--announced that the Palestinian leader had ordered a halt to violence in the West Bank and Gaza highlights the failure of the U.S.-led summit meeting in Paris. This underscores the prospect that the al-Aqsa Intifada--as Palestinians have termed the week-long spasm of

With a couple of minor exceptions, there was scant criticism of U.S. policy by Arab leaders. Contrary to expectation, officials from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority volunteered very few complaints. Israel's discontent with the relationship, on the other hand, was manifest and unmistakable. Israeli representatives from both ends

There have been at least seven agreements between Israel and the Palestinians in the past seven years. Negotiations with intermittent spurts of violence have been a way of life. Any new agreement will not be about an end to the conflict: The original 1993 agreement specified such an end, with

When Mideast peace talks convene at Camp David on Tuesday, President Clinton will need to bring more to the table--from members of Congress to carrots, from senators to sticks--than he has so far brought to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. With "Camp David II," the United States begins a journey into unknown Mideast

Hafiz al-Asad was a cautious and calculating leader, but he had not completed the steps to guarantee a smooth succession to his son Bashar by the time of his death. Nevertheless, Bashar al-Asad will probably become Syria’s next president. There are no significant or immediate threats to his accession. Some