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Comments (0)The United States has invited Israel and the Palestinians to relaunch direct peace talks next month, though the parameters remain vague.
“On behalf of the United States government I’ve invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to meet on Sept. 2 to resolve all final status issues which we believe can be completed within one year,” Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, said in a conference call on Friday.
George Mitchell, the top U.S. envoy to the region, suggested the parameters to the talks had yet to be determined.
“It will be for the parties themselves to decide the manner in which they will be addressed,” he said, responding to a question regarding when and how the parties will get to the final-status issues, which include borders, Jerusalem and refugees. “There are differences of opinions on both sides on how best to succeed. We don’t expect all of those differences to disappear when talks begin.”
The two leaders, joined by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah, have been invited to dine with President Obama on Sept. 1; prior to the dinner, Obama will meet with each leader separately. The next day, Netanyahu, Abbas and Clinton will meet at the State Department to launch talks.
Netanyahu accepted the offer within minutes of its announcement. It was not immediately clear if Abbas, Mubarak and Abdullah had accepted their invitations.
“Reaching an agreement is a difficult challenge but is possible,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “We are coming to the talks with a genuine desire to reach a peace agreement between the two peoples that will protect Israel’s national security interests, foremost of which is security.”
U.S. Tells Israel Iran At Least a Year from Bomb
U.S. officials reportedly said they have persuaded Israel that Iran is at least a year away from a nuclear weapon.
Troubles besetting Iran’s nuclear program mean that Iran has at least a year’s “dash” time, Gary Samore, a National Security Council official, told The New York Times.
The dash time refers to estimates of how long a concerted effort to convert low-grade uranium into weapons-grade material would take. Israel reportedly had believed that Iran might have a weapon by next March.
The Times quoted only U.S. officials as saying that their Israeli counterparts were reassured; Israeli officials were quoted as saying only that their assessments were “coming into line” with the U.S. analysis, but that they still had suspicions that Iran was maintaining a secret enrichment site.
Allen Describes Post-‘Macaca’ Search for Jewish Roots
Former U.S. senator George Allen said he believed denying his Jewish past helped cost him re-election in 2006.
Allen, who lost the Virginia seat in a razor-close election to James Webb, spoke Thursday for the first time of the fallout from the controversy of his denying his Jewish past. He also spoke of his Jewish roots. At the time of the election, Allen heatedly denied any Jewish heritage, although research by the Forward and other Jewish media outlets made it clear he had Jewish ancestors.
The journalistic digging into Allen’s past was prompted by his use at a rally of the word “macaca,” a slur against people of color that is commonplace in North Africa. Allen subsequently revealed that his Tunisian-born mother, traumatized by the Nazi occupation of her native land, had sworn him to secrecy about his Jewish roots.
He made clear that the controversy contributed to his loss. “All sorts of things happened in that 2006 campaign, which we lost by 4/10ths of 1 percent,” he said.
Speaking in Reston, Va. to the annual Jewish Learning Retreat of Chabad-Lubavitch’s Jewish Learning Institute, Allen, a Republican, described the joy of researching the roots of his mother’s heritage as a Lumbroso, a venerated Italian-Jewish line.
His biggest takeaway, he said, was greater sensitivity to minority rights—he said using the word “macaca” to needle a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent was a mistake, but he denied knowing that the term was a slur.
From the moment his mother revealed her Jewish past to him in the summer of 2006, Allen said, “The core principle of freedom of conscience, beliefs and religion was no longer just a matter of enlightened philosophy to me—it became deeply personal in my heartwrenching realization of how fear and persecution so tormented my loving, loyal mother.”