The Israeli-Palestinian peace process hit a serious snag this week when Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas opted for a national unity pact with Hamas, rather than a renewal of peace talks with Israel. Now the peace talks were already in deep trouble before the unity deal with Hamas was reached. The Palestinians were making ever steeper demands that no Israeli leader could agree to just to renew the negotiations for another 8 months. Yet reports indicate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ready to make some major concessions to the Palestinians to keep the talks alive. But that won’t be necessary now given the way the Palestinians have thumbed their noses at the US and Israel. Still, these developments have raised some urgent questions about the peace process and the American role in the region. For instance, how will it affect US-Israeli relations? What is Israel’s explanation for why the peace talks with the Palestinians have been faltering? Is it still possible to get an extension of those talks? And on a separate topic, is Israel worried about the results of the recent high-level talks over Iran’s renegade nuclear program? To get answers to these and other questions, we turned this week to Ron Dermer, Israel’s new ambassador to the US.The View From Washington! That’s our main feature this week here on Front Page Jerusalem. Amb. Dermer has been Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest advisor over recent years, and has now been sent to represent his country in the US capital. We’ll hear from him about the recent breakdown in the Palestinian peace talks, as well as why the world has failed so far in stopping Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
On today’s program, we’re starting out with an exclusive interview which Front Page co-host Earl Cox conducted last week with Israel’s new ambassador in Washington, Mr. Ron Dermer. Ron is one of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidants and has been at the center of the recent efforts to keep the peace talks alive with the Palestinians. He’ll give us his views on why those talks are stymied, as well as what Western leaders need to do to stop Iran’s dangerous nuclear drive.
Word From Zion
Our second feature on today’s program is a report by Front Page reporter Aaron Hecht on a recent military briefing delivered in Jerusalem by a top US general involved in the field of missile defense. Gen. John Shapland had only good things to say about Israel’s lead role in developing multi-layered missile defense systems to meet the growing threat of rocket attacks.
Join hosts Earl Cox, Ben Kinchlow and David Parsons for this week’s Front Page Jerusalem, on a radio station near you or visit our website to download the MP3 and to subscribe to program podcasts
Nine months of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians ended in a complete meltdown this week when the United States failed to get the two sides to extend the negotiations through the end of 2014. The breakdown in talks is a major defeat for US Secretary of State John Kerry, who invested a lot of time and energy in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while ignoring other festering problems in the region, like the Syrian civil war. Besides his mishandling of the talks, Kerry also was taking a lot of heat for his warning this week that Israel could turn into an apartheid state absent a final peace deal. Now both Israel and the Palestinians blamed the other side for derailing the talks. The last straw came when Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas opted for a reconciliation pact with Hamas, rather than extending the talks with Israel. US President Barack Obama tried to put a positive spin on the failed effort, saying the parties simply needed to take a pause from the talks to reassess their positions. But the diplomatic collapse has raised a lot of serious questions about the consequences for Israel and the region. Questions like: Does this spell the end of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking for the foreseeable future? Should one side or the other be blamed and punished for sabotaging the talks? Will Hamas and the Palestinian Authority stick with their new reconciliation pact or will it fall apart like past unity deals? And will Europe and the United States accept a united Palestinian front that includes Hamas? The Pause in the Peace Process!That’s our main feature next week here on Front Page Jerusalem. We’ll be speaking with David Horovitz, editor-in-chief of the Times of Israel news site, about the possible fallout from the recent breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
