News stories by Analysis by Jerrold Kessel, page 2

'Mine forever more, Will you still need me, Will you still feed me, When I'm sixty- four.' Israelis weren't explicitly intoning the Beatles when they gathered around their Bar-B-Q get-togethers or followed the live broadcasts of official state ceremonies.

Against all expectations, it's becoming the forerunner of a peace plan. Indeed, it might in the end even surprise the world as Israelis and Palestinians are forced into a peace. Even if, for now, it's shaping up as anything but peaceful.

There was a time when Israel was held in contempt by its neighbours for its over-liberal ways. They felt it did not 'belong' in the Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current visit to Washington is not just about trying to smooth over the crisis which has rocked U.S.-Israeli relations over the past fortnight.

In the middle of last week, it seemed that the old cliché about the light at the end of the dark Middle East tunnel was being confirmed: the U.S. had successfully cajoled both Israel and the Palestinian Authority into beginning to talk again.

Was it Yasser Arafat's biggest political error? A decade ago, the deadline for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel as envisaged in the 1993 Oslo peace accords thrust itself into the fruitless Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

The U.S. is raising the stakes in its bid to halt Iran's nuclear programme, putting the issue on a 'pressure track', says top U.S. general David Petraeus. The U.S. and other world powers are drumming up support for a fourth round of UN sanctions against Iran for its refusal to comply with repeated ultimatums to suspend uranium enrichment and to agree to a deal involving UN-backed nuclear fuel.

A bizarre diplomatic incident - even by the Byzantine-like standards of the old near East - has threatened already strained relations between Israel and Turkey.

In the past, whenever there was even a semblance of pressure from Washington on Israel, nerves in Jerusalem went all a-jangle.

United States President Barack Obama’s intended broad Mideast policies are running into the complexities of peacemaking - especially after the ‘Prince of Peace’ began insisting on the necessity of, sometimes, fighting for peace.