Apartheid Arab-Israeli conflict George Mitchell Israel South Africa

Guest Column: A new “grand bargain” in the Middle East

What follows is a column by Thomas Mitchell, lightly edited. We often read and hear comparisons between Israel and South Africa under apartheid. Mitchell finds lessons to be learned from South Africa, but not the most familiar ones. Instead, he focuses on diplomatic efforts to end South Africa’s occupation of Namibia and its confrontation with […]

Arab-Israeli conflict Benjamin Netanyahu George Mitchell Israel Middle East peace process Northern Ireland Palestinians

George Mitchell rejects the “F-word”

Much of the media are dismissing today’s Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas summit as an abject failure. Check out the Guardian, which uses the word “failure” no less than three times in its chronicle of the UN meetings, along with “meager results,” “inauspicious start” and other formulations to characterize negotiations that supposedly yielded nothing. I haven’t come across the […]