October, 3 2010 How to Climb Down From Trees

How can we get all of the sides to climb down from their respective trees? The Palestinians cannot continue negotations as long as Israel continues to build in the territories. Netanyahu cannot agree to an additional building freeze, since he promised his supporters there would be no additional freeze. Meanwhile, the American government is up a tree of its own making, desperately trying to show that it can force Netanyahu to extend the freeze. It's not clear how this game of high stakes poker will end. One view circulating in Israel is that Netanyahu will shortly agree to another freeze, claiming domestically that it’s a new freeze, and not an extension. We will see in the coming days.

A major PR fiasco, not to mention a sign of moral failing, has been delayed temporarily by poor Israeli planning. Today was the day Israel was supposed to begin deporting some of the children of temporary workers. The workers and their children have gone underground. Luckily, for the moment, the Ministry of the Interior has not worked out a plan of how to actually carry out the expulsions.

The Iranians confirmed today that the reported "Stuxnet worm" computer virus was in fact an attack against them. They claimed to have arrested spies who were responsible for distributing the virus. They also admitted it will take a number of months to clean their systems of the virus. There is a sense the virus have been extremely effective in damaging the Iranian program.