5 December 2012 Dead, Dead, Dead: The Middle East “Peace Process” By Gwynne Dyer It’s as if the world’s leaders were earnestly warning us that global warming will cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. They’ve actually been dead for a long time already. So has the Middle East “peace process”. As soon as Prime Minister …
5 November 2012 The One-State Solution By Gwynne Dyer “Everybody knows how this will end,” wrote Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s best-known journalists, in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot recently. “There will be a bi-national (state).” The “two-state solution” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead; long live the “one-state solution.” The two-state solution, promised by the …
1 May 2012 After the “Peace Process” By Gwynne Dyer The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, were supposed to lead, through a “peace process”, to the final solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: two sovereign states living side by side in peace. It would have been a sulky, grumpy peace, and the Palestinians would only have …
20 May 2011 Obama’s Fine Words By Gwynne Dyer Barack Obama’s speech on the Middle East lasted for forty minutes, but did it say anything new? Not exactly, although it did reinstate an old rule that had been abandoned. Two years after the American president’s much-ballyhooed speech in Cairo promised a new relationship with the …
24 January 2011 The Next Arab-Israeli War By Gwynne Dyer It’s time to think about the nature of the next Arab-Israeli war. The release by the Arab satellite network al-Jazeera of 16,000 leaked Palestinian documents covering the past ten years of peace negotiations has driven a stake through the heart of the already moribund “peace …
3 January 2011 The Vanishing Two-State Solution By Gwynne Dyer What does it mean when the United States, Britain, France and Spain upgrade the diplomatic status of the Palestinian delegations in their capitals, as they all did in the past year? When the number of countries recognising Palestinian statehood now exceeds one hundred? Binyamin Ben …
19 December 2010 Dead Peace Process By Gwynne Dyer “This parrot is no more,” rants former “Monty Python” member John Cleese in the English-speaking world’s best-loved TV sketch. “It has ceased to be,” he tells fellow Python Michael Palin, playing a pet-shop owner who insists that the obviously dead bird is still alive. “It’s expired …
15 March 2010 Israel Holds the Whip Hand By Gwynne Dyer The very public row over the Israeli government’s humiliation of US Vice-President Joe Biden has led to excited speculation that the US government might actually defy Israel this time. Don’t hold your breath. The White House has not actually prevailed in a policy dispute …
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 …
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 …