SCROLL DOWN PLEASE........... |
|
Sunday, May 31, 2009
10 Most Poisonous Animals in the World
Malay Billionaires
That, however, is almost 29% lower than the US$3.65bil (RM12.84bil) gained last year and it only represented 7% of the entire US$36.41bil (RM127.74bil) accumulated wealth of all the 40 individuals on the list.
Prominent corporate figures Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary and Ambank group chairman Tan Sri Azman Hashim maintained their positions as the top two richest Malay men.
Syed Mokhtar’s assets are worth US$1.1bil (RM3.86bil) while Azman’s assets totalled US$470mil (RM1.65bil).
Three additional Malay magnates entering the list this year are Puncak Niaga Holding Bhd chief executive officer Tan Sri Rozali Ismail at the 31st position with US$130mil (RM456.08mil), Hard Rock Cafe Malaysia Enterprise chairman Tan Sri Syed Yusof Syed Nasir placed 37th with US$100mil (RM350.83mil) followed by Ranhill Bhd chief executive officer Tan Sri Hamdan Moha-mad at No. 38 with US$98mil (RM343.82mil).
Friday, May 29, 2009
A National School System can help realize 1Malaysia
KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 -- For 1Malaysia to succeed, the government needs to streamline the education system by having a national school system to promote national integration, said former Dewan Negara Speaker Tan Sri Michael Chen.
He said through the system, the national language would be the basic language or the medium of instruction to promote nation building, while Mandarin, Tamil and English would be taught as an option.
Chen said the system was similar to the Switzerland education system where parents were given the opportunity to choose the preferred language to be learned by their children, whether Italian, German or English, depending on their needs.
"All schools will have the same system, same finance (financial aid) and the same curriculum from the government," he said at a forum on "1Malaysia" organised by the Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama)'s Centre of Excellence and Taima Journalism Academy, here, Thursday.
Forum moderator and Bernama deputy editor-in-chief Zulkefli Salleh had earlier asked Chen for his opinion on the 1Malaysia concept mooted by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
He said the national school system would enable children of different races to seek education at the same type of school, thus promoting racial integration from an impressionable age.
"This means if the parents want their children to excel in English, Mandarin or Tamil, they can send them to any school they want," said Chen who served under three prime ministers - Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, Tun Hussein Onn and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
However, he said, this did not mean that vernacular schools would be abolished.
"The vernacular schools will remain but will be using the national curriculum where the national language is a compulsory subject, while the other languages will be taught as an option.
"Through the proposed system, everyone will have an equal platform to get an education, thus eliminating claims of government favouritism towards certain schools when disbursing aid," he added.
-- BERNAMA
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Two PKR Leaders admitted meeting Aminah
BUKIT MERTAJAM: A PKR supreme council member and a special assistant to a Penang executive councillor have owned up to meeting former party colleague Aminah Abdullah.
Lawyers Cheah Kah Peng and Peter Lim Eng Nam, however, denied any wrongdoing, saying they had met for lunch at Aminah’s house and the atmosphere was jovial and light-hearted.
“I feel sad because she has converted a perfectly bona fide chat into something that has turned ugly,” Cheah told a press conference yesterday.
Aminah created a storm when she claimed that two PKR leaders had offered her the Penang Municipal Council president’s post to withdraw from contesting the Penanti by-election.
She claimed that she was also offered the Penang Deputy Chief Minister I post to rejoin the party if she won.
She also claimed that she would be given RM80,000 as compensation for what she had spent so far in preparation for the May 31 by-election.
Cheah stressed that he and Lim, who is a special assistant to state Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry, Rural Development and Flood Mitigation Committee chairman Law Choo Kiang, went to Aminah’s place on her invitation.
He said they also went “in their own personal capacity” without representing any organisation, including PKR.
Cheah added that Aminah had during their lunch conversation expressed how good it would be to meet old friends and to possibly re-join the party.
“One of the things she implied during our chat was that she might not continue with her potential candidature in the by-election.
“She was inviting us to share our views on this matter. So, we gave her our two cents worth,” he said.
Cheah, who has been in PKR since 1998, said he got to known Aminah and her family a year later.
