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
8 January 2008 George W Bush and the Middle East By Gwynne Dyer “Let’s not raise our expectations too high. We are talking about weak leaders on both sides, leaders who can barely stand on their own two feet….It seems fair to say that no great miracle will happen here.” So wrote Israeli journalist Yoel
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.
31 May 2007 The War of Six Days and Forty Years By Gwynne Dyer On the 5th of June, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In six days it annihilated the Arab air forces, defeated the Arab armies, and conquered the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza