Gershom Gorenberg
Obama stopped through for two nights and a day, as if he were writing one of the New York Times travel pieces about how to spend 36 hours in some locale. At first glance, the trip was purely about photo-ops, gathering footage for later campaign ads that will air in south Florida. But there [...]

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In the past, when the press has reported that Israel’s leaders were talking to Syria about returning the Golan Heights for peace, I was skeptical. First Yitzhak Rabin, then Binyamin Netanyahu, then Ehud Barak signalled to Syria that they were willing to contemplate a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
Dan Kurtzer, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and an Orthodox Jew, is in Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary celebrations. This morning my wife heard him being interviewed on Israeli Radio, in Hebrew, about the U.S. election. Kurtzer explained that he’s backing Barack Obama.
This was not exactly a revelation. Kurtzer has explained his reasons [...]

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Alas, Barack Obama is apparently not reading South Jerusalem. If he were, perhaps his campaign would have responded to Jimmy Carter’s reported plans to meet Hamas leaders in Damascus with something a bit more sophisticated than this statement, carried by JTA (thanks to Ben Smith for the head’s up):
“Senator Obama does not agree with President [...]

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Last week Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, gave an interview to the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam. The choice of venue is significant, since Al-Ayyam is a pro-Fatah paper, linked to the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah, and Meshaal is the presumed leader of Hamas, whose breakaway government rules Gaza since last [...]

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