Ambassador Richard Schifter

At the Bahrain Conference of last June, the United States recommended approval of a program that would invest $ 50 billion in the improvement of the economies of the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon.  The major beneficiaries of this program would be the more than 5 million people living in the area whom […]

Discussions of last week’s Bahrain Conference have stressed the point that the Conference was designed to deal only with economic issues.  It was to be followed by a conference that would be attended by representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Authority at which the political issues would be discussed and, hopefully, a peace agreement would be reached. What appears to have been […]

In Paris last month, diplomats reaffirmed their support for a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So they said. Yet, they once again failed to discuss the single most important obstacle to attainment of that goal: the insistence of even “moderate” Palestinians of the Fatah party on an alleged “right of return.”   […]