ACKBASSWARDS:

Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace. (Seymour M. Hersh, April 6, 2009, The New Yorker)

American and foreign government officials, intelligence officers, diplomats, and politicians said in interviews that renewed Israeli-Syrian negotiations over the Golan Heights are now highly likely, despite Gaza and the elections in Israel in February, which left the Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of a coalition that includes both the far right and Labor. Those talks would depend largely on America’s willingness to act as the mediator, a role that could offer Barack Obama his first—and perhaps best—chance for engagement in the Middle East peace process.

A senior Syrian official explained that Israel’s failure to unseat Hamas from power in Gaza, despite the scale of the war, gave Assad enough political room to continue the negotiations without losing credibility in the Arab world.

Rather than attacking democrats in Palestine and collaborating with the dictatorship in Syria, Israel ought to have declared Palestinian statehood and regime-changed Damascus.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 29, 2009 6:44 AM