Word: east
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...elections looming, and their leader, Mahmoud Abbas, had to hang tough: he was demanding a total freeze to Israeli settlement-building on the West Bank - which was precisely what the Obama Administration had previously said it favored. Netanyahu was offering a partial freeze, not including new settlements in East Jerusalem, the desired capital of a future Palestinian state. This was a nonstarter for the Palestinians, but it had the holographic glow of a step forward. It was an "unprecedented" offer, Netanyahu trumpeted, with the joy of a chess master springing a trap.(See pictures from 60 years of Israel...
Suddenly the Obama Administration seemed wobbly on the Middle East; clearly, Clinton had been too bullish on Netanyahu's proposal (which had been negotiated over months with Middle East envoy George Mitchell and was seen, privately, by the Americans as real progress). But the Administration's mission was to get the parties into peace talks without preconditions. The Israelis were now in favor of talks. The Palestinians were setting preconditions. And Clinton had violated an essential rule of her job: boring is almost always better.(See pictures of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright...
Clinton's Three Qualities For the past 40 years, the awkward Middle East press conference has helped define the job of Secretary of State. You go to Jerusalem or Ramallah; you stand there "guardedly optimistic" in public; in private, you try to move a comma, but the Israelis or Palestinians move a semicolon to block your comma. The result is almost always the same: gridlock. The breakthroughs, when they come, emanate from others. Walter Cronkite asks Anwar Sadat if he'd be willing to go to Jerusalem ... and Sadat, to everyone's surprise, says yes. The Israelis and Palestinians hold...
...campaign indicates that she is a bit more conservative than the President, more the foreign policy realist than the Wilsonian idealist. It is also too early to judge her skill as a manager or negotiator - although her performance in Jerusalem indicates that she needs a few lessons in Middle East Haggling...
...last week of October, Secretary Clinton moved squarely to the center of the world stage, attempting, at the behest of her special envoys, to improve the rocky alliance with Pakistan and nudge the Middle East pugilists into talks. In the course of the trip, there were the first stray wisps of a hint that Clinton wanted to begin asserting her independence, as the Administration, facing roadblocks across the world, struggled for a firmer foreign policy tone after an opening nine months that might be called the Rodney King - "Can't we all just get along?" - phase...