Lim, who is Batu Kawan PKR division deputy chief, said he got to know her in 2000.
They said they would visit her during Hari Raya and on other festive occasions.
Even after Aminah quit the party in 2007, Cheah said he and Lim kept in contact with her.
He said they attended her daughter’s engagement ceremony in March.
Lim said he was disappointed that Aminah, who had cooked for them, had also quietly recorded their conversation.
“I did not expect to be used this way. I feel sad and very hurt,” he said. The Star
Monday, May 25, 2009
Sultan Selangor safely home from US after heart surgery
SEPANG: Selangor Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who was in the United States for heart surgery, returned home on Monday to a warm welcome.
The private jet touched down at 3.40pm and he walked out with minimal help to greet family members, Raja Muda Perak Raja Dr Nazrin Shah, Selangor Mentri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim and 250 others at KLIA’s Bunga Raya VIP complex.
Dressed in a brown moleskin jacket over a denim shirt, black trousers and sneakers, the Sultan had some tea before going home.
His personal physician Datuk Dr Anuar Masduki said the heart surgery on May 2 involved three procedures over nine hours and went smoothly with the Sultan making satisfactory recovery.
Followup treatment would be done at Sime Darby SJMC, he said. The Star
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Chinese and Arabs are buying huge farmland abroad
Rich food importers are acquiring vast tracts of poor countries' farmland. Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism?
 | |
EARLY this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to them by the government. The investors are exempt from tax in the first few years and may export the entire crop back home. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) is spending almost the same amount as the investors ($116m) providing 230,000 tonnes of food aid between 2007 and 2011 to the 4.6m Ethiopians it thinks are threatened by hunger and malnutrition.
The Saudi programme is an example of a powerful but contentious trend sweeping the poor world: countries that export capital but import food are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have land to spare. Instead of buying food on world markets, governments and politically influential companies buy or lease farmland abroad, grow the crops there and ship them back.
Supporters of such deals argue they provide new seeds, techniques and money for agriculture, the basis of poor countries’ economies, which has suffered from disastrous underinvestment for decades. Opponents call the projects “land grabs”, claim the farms will be insulated from host countries and argue that poor farmers will be pushed off land they have farmed for generations. What is unquestionable is that the projects are large, risky and controversial. In Madagascar they contributed to the overthrow of a government.
Investment in foreign farms is not new. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 foreign investors rushed to snap up former state-owned and collective farms. Before that there were famous—indeed notorious—examples of European attempts to set up flagship farms in ex-colonies, such as Britain’s ill-fated attempt in the 1940s to turn tracts of southern Tanzania into a limitless peanut prairie (the southern Tanganyika groundnut scheme). The phrase “banana republics” originally referred to servile dictatorships running countries whose economies were dominated by foreign-owned fruit plantations.
But several things about the current fashion are new. One is its scale. A big land deal used to be around 100,000 hectares (240,000 acres). Now the largest ones are many times that. In Sudan alone, South Korea has signed deals for 690,000 hectares, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for 400,000 hectares and Egypt has secured a similar deal to grow wheat. An official in Sudan says his country will set aside for Arab governments roughly a fifth of the cultivated land in Africa’s largest country (traditionally known as the breadbasket of the Arab world).
It is not just Gulf states that are buying up farms. China secured the right to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8m hectares of Congo, which would be the world’s largest palm-oil plantation. It is negotiating to grow biofuels on 2m hectares in Zambia, a country where Chinese farms are said to produce a quarter of the eggs sold in the capital, Lusaka. According to one estimate, 1m Chinese farm labourers will be working in Africa this year, a number one African leader called “catastrophic”.
 | |
In total, says the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a think-tank in Washington, DC, between 15m and 20m hectares of farmland in poor countries have been subject to transactions or talks involving foreigners since 2006. That is the size of France’s agricultural land and a fifth of all the farmland of the European Union. Putting a conservative figure on the land’s value, IFPRI calculates that these deals are worth $20 billion-30 billion—at least ten times as much as an emergency package for agriculture recently announced by the World Bank and 15 times more than the American administration’s new fund for food security.
If you assume that the land, when developed, will yield roughly two tonnes of grain per hectare (which would be twice the African average but less than that of Europe, America and rich Asia), it would produce 30m-40m tonnes of cereals a year. That is a significant share of the world’s cereals trade of roughly 220m tonnes a year and would be more than enough to meet the appetite for grain imports in the Middle East. What is happening, argues Richard Ferguson, an analyst for Nomura Securities, is outsourcing’s third great wave, following that of manufacturing in the 1980s and information technology in the 1990s.
Several other features of the process are also new. Unlike older projects, the current ones mostly focus on staples or biofuels—wheat, maize, rice, jatropha. The Egyptian and South Korean projects in Sudan are both for wheat. Libya has leased 100,000 hectares of Mali for rice. By contrast, farming ventures used to be about cash crops (coffee, tea, sugar or bananas).
In the past, foreign farming investment was usually private: private investors bought land from private owners. That process has continued, particularly the snapping up of privatised land in the former Soviet Union. Last year a Swedish company called Alpcot Agro bought 128,000 hectares of Russia; South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries paid $6.5m for a majority stake in Khorol Zerno, a company that owns 10,000 hectares of eastern Siberia; Morgan Stanley, an American bank, bought 40,000 hectares of Ukraine in March. And Pava, the first Russian grain processor to be floated, plans to sell 40% of its landowning division to investors in the Gulf, giving them access to 500,000 hectares. Thanks to rising land values and (until recently) rising commodity prices, farming has been one of the few sectors to remain attractive during the credit crunch.
But the majority of the new deals have been government-to-government. The acquirers are foreign regimes or companies closely tied to them, such as sovereign-wealth funds. The sellers are host governments dispensing land they nominally own. Cambodia leased land to Kuwaiti investors last August after mutual prime-ministerial visits. Last year the Sudanese and Qatari governments set up a joint venture to invest in Sudan; the Kuwaiti and Sudanese ministers of finance signed what they called a “giant” strategic partnership for the same purpose. Saudi officials have visited Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam to talk about land acquisitions. The balance between the state and private sectors is heavily skewed in favour of the state.
| |
 | |
But where’s it going? |
That makes the current round of land acquisitions different in kind, as well as scale. When private investors put money into cash crops, they tended to boost world trade and international economic activity. At least in theory, they encourage farmers to switch from growing subsistence rice to harvesting rubber for cash; from growing rubber to working in a tyre factory; and from making tyres to making cars. But now, governments are investing in staple crops in a protectionist impulse to circumvent world markets. Why are they doing this and what are the effects?
“Food security is not just an issue for Abu Dhabi or the United Arab Emirates,” says Eissa Mohamed Al Suwaidi of the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development. “Recently, it has become a hot issue everywhere.” He is confirming what everyone knows: the land deals are responses to food-market turmoil.
Between the start of 2007 and the middle of 2008, The Economist index of food prices rose 78%; soyabeans and rice both soared more than 130%. Meanwhile, food stocks slumped. In the five largest grain exporters, the ratio of stocks to consumption-plus-exports fell to 11% in 2009, below its ten-year average of over 15%.
It was not just the price rises that rattled food importers. Some of them, especially Arab ones, are oil exporters and their revenues were booming. They could afford higher prices. What they could not afford, though, was the spate of trade bans that grain exporters large and small imposed to keep food prices from rising at home. Ukraine and India banned wheat exports for a while; Argentina increased export taxes sharply. Actions like these raised fears in the Gulf that one day importers might not be able to secure enough supplies at any price. They persuaded many food-importing countries that they could no longer rely on world food markets for basic supplies.
What to do instead? The obvious answer was: invest in domestic farming and build up your own stocks. Countries that could, did so. Spending on rural infrastructure is the third largest item in China’s 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) economic-stimulus plan. European leaders said high prices showed the protectionist common agricultural policy needed to be preserved.
But the richest oil exporters did not have that option. Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient in wheat by lavishing untold quantities of money to create grain fields in the desert. In 2008, however, it abandoned its self-sufficiency programme when it discovered that farmers were burning their way through water—which comes from a non-replenishable aquifer below the Arabian sands—at a catastrophic rate. But if Saudi Arabia was growing more food than it should, and if it did not trust world markets, the only solution was to find farmland abroad. Other Gulf states followed suit. So did China and South Korea, countries not usually associated with water shortages but where agricultural expansion has been draining dry breadbasket areas like the North China Plain.
Water shortages have provided the hidden impulse behind many land deals. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, claims: “The purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.” He calls it “the great water grab”.
For the countries seeking land (or water), the attractions are clear. But what of those selling or leasing their resources? They are keen enough, even sending road shows to the Gulf. Sudan is letting investors export 70% of the crop, even though it is the recipient of the largest food-aid operation in the world. Pakistan is offering half a million hectares of land and promising Gulf investors that if they sign up, it will hire a security force of 100,000 to protect the assets. For poor countries land deals offer a chance to reverse decades of underinvestment in agriculture.
In developing countries as a whole, the average growth in cereal yields has fallen from 3-6% a year in the 1960s to 1-2% a year now, says the World Bank. This reflects, among other things, a decline in public investment. In the 14 countries that depend most on farming, public spending on agriculture almost halved as a share of total public spending between 1980 and 2004. Foreign aid to farming also halved in real terms over the same period. Farming has done worst of all in Africa, where most of the largest land deals are taking place. There, agricultural output per farmworker was the lowest in the world during 1980-2004, growing by less than 1% a year, compared with over 3% a year in East Asia and the Middle East.
The investors promise a lot: new seeds, new marketing, better jobs, schools, clinics and roads. An official at Sudan’s agriculture ministry said investment in farming in his country by Arab states would rise almost tenfold from $700m in 2007 to a forecast $7.5 billion in 2010. That would be half of all investment in the country, he said. In 2007, agricultural investment had been a mere 3% of the total.
China has set up 11 research stations in Africa to boost yields of staple crops. That is needed: sub-Saharan Africa spends much less than India on agricultural R&D. Even without new seed varieties or fancy drip-feed irrigation, investment should help farmers. One of the biggest constraints on African farming is the inability to borrow money for fertilisers. If new landlords just helped farmers get credit, it would make a big difference.
Yet a certain wariness ought to be maintained. Farming in Africa is hard. It breaks backs and the naive ambitions of outsiders. To judge by the scale of projects so far, the new investors seem to be pinning their hopes on creating technologically sophisticated large farms. These have worked well in Europe and the Americas. Paul Collier of Oxford University says Africa needs them too: “African peasant farming has fallen further and further behind the advancing commercial productivity frontier.”
But alas, the record of large farms in Africa has been poor. Those that have done best are now moving away from staple crops to higher-value things such as flowers and fruit. Mechanised farming schemes that grow staples have often ended with abandoned machinery rusting in the returning bush. Moreover, large farmers are often well-connected and spend more time lobbying for special favours than doing the hard work.
Politics of a different sort poses more immediate problems. In Madagascar this year popular hostility to a deal that would have leased 1.3m hectares—half the island’s arable land—to Daewoo Logistics, a South Korean company, fanned the flames of opposition and contributed to the president’s overthrow. In Zambia, the main opposition leader has come out against China’s proposed 2m-hectare biofuels project—and China has threatened to pull out of Zambia if he ever came to power. The chairman of Cambodia’s parliamentary foreign-affairs committee complains that no one has any idea what terms are being offered to Kuwait to lease rice paddies.
The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, dubs some projects “neocolonialist”. Bowing before the wind, a Chinese agriculture-ministry official insists his country is not seeking to buy land abroad, though he adds that “if there are requests, we would like to assist.” (On one estimate, China has signed 30 agricultural co-operation deals covering over 2m hectares since 2007.)
| |
 | |
Chinese neocolonialism going down well with Mozambique’s elite |
Objections to the projects are not simply Luddite. The deals produce losers as well as winners. Host governments usually claim that the land they are offering for sale or lease is vacant or owned by the state. That is not always true. “Empty” land often supports herders who graze animals on it. Land may be formally owned by the state but contain people who have farmed it for generations. Their customary rights are recognised locally, but often not accepted in law, or in the terms of a foreign-investment deal.
So the deals frequently set one group against another in host countries and the question is how those conflicts get resolved. “If you want people to invest in your country, you have to make concessions,” says the spokesman for Kenya’s president. (He was referring to a deal in which Qatar offered to build a new port in exchange for growing crops in the Tana river delta, something opposed by local farmers and conservationists.) The trouble is that the concessions are frequently one-sided. Customary owners are thrown off land they think of as theirs. Smallholders have their arms twisted to sign away their rights for a pittance.
This is worrying in itself. And it leads to so much local opposition that some deals cannot be implemented. The Saudi Binladin Group put on hold a $4.3 billion project to grow rice on 500,000 hectares of Indonesia. China postponed a 1.2m hectare deal in the Philippines.
Joachim von Braun, the head of IFPRI, argues that the best way to resolve the conflicts and create “a win-win” is for foreign investors to sign a code of conduct to improve the terms of the deals for locals. Various international bodies have been working on their versions of such a code, including the African Union, which is due to ratify one at a summit in July.
Good practice would mean respecting customary rights; sharing benefits among locals (ie, not just bringing in your own workers), increasing transparency (current deals are shrouded in secrecy) and abiding by national trade policies (which means not exporting if the host country is suffering a famine). These sound well and good. But Sudan and Ethiopia have famines now: should they be declining to sign land deals altogether? Many of the worst abuses are committed by the foreign investors’ local partners: will they be restrained by some international code?
There are plenty of reasons for scepticism about these deals. If they manage to reverse the long decline of farming in poor countries, they will have justified themselves. But like any big farming venture, they will take years to reveal their full impact. For the moment, the right response is to defer judgment and keep a watchful, hopeful but wary eye on their progress. The Economist
The Mandailing Story
The Mandailing or often called as "The Mandailing Batak" is a traditional cultural group in Southeast Asia. They are found mainly in the northern section of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, the Mandailings are considered as a part of the Batak people.
They came under the influence of the Kaum paderi who ruled the Minangkabau of Tanah Datar. As a result, the Mandailing were influenced by Muslim culture and converted to Islam. Previous to their conversion, they practised Hinduism and Parmalim (Batak native religion).
There are also a group of Mandailing in Malaysia, especially in the states of Selangor and Perak but they refuse to be considered as a part of Batak people.
The etymology of 'Mandailing' is said to be a compounding of the words manda, meaning 'mother', and ilang, meaning 'lost'. Thus, the name is said to mean 'lost mother'.
Some research has suggested that the Mandailing are the descendants of the Toba Batak, who migrated to the south centuries before the coming of the Portuguese and Dutch colonisation of Sumatra.
There they converted to Islam and intermarried with Minangkabau and the Malay peoples. Mandailing society is patriarchal, employing family names, or marga, in the same manner as the Toba Batak.
The same marga can be found, such as Lubis, Nasution, Siregar, Hasibuan, Harahap, Dalimunthe (originally from Munthe), Matondang, Rangkuti, Parinduri, Pulungan, Rambe, Daulae(y), Pohan, Batubara (not to be confused with the Batu Bara people from the east coast of Sumatra), Barus and Hutajulu. They are closely related to the Angkola, who are mixed between Muslim and Christian adherents.
'Mandailing' is the name of region (Luat Mandailing) which is now almost in Mandailing Natal Regency in North Sumatra Province. The first group who came to this region were the Lubis and Nasution later followed by the Siregar, Harahap and so forth. These groups migrated from the northern region, which now belongs to North Tapanuli Regency and Tobasa Regency. One of these groups, the Harahap, left, which makes their identification to the region difficult.
Matondang, Rangkuti and Parinduri are the local groups of Luat Mandailing. Harahap and Siregar dwell almost in Luat Angkola, which now belongs to South Tapanuli Regency, situated between Mandailing-Natal Regency and North Tapanuli Regency.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Barack Obama must just not scold Israel's leader but also promote his own plan soon
| |
 | |
FOR the first time in many years, an Israeli government is scared stiff that an American administration may squeeze it until its pips squeak. That is surely a good thing, if it makes the Israelis more amenable to giving the Palestinians the fair deal—in essence, a proper state of their own—that might bring peace to the two peoples and to the wider region of the Middle East. So when Barack Obama meets Binyamin Netanyahu in the White House on May 18th, he must be tough with him.
