27 January 2010 Obama’s Middle Eastern Adventure By Gwynne Dyer Barack Obama had worse failures to address in his State of the Union message on Wednesday (January 27), but a few days before he owned up to the most foolish miscalculation that his administration had made in its first year in power. In an interview …
10 October 2009 No Peace, Just Prizes By Gwynne Dyer “Anyone who says that within the next few years an agreement can be reached ending the conflict (between Israel and the Palestinians) simply doesn’t understand the situation and spreads delusions,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman last week. But Barack Obama does say that. In …
4 June 2009 Obama and the Two-State Solution By Gwynne Dyer It was a good speech by any measure, and it will go some way towards lessening the mistrust of the world’s Muslims towards the United States. But when it comes to the core issue that has put Americans and Arabs on different sides of …
11 January 2009 Gaza: Worse than a Crime By Gwynne Dyer “Israel is not going to show restraint,” Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told the Washington Post on Saturday, after the United States abstained on Friday’s UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. All last week the speculation grew that Washington was going …
31 December 2008 Battlefield Gaza By Gwynne Dyer Yosef Sheinin, the chief rabbi of Ashdod, was understandably istraught at the funeral of Irit Shetreet, one of four Israelis to be killed by Palestinian rockets since Israel launched its bombing campaign against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Sunday. However, he was wrong to say that her …
27 December 2008 A Christmas Message from Ahmadinejad (And other Middle Eastern curiosities) By Gwynne Dyer There’s something about the Middle East that brings out the hypocrisy in people, and never more than at Christmas. Take, for example, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Britain’s Channel Four, in its never-ending quest for cheap controversy, has …
1 August 2008 Israel: The Politics of Indecision By Gwynne Dyer “I am proud to be a citizen of a country where the prime minister can be investigated like an ordinary citizen,” said Ehud Olmert on 30 July, announcing that he would resign as prime minister in September to defend himself against corruption allegations. He …
7 March 2008 Israel and Palestine: Nothing to Report By Gwynne Dyer “Twenty-four hours a day of rolling news to fill,” lamented the senior producer of an all-news radio station recently, “and only two hours of actual news to fill it.” But his problem is minor compared to that of people condemned to cover the …
16 October 2007 The Corpse Twitches: The Middle East “Peace Process” By Gwynne Dyer “We are at the beginning of a process,” said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after her four-day tour of the countries closely involved in the Arab-Israeli confrontation. But the “peace process” really began with the Oslo accords in 1993, and …
14 June 2007 The Islamic Republic of Gaza By Gwynne Dyer “I like this violence…It means other Palestinians are resisting Hamas,” said a US official some months ago to Alvaro de Soto, the UN envoy to the Middle East, according to de Soto’s confidential “End of Mission Report,” leaked to “The Guardian” newspaper last week. …