Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The current period of intense violence in the region has resulted in a serious unraveling of the Arab-Israeli peace process and suggest the near impossibility of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. Two defining moments have led to this conclusion: first, the Oslo agreement that raised high hopes for peace and then the failure of Camp David II that shattered them.
Prime Minister Sharon's analogy of George W. Bush's current policies to the abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 is warped and ill-advised. But, the prime minister had a point. There exists a much more apt analogy which- not surprisingly- does go back to 1938-39. It is not Chamberlain and the Nazis, but the British and the publication of the pro-Arab 1939 White Paper on Palestine.
It is important to have partners in the war on terrorism, Carnegie's Robert Kagan writes, but a unilateral determination to act invariably precedes a policy of effective multilateralism.
Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, it is striking how many remnants of that era remain. Partly as a result of Russia's slow progress in becoming a "Western" country, European and American leaders are reconsidering the kind of relationship they wish to cultivate with Russia.
Discussion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict often focuses more on the politics of the conflict than on the terrible human cost. The Carnegie Endowment hosted a Werner Kaspar and Kathleen Newland to discuss the humanitarian consequences of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have fundamentally changed the strategic balance in the Middle East and have had a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carnegie's Shlomo Avineri argues that four facets can be discerned from current Russian attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that inform Russian policy.