Jordan

The news of the week in Israel’s bustling capital revolves around Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policy speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14, where Israel formally announced that it would indeed recognize an independent Palestinian state, if it were to be demilitarized and if would recognize Israel as a Jewish state, as proscribed in the “declaration of principles” of the 1993 Oslo accords, which were signed by Israel and the PLO on the White House lawn in September 1993, approved by the Israeli Knesset Parliament, yet never ratified by the PLO.

A cold war is "the key to understanding the Middle East in the 21^st century." So argue Yigal Carmon and three of his colleagues at the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) in a recent study, "An Escalating Regional Cold War."They have identified a major confrontation that the media has somehow missed - and which is the more important for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's just having been re-designated as president of Iran.