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Yasir Arafat received a standing ovation from the United Nations General Assembly last week when he reiterated Palestine's claim to statehood and eventual full UN membership. He had hoped to receive even more substantive backing when he asked the member-states of the Arab League to lend tangible support to the

As U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross continued his efforts this week to bridge gaps preventing an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on "further redeployment" (FRD), Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat was at the Arab League Foreign Minister's meeting in Cairo seeking backing for his plan to establish a Palestinian state next year. His efforts

Return of U.S. Mediation: Less than four months after the standoff between the Clinton and Netanyahu administrations over the extent of Israel's further redeployment (FRD) from the West Bank, Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross is back in the Middle East trying to "narrow the differences" between the Israeli and

With Yasir Arafat in South Africa and Benjamin Netanyahu poised to take his summer vacation, Israeli spokesman David Bar Illan recently predicted "not much progress [in the peace process] the next couple of weeks." Recent days have, in fact, witnessed significant, though not yet successful, backroom maneuvering inside the fractious

With the first high-level, direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 16 months reaching an impasse just hours after they opened, pressures facing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu are heating up. From Gaza come statements that Palestinians will talk only with Washington, which has already declared that the "ball

In the weeks since Yasir Arafat first called for an emergency Arab summit to address the peace process stalemate, Arab capitals have responded with near-unanimous support for the idea. But despite that agreement-in-principle, actual planning for a summit has been hampered by disputes among Arab countries on a few minor

In the five years since the September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords (formally, the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles), not much peace has been produced. The feeling of hope and optimism among ordinary people has died down. One issue for Palestinians has been the continuing control by Israel. Despite the

With headlines both here and in the Middle East focused on the U.S.-Israel confrontation over "further redeployments," little attention has been paid in recent weeks to the lost opportunity to close the file on two items left from Oslo's interim agenda: the Gaza Airport and the Gaza Industrial Estate at

Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Near East and South Asian Affairs The May 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami as president of Iran has raised hopes and expectations of change in Iran's domestic and foreign policy. In the foreign policy arena, it is possible to discern a