More Disturbing Mid-East News: New Hezbollah-Majority Cabinet Approved In Lebanon
Druze Protests from NYT via Reuters
New York Times via Reuters has just reported that after five months a new cabinet has been proposed in Lebanon. Not only does it contain a majority of Hezbollah ministers, but also contains more Sunnis than Shiites. In a related development, Druze minister Talal Arslan, who was nominated to be Minister of State, resigned the government – leading to street protests by local Druze.
To get an idea of what is likely to come out of this government, Prime Minister Najib Mikati made the following statement:
“Let us go to work immediately according to the principles … (of) defending Lebanon’s sovereignty and its independence and liberating land that remains under the occupation of the Israeli enemy.”
If that weren’t scary enough, he also openly supports President Assad in Syria.
beyondzerosum 
As I keep saying, there are NO partners for peace!
OK. So, what does that imply? If you believe that Israel’s long term survival as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people is a two state solution, your statement should be followed by a question: How Do We Change That? What do I mean? To me, you have to approach peace in the same way that you approach war. You analyze the opponents strengths and weaknesses – in this case you analyze the obstacles to peace (and there obviously are many others besides not having an appropriate, effective partner for peace). You then develop a strategy for solving these obstacles, then operational plans, and then down to the tactics available. And. of course, one has to provide the resources (i.e., funding) for actualizing the plans. A very specific example where this has worked well is the training of the Palestinian security forces in conjunction with the IDF. The success of this process, while not perfect, has allowed the Israelis to eliminate a number of checkpoints which has been a positive development for both sides.