Word: palestinians
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Peled's proposals aren't likely to be adopted, but they are a sign of the deep anxiety in Israel's right-wing government over the Obama Administration's intention to move quickly toward the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. Particularly irksome to Netanyahu is Obama's insistence that Israel immediately freeze all construction in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - territories conquered by Israel in 1967 - that together with Gaza are envisaged as the basis of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu's government has thus far refrained from embracing the two-state formula...
...majlis on the second floor of the Hamas office in a quiet Damascus neighborhood. Mashaal, a handsome, soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair, sat flanked by Palestinian and Hamas flags. I asked about his reaction to the Obama speech. He was officially skeptical. He acknowledged the President's new tone, but wanted to know what the Obama Administration would do to pressure the Israeli government to stop building settlements on Palestinian lands. "The Americans have an abundance of experience in pressuring countries around the world," he said. "Why is it only in the case of Israel that America...
...resources," he said and repeated a previous offer to negotiate an arrangement based on Israel's withdrawing to pre-1967 borders. What about formal recognition of Israel? "Who is more in need of recognition," he asked, "Israel, which has a nuclear arsenal, great power and resources, or the Palestinian people? Which party should be given attention, the hangman or the victim, the oppressor or the oppressed?" He also had no apologies for Hamas' history of attacks directed against innocent Israelis, saying it was a matter of self-defense. (Watch TIME's video "Protesting Gaza, Carefully, in the West Bank...
...Obama is proposing. Gaza, which Hamas controls, lies in ruins. The border crossings are still sealed by Israel, except for some humanitarian goods, despite entreaties by Hillary Clinton, and the Gazans are unable to rebuild. Mashaal is also enmeshed in his own local political struggle, against Fatah, the moderate Palestinian party, which receives the bulk of international donations for reconstruction and whose security forces are armed and trained by the U.S. Hamas violently expelled Fatah from Gaza after its victory there in the 2006 elections; armed clashes between the groups have erupted again in recent weeks. Before the Israelis negotiate...
...inconvenient facts in its favor: it exists, it remains strong in Gaza - as a direct consequence of the real social services it provides and its relative lack of corruption compared with Fatah - and it has a legitimate complaint. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is inhumane and outrageous. Palestinians are imprisoned behind a barrier wall that does not conform to the 1967 lines; they are forced to endure hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks whose purpose seems humiliation as much as security; their lands are slit by highways that only settlers are allowed to use; the settlements, populated...