TEL AVIV, Israel -- When I told this to Anwar Sadat, he laughed: The moment the door of your airplane opened, all Israelis held their breath. I live on a main street in Tel Aviv, and at that moment I looked out at the street below. It was totally empty. Nothing moved, except one cat which was probably hurrying home to the television.

CAIRO – U.S. President-elect Barack Obamas message of hope and change has been inspiring not only Americans but millions across the globe. His election has proved the success of true democratic systems in which empowered citizens can change the face of their politics. But for many Egyptians, whose apathy toward their own political system runs rampant, the hope and change that Obama represents seems worlds away.

In a farewell interview he gave to the Yediot Ahronot newspaper on the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dropped a bombshell. "What Im telling you now," he said to his interviewers, "no Israeli leader ever said before me: We have to pull out from almost all the territories [in the West Bank], including in East Jerusalem, including in the Golan Heights."

AMMAN -- The return of an Arab League mission chief this week to the organizations Baghdad office to fill a position that has been vacant since January 2007 is the latest signal that Arab countries are making a belated diplomatic comeback to the war-torn "brotherly" country.

Monday marks the 35th anniversary of the fourth Arab-Israeli major conflict, the 1973 October War — or, as it is known in Israel, the Yom Kippur War.

More than seven years after the horrendous terrorist attacks on New York Citys World Trade Center and the Pentagon the "war on terror," as U.S. President George W. Bush likes to call it, still rages. And while Bush is due to leave the White House in about 100 days, the threats posed by al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden remain. In fact, a recