More in ‘George Mitchell’

Are there impending direct peace talks between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, or an impending direct peace talk? The September 2 session in Washington, D.C., will last one day only, and will deal with one subject only: The West Bank construction freeze, currently scheduled to expire on September 26 (which, naturally, is right after ...

Last week, as President Barack Obama was in the Rose Garden announcing that he’d relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal of command in Afghanistan, about 40 people were sitting in a windowless midtown Manhattan meeting room listening to a retired Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, lay out his assessment of the security risks to the Jewish state inherent ...

• President Obama informed the Lebanese prime minister that he still believes Syria is transporting Scud missiles to Hezbollah. [Ynet]
• We learned that Australia’s expulsion yesterday of a Mossad representative related to the Dubai/Hamas assassination followed the country’s intelligence chief’s personal trip to Israel. Israeli diplomats called this “a very serious crisis.” [Haaretz]
• Others joined ...

Jerusalem Syndrome is actually a real thing. Visitors (and, less frequently, locals) really do occasionally find themselves believing they are characters from the Bible or messengers from God. Most frequent sufferers? Protestant tourists from the United States and Scandinavia. But Jews are not immune, either.
So whence the disorder? “Those who succumb are unable to deal ...

• Prime Minister Netanyahu and U.S. envoy George Mitchell met yesterday (and will meet today) to discuss the proximity talks’ ground rules. President Abbas will have his chance to agree to them Saturday. [WP]
• Sorry I missed this yesterday, but an editorial notes that the administration’s pressure on Israel accomplished little to nothing, and calls ...

• A month-long nonproliferation summit in New York City kicks off today. Expect Iran to take center stage—but, behind the scenes, the U.S. has long been working to ensure that an Iranian bomb doesn’t set off a proliferation chain reaction in the region. [NYT]
• U.S. envoy George Mitchell arrives in the Mideast today, and proximity ...

• People in the know say proximity talks will begin next month. President Obama admitted to Palestinian President Abbas that while he didn’t secure a total settlement freeze, Israel will commit no “significant” actions during negotiations. (Also, Abbas was invited to D.C.) [Haaretz]
• As it happens, however, President Abbas disclosed that he had actually asked ...

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell has arrived in Israel and met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and is also set to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. “We don’t go to meet just to meet,” says a U.S. rep. “We go there because we have some indication that both sides ...

• The United States has proposed less severe U.N. sanctions to try to get Russia and China onboard. [WSJ/Kurdish Globe]
• Meanwhile, an AIPAC-backed letter calling for harsh and unilateral Iran sanctions has been like a magnet for congressional signatures. [Ben Smith]
• The U.S. and Israeli administrations are constructing “the blueprint”: a list of everything that ...

If no one was sure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tell the 7,500 delegates who descended on Washington for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference early this week, everyone knew what Elliott Abrams was going to say. For more than a year, the ...