Israel’s public image today is dismal. As Elie Wiesel once joked, “Jews excel in just about every profession except public relations, but this should not surprise us: when God wanted to free the Jews from Egypt he sent Moses, who stuttered.” However, today Israel’s problem is not that its leaders are stuttering, rather that they are stalling to show leadership toward ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. In doing so, they are sending a message to the international community that Israel does not care what the world thinks, and that it does not want peace after all.

The peace process has been major news in almost all Arab media before, during and after direct negotiations started between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In broadsheet newspapers it is front page news; in broadcast media it usually comes first or second.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas faces an impossible choice: walk out of the talks with Israel and the chance for a peaceful two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, or accept the continuation of illegal Israeli settlements eroding even further Palestinian land in the West Bank.

The Middle East peace process has always been a fantasyland – a garden of illusions sustained by politicians and myths that by and large the American media have been too timid, too uninformed or too biased to question.

Yesterday, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) made a public statement accepting the call of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy for a Middle East peace conference and his offer to host this conference. In his statement, Abbas emphasized that a condition for holding the conference must be a total freeze of settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories.