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Daybreak: Hard Not To Feel the Hope

Plus Israel’s Gorbachev, and more

by
Marc Tracy
September 02, 2010
The leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and the United States last night.(NYT)
The leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and the United States last night.(NYT)

• Talks today at the State Department. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas seemed equal parts insistent and conciliatory in speeches at last night’s banquet. [NYT]

• Obama, meanwhile, pledged his “full weight” behind the peace effort while asserting that the United States “cannot impose a solution.” [Politico]

• The figure driving much of the optimism and short timeframe is actually Netanyahu, who believes that he—with his hawkish bona fides back home—is the one who can actually get peace done. Columnist Aluf Benn compared him to Mikhail Gorbachev. [NYT]

• As the Palestinian Authority exerted great effort to find and arrest those behind the murder of four Israeli settlers, two Israelis were wounded in a shooting in Ramallah, in an attack also claimed by Hamas (which has accused the P.A. of overly harsh raids). [NYT]

• Former negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley argue that Palestinian leadership is in an unfairly weaker position vis-à-vis Israel. [WP]

• Tom Segev’s new biography shows, with documents from his estate, that famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was a Mossad agent. [Haaretz]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.