I expect some to suggest that this fact discredits Joseph Massad’s take on the Palestinian predicament, as published by Al-Ahram. I don’t think so. Yes, Al-Ahram operates within some ideological red lines–that’s true of the Washington Post too. The site is an essential read in the English-speaking Arab world, just as the Post is in Washington. And Massad is hardly apologizing for Mubarak, who, after all, is the U.S. government’s most essential ally in the region.

It is an ingenius, if not ingenuous, argument, because it depends on pretending as if the repressive nature of the Egyptian regime–with all of it limitations on independent political parties, journalists and bloggers, not to mention torture and secret trials—-serves the interests of Israeli and American policymakers more than it advances the interests of say, the Palestinians in Gaza.

Bottom line, says the Eygpt Daily News: the initiative has to come from the United States.

These three moves by the US are more about domestic politics than Middle East diplomacy, but they augur badly for peace-making prospects if they point the way to future American positions.

In the Palestinian press, Abbas’s intervention to persuade the UN to put off its response has been greeted with fury, even in papers normally loyal to the president’s Fatah faction.

“This was a humiliating capitulation in the face of US and Israeli pressure”, Hani al-Masri fumed in the pro-Fatah daily al-Ayyam.”