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The following is a transcript from the NPR program Talk of the Nation. JOE PALCA, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Joe Palca in Washington, sitting in for Neal Conan. Tomorrow, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and newly elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will hold a summit in

For Palestinians, the January 9 elections represented a mechanism both for filling the void left by the death of Yassir Arafat and for adopting a path to a different future. Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, won a decisive victory, nearly two-thirds of the vote, despite calls by Hamas

The most candid inside account of the peace process ever written, as told by Washington's point man on the negotiations during the Bush and Clinton administrations.

This Sunday, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem will cast their votes at more than 3,000 polling places and elect a new president of the Palestinian Authority. The turnout is expected to be high, and Israelis have promised to lift checkpoints that otherwise might impede the voting

Something is stirring in Gaza. There is a sense of hope and possibility, a belief that it is time for a change. And there is a new discourse that includes all Palestinian factions and an open questioning of violence. I witnessed all this in an extraordinary event hosted in Gaza

The United States has had critical interests in the Middle East for as long as it has been a global power. Securing the flow of the region’s oil to the world economy has always been a central priority. During the Cold War, competition with the Soviet Union for Middle Eastern

Yasser Arafat has dominated the Palestinian national movement for the past 40 years. He has been a fixture on the landscape of the Middle East. He came to embody the Palestinian cause and was determined that no other Palestinian figure could emerge as a possible alternative to him. Not surprisingly

As the Middle East negotiator for the United States during the Clinton administration, I met with Yasser Arafat more than any other non-Palestinian -- probably more than 500 meetings in a series of windowless negotiating rooms, in his office overlooking the Mediterranean in Gaza, in the Oval Office with the

Nowhere are the paradoxes of the Middle East more evident than in Gaza. Ariel Sharon, Israeli prime minister and architect of the settler movement, is now being castigated by Israeli settlers for his decision to withdraw from Gaza. To win Knesset approval of his controversial plan, he had to depend

Before peace can be initiated, Israel, the Arab world, and the Palestinians must undergo a change in behavior and, in the case of the latter, find new, legitimate leadership. The Clinton administration was correct to put Yasser Arafat to the test in 2000. During the Camp David talks, even the

The recent bus bombings in Beersheba reminded Israelis that the lull in suicide attacks in Israel had less to do with the Hamas intention to conduct such acts and more to do with Israel's capability to prevent them. Israel's presence in the West Bank, including continuing raids into cities such

Nobody spent more time with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat during the years of the Oslo peace process than I did. Why didn't I see that he was incapable of ending the conflict with Israel? Certainly there were those who claimed he could not be trusted and would never make