Date: June 17th 2008

"Palestine amidst a Region in Flux: Signs of Accommodation and Fears of War"
Palestine Center Information Brief No. 163 (17 June 2008)

By Ali Abunimah
Palestine Center Fellow

The waning of the Bush administration is having a marked impact on events in Palestine and the surrounding region. On the ground conditions are as difficult as ever; Palestinians are frequently injured and killed by Israeli forces as their land is seized. A few Israeli communities continue to face harassment, occasional injuries and rare fatalities due to armed attacks by Palestinian resistance groups. The humanitarian disaster caused by Israel's near total blockade on the civilian population in Gaza and severe restrictions in the West Bank is worsening.

Politically, however, the situation is in flux. As regional actors who staked all on support from the Bush administration now recognize how vulnerable this strategy has left them, they are trying their best to rearrange the political furniture and shore up their internal positions. Having failed to dislodge their rivals, U.S.-backed regimes are coming to terms with them. The direction of events points to an erosion of the U.S. effort to corral client states into an anti-Iran coalition anchored by Israel and Saudi Arabia and a realignment according to local interests and compromises.

Fragile buds of political accommodation are sprouting. The major wild card is whether the Bush administration will allow the long, slow decline in its influence to continue, and these buds to flourish, or whether it may try to dramatically reengineer the situation by, among other things, attacking Iran or encouraging Israel to do so. The U.S. election campaign adds a further element of uncertainty as to whether the situation will continue to improve gradually or dramatically worsen over the next six months.

This briefing surveys some of the key developments with a particular focus on Palestine.

Read the full article:
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/informationbrief.php?ID=193