• Obama: Diplomacy Is Failing in Syria - Anne Gearan
  The Obama administration acknowledged Tuesday that diplomacy is failing in Syria. Negotiations between the Syrian government and parts of the opposition are "far from achieving" a peaceful end to the conflict, President Obama said. "The state of Syria itself is crumbling," Obama said. "There are extremists who have moved into the vacuum in certain portions of Syria in a way that could threaten us over the long term."
      At the peace talks in Geneva, which resumed Monday, negotiators are talking past one another and cannot even agree on what the main goal of the talks should be. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy for Syria, said in Geneva, "We are not making much progress."  (Washington Post)
      See also In Peace Talks, Assad Plays for Time (AP-Washington Post)
• Palestinian Forces Raid West Bank Refugee Camps - Mel Frykberg
  In recent weeks, Palestinian security forces have searched refugee camps for militants and sparked gunfights that have ended with the deaths of two people, injuries to several security personnel and local residents, and the arrest of dozens, as the Palestinian Authority tries to establish security among its increasingly restless populace.
      "Israel is worried about the deteriorating security situation in the West Bank. This is the reason it wants to maintain a security presence in a future Palestinian state. The [PA] will not be able to take care of Israel's security needs," said Pinhas Inbari, a security analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
      Inbari said the PA appears to have lost control over several of the camps, including Balata near Nablus, Jenin, and Kalandia near Jerusalem. "The PA tried the diplomatic approach, first by trying to reason with the gunmen and the residents, but that has failed. They then tried launching military assaults, but those, too, are not working," he said. (Washington Times)
• Iranians Celebrate Islamic Revolution, Denounce U.S. Leaders - Thomas Erdbrink
  Iran celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on Tuesday, and the state news media said millions had exuberantly participated. Wendy R. Sherman, the lead American negotiator in the nuclear talks, was singled out for particular denunciation, with many rally participants shouting, "Death to Sherman," the Iranian Students' News Agency reported. Some protesters also shouted, "Death to Obama!" and "Death to Kerry!"
      As the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps band played songs from the 1979 revolution, one cleric, Mohammad Moshabarati, 28, marched by, holding an Islamic flag. He said, "Our slogan is, 'Death to the U.S.,' and it will be so forever, no matter what President Rouhani agrees with the Americans."  (New York Times)

• EU Parliament Head: "We're Not Boycotting Israel" - Tovah Lazaroff
  The European Union is not talking about boycotting Israel, the president of its parliament Martin Schulz said after receiving an honorary doctorate at Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Tuesday. "There is no boycott. In the European Parliament there is for sure not a majority for a potential boycott," Schulz said. "There is no concrete position of the European Union or its institutions for a boycott of Israel or Israeli products....My personal view is that a boycott is not a solution for anything."  (Jerusalem Post)
      See also Future EU Sanctions Against Israel? Real, Imagined, and Somewhere in Between
  Is the scenario of a full-scale EU boycott of Israel at all realistic? This study provides policy-makers with a "Brussels insiders" perspective on the prospects for future sanctions by the EU against Israel. It remains unlikely for the EU to adopt a formal, new sanctions regime against Israel, regardless of the precedent set by the Horizon 2020 research project and the European Commission's guidelines on it. (Institute for Contemporary Affairs-Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
• Turkey: No Reconciliation with Israel until It Ends Gaza Blockade - Barak Ravid
  Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said on Tuesday that he demands a "written protocol" from Israel pledging it will lift the siege over Gaza as a condition for signing a reconciliation agreement and normalizing relations between the two countries. "Nothing will happen without lifting the siege on Gaza," he said. (Ha'aretz)

• Why Does the EU Continue to Fund Anti-Peace NGOs? - Gerald Steinberg
  For years, the EU has been providing millions of euros to radical political advocacy NGOs that promote the images of Palestinian victimization and Israeli oppression. In many cases, the reports and lobbying efforts of these NGOs are central to EU policy formation, forming a closed circle in which biased anti-Israel narratives are reinforced.
      These EU funding policies actively promote boycott and isolation of Israel. And as a result, the Palestinians have an easy alternative to the "painful compromises" necessary for peace. The writer, a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, heads NGO Monitor. (Jerusalem Post)
• SodaStream and Scarlett Johansson - Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch
  Scarlett Johansson has given a clinic on how to stand up to bullies. Boycotts of Israel are absurd. The reason many Palestinians became refugees was that the Palestinian Arabs joined surrounding Arab states in a war of extermination against the infant State of Israel in 1948, a war that they lost. Israel came into possession of the West Bank because of a war of extermination that three Arab states launched against Israel in 1967 and lost.
      The PLO rejected President Clinton's Camp David proposals and launched a vicious war against Israeli civilians that killed a thousand and maimed ten thousand - and lost. Every day Palestinians try to inflict terror on Israel.
      The Middle East is burning with the fires of anti-Western, anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian savagery, torture and anarchy, and SodaStream is the primary preoccupation of those who supposedly advocate for truth, human rights and love? (Huffington Post)
• The Poet Iran Executed - David Keyes
  As Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani was dangling from a noose two weeks ago, one wonders what he would have thought about Western leaders who call President Hassan Rouhani a moderate. Shaabani criticized the regime by speaking out against repression of ethnic Arabs in Khuzestan province, but since the regime sees itself as the representative of God on Earth, his fate was sealed. It's not called a theocracy for nothing.
      Islamic scholar and former Iraqi parliamentarian Iyad Jamal al Din once told me of Iran's Supreme Leader: "Ayatollah Khamenei is a man just like me. He's a cleric and I'm a cleric. But he says, 'I am the representative of God.' From him, these words make me sleepless. You all [in America] sleep normally because you don't know what that means. I know what it means. He means that he is right and the others are wrong. And wrong must not live. You should be defeated and destroyed."
      Can the world trust a government which doesn't even trust its own people? Can the West rely on a regime which so fears dissidents that it puts them to death? Shaabani, and the more than 300 Iranians executed since Rouhani took power, are powerful reminders that the Iranian government remains as fanatic as it is dangerous. The writer is executive director of Advancing Human Rights. (Daily Beast)
• Jewish-Arab Coexistence in Jerusalem - Matti Friedman
  In recent years, Jerusalem has seen new infrastructure projects like a light-rail line serving Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. State-funded health care in Arab neighborhoods is improving. One hears more Arabic than ever spoken in predominantly Jewish commercial areas. More Arab residents are requesting Israeli citizenship and taking the Israeli high-school matriculation exams.
      There are many thousands of interactions between Jews and Arabs each day, nearly all of them uneventful. What we have here is not peace but peacefulness - a budding, imperfect coexistence obvious to anyone. According to a poll published in January 2014 by Ha'aretz, when Arab Israelis were asked if they were "generally satisfied" with their lives in Israel, 79% said yes. (Tablet)

West Bank Boycott: A Political Act or Prejudice? - Jodi Rudoren (New York Times)

• For many Israelis, the word "boycott" recalls the Nazi-led one of Jewish-owned businesses that spread in the 1930s from Germany across Europe.
• "The politically correct way to be anti-Semitic is not to say, 'I hate the Jews,' but to say, 'I hate Israel,'" said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
• Mark Regev, Prime Minister Netanyahu's spokesman, said Israel is unfairly singled out, while human rights violations elsewhere in the world - and other states' occupation of land claimed by other ethnic groups - are ignored.
• "It's of dubious morality to hold the Jewish state to a standard to which you hold no one else," Regev said. "Are you boycotting any other place of disputed sovereignty on the planet, or are you picking and choosing your moral outrage?" Some people "are being very selective with their indignation, and it fits into certain cultural prejudices."