Mr Netanyahu refuses publicly to accept the notion of two states. He seems to want to continue to squeeze the Gaza Strip until its elected government, run by the Islamist movement, Hamas, is toppled. He says he will not give Syria back the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in 1967. He now adds a demand that the Palestinians should not just recognise Israel as a country but as a specifically Jewish state. He refuses to freeze the growth of Jewish settlements that continue to bite into what is left of a barely contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank. And, most pressingly, he seeks to link peace with the Palestinians to a prior deal between the West and Iran to ensure that the Islamic Republic is prevented from having a nuclear bomb. His stance on these issues makes him appear an unpromising partner in negotiation; but much the same was said of Menachem Begin, whom the Americans persuaded to make peace with Egypt 30 years ago, so it’s certainly worth Mr Obama’s while to put some political capital into budging him.
Mr Obama must tell Mr Netanyahu that he is flat wrong on all those counts. No more settlements can be built or expanded—on pain of a reduction in American aid. On Iran, Mr Netanyahu’s logic is back-to-front. For sure, sensible leaders the world over, including Arab ones, want Iran to forgo the bomb. But how much easier it would be to persuade the Iranians to drop their ambitions if they were unable to invoke the unresolved conflict over Israel as part of a holy nuclear cause.
It is not just for the Palestinians’ sake that Mr Obama needs to take a tough line. Being too kind to the Israelis, as American administrations have been in the past, does them no favour in the long run either. Israel’s long-term security can be ensured only by America cajoling and even threatening its leaders in the hope that they will accept that the Israeli state’s safety depends overwhelmingly on the viability of a Palestinian one.
Mr Netanyahu does, however, have one good question to pose to the American administration. Who would govern the Palestinian state the world wants him to create in the West Bank and Gaza? Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party run the West Bank under Israeli supervision but are chronically weak. Hamas is strong. Both movements say that Israel must withdraw from every inch of land occupied in 1967 and accept back to what is now the Jewish state all the Arab refugees who fled more than 60 years ago. But unlike Fatah, which has explicitly accepted the idea of two states, Hamas, while groping towards a de facto acceptance of Israel, has yet to renounce its desire eventually to liberate all of Palestine from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
So far Mr Obama has held his cards to his chest. But if he is to push Israel into concessions he needs to answer the Hamas conundrum. Unlike George Bush’s team, Mr Obama’s has endorsed the idea of a Palestinian government that would include Hamas and so talk with more authority to the Israelis, making any agreement more likely to stick. The snag is that the two halves of the Palestinian movement are at daggers’ drawn and have fluffed repeated opportunities to reconcile.
The chances are that Mr Netanyahu’s rendezvous at the White House will not end in a public fracas. The Israeli leader is too clever for that, and shouting in public is not Mr Obama’s style. More likely, the pair will frankly acknowledge differences. Mr Netanyahu is a practised opportunist—and may indeed edge towards an acceptance of the two-state idea over time. After all, he says he accepts Mr Bush’s “road map” that led nowhere but clearly affirmed a two-state solution.
Still, if the meeting does end in a stalemate, it will not be enough merely for Mr Obama to mutter doleful thoughts about reassessing America’s special relations with Israel—and then back off. Former administrations told the Israelis and Palestinians that, in the end, it was for the two sides to negotiate peace. It is now plain that this approach does not work. America too needs to be deeply involved from start to finish.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, reasserting the Arab peace initiative of 2002, has boldly called for all Muslim governments to state clearly that they would accept Israel. They must make Hamas do so too. Next month Mr Obama goes to Egypt on his first presidential visit to an Arab country. That would be the perfect moment to unveil his detailed plan for peace, along with a promise that under his administration America intends at last to implement the two-state vision, not just talk about it. The Economist
