Salam Fayyad has formally resigned his post as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Note the word formally. In the half-presidential, half-parliamentary, mostly improvised political system of the Palestinian non-state, Fayyad will apparently stay on until President Mahmoud Abbas appoints a replacement, or until elections are held, or indeterminately as his resignation fades from memory.
Since becoming Secretary of State, indeed even during his confirmation hearings, John Kerry has made it clear that he places high priority on achieving a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and has spent the first months of his tenure exploring the possibilities for a reinvigorated peace process, stalled for the last three years. Speaking Tuesday at a press conference at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, during his third visit to Israel-Palestine in as many weeks, Secretary Kerry confirmed that initiatives aimed at building the Palestinian economy would be a key component of the effort to restart peace talks.
The Cyprus banking crisis presents, in microcosm, everything that is perverse about the European leaders’ response to the continuing financial collapse. And bravo to the Cypriot Parliament for rejecting the EU’s insane demand to condition a bank bailout on a large tax on small depositors.
Over the past days, growing unrest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in response to the death of a Palestinian in Israeli custody has threatened the relative calm that has prevailed recently, a result of the considerable amount of cooperation between the Palestinian security services and the Israeli army. While it seems clear that neither of the main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, are interested in an escalation, the speed with which large protests erupted in the last week demonstrates once again the danger of pretending that the status quo in the occupied territories is a sustainable one.
Before a day had passed after the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya—in which four Americans were killed, including J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and as many as ten Libyans trying to protect them—some commenters declared an end to the Arab Spring. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney tried to use the Libya attack and attempted attack on the U.S. embassy in Egypt, both reportedly sparked by an American-made anti-Muslim video, to score political points. His statement darkly warned that the protests could represent the end of a trajectory away from authoritarianism and instead a turn toward an "Arab winter."
Even those who weren’t as ready as Romney to declare the Arab Spring over were worried. Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch suggested that the fate of democracy hangs in the balance in the aftermath of the violence, which continues as rioters attack the U.S. embassy in Yemen. Not the events themselves, but how governments and peoples react in the days to follow, he writes, will decide.
I know you have a lot on your mind. It's been less than three months since you won Egypt's first democratic election for president as the Muslim Brotherhood's second-choice candidate. Activists who overthrew the old regime could yet rise against you if you convince them that you stole their revolution. Millions of hungry Egyptians are waiting for you to rebuild the economy—a job made harder because the army controls so much of it.
With the addition of women to the Olympic teams of Saudi Arabia, Brunei, and Qatar, the London Olympics mark the first time that every country participating in the Games is sending at least one female athlete. Many of them are only high school or college students, but they've overcome obstacles ranging from ultraconservative opposition to civil war to participate in the 2012 Olympics. The Prospect takes a look at the women who are breaking ground—and in some cases, national records—in fields from judo to shooting.
What a difference ten years makes. In 2001, Greece adopted the euro as its national currency. Its borrowing costs, which plummeted in expectation of this momentous event, were almost as low as Germany’s. Its growth rate for the year climbed to 4.1 percent and inflation hovered around 4 percent—a sharp decline from the double digits of the ’80s and ’90s. It was a country on the way up. On the other hand, Turkey, its neighbor and geopolitical arch-rival, was mired in a major financial crisis. Its currency was collapsing, its banking system was broken and unemployment was skyrocketing.
The polls had closed a few hours earlier in Cairo, after two days of voting for a president who may or may not have any power. The Muslim Brotherhood was preparing to claim victory. Meanwhile, in the desert to the west, three gunmen crossed the border between Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Israel, attacked an Israeli crew building a border fence, and killed a worker, an Arab Israeli named Saeed Fashafshe.
Before July 1, five apartment buildings in a West Bank settlement will be cut from their foundations and dragged over the hilly terrain to a new location elsewhere in the community. That's Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan, anyway.
From an engineering perspective, the idea is "delusional," as one expert put it. That's an understated evaluation. If the three-story buildings are moved and survive, it's reasonable to assume that they'll be riddled with visible and unseen fissures—just like Netanyahu's Likud party, his ruling coalition, and the jerrybuilt legal underpinnings of Israeli settlement in occupied territory. The interesting question is which of these flawed structures will collapse first.
As you may have read in last Sunday's New York Times, the government of Israel has declared German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass persona non grata because of a poem. True, it's a pretty lousy poem: "What Must Be Said," it's called, and that "Must" tells old Grass hands that it's musty Gunter Gasbag time. But literary criticism has never been a big priority for Benjamin Netanyahu, who followed up his Interior Ministry's PNG announcement with his own condemnation of Grass: "Shameful."
The headline of Anthony Shadid’s article in Sunday’s New York Times reads “Fear of Civil War Mounts in Syria as Crisis Deepens.” The Arab League’s Secretary General, Nabil el-Araby, is quoted as saying “I fear a civil war, and the events that we see and hear about now could lead to a civil war.” Others concur, while stopping short of saying that Syria is currently in a state of civil war.
