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Tag: George Mitchell

  • Palestine is open for business! by Ziad Asali

    This is an important piece on what  pragmatically can and should be supported right now to prepare for and achieve Palestinian independence.

    WASHINGTON, DC – Almost everything about the second Palestine Investment Conference held in Bethlehem in early June, which I had the honour of attending as a member of President Barack Obama’s official delegation, was encouraging.

    The Conference, which was designed to promote private sector development, was held at the elegant and modern Convention Center facility in Bethlehem from 2-3 June. President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed around 2,000 participants including Palestinian and Arab business people from around the world, impressive entrepreneurs from Gaza, and many international institutional representatives and investors. The message, summed up by the Quartet Envoy Tony Blair was simple: Palestine is open for business!

    While the first Investment Conference in 2008 focused on large development and public-private partnership initiatives, this Conference focused properly on small to medium-sized

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  • GEORGE MITCHELL FOR ISRAEL AND PALESTINE? A NEW HOPE

    A surprise development in the million dollar question of who President Obama will appoint to oversee  Israeli/Palestinian conflict intervention. I had lobbied hard in these pages earlier in the year for George Mitchell to be sent in. More recently there had been much speculation and controversy over the appointment of Dennis Ross. Serious media reports now indicate that former Senator Mitchell may be a strong possibility, and that this will meet with a much better reception in the world beyond the United States. I want to reiterate my arguments earlier for why Mitchell is crucial.

    Here is an excerpt from Change in U.S. Middle East Policy:

    The president must be a person who sees the need for constant engagement on the ground in Israel, so that both sides have a third party they can rely on to push for compliance to agreements. Both sides of the conflict need …

  • Change in U.S. Middle East Policy: A Religious Argument to Obama and McCain

    I just published this piece in the Washington Jewish Week. I wrote it as a member of the Rabbinic Cabinet of Brit Tzedek Ve’Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, a national American Jewish organization with over thirty thousand members and thirty eight chapters, which argues in Washington for a just solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict.

    It is settled: The election is about change. Sen. Barack Obama had made that his central motif all along, but now Sen. John McCain is onboard. Now that everyone is using the word “change,” it begs a question. The question is not “Who stands for change?” but rather, “Whose changes are going to really make a difference, and what are those changes?”

    One place where change is desperately needed is in the disastrous United States policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that has been in effect for the past eight years. It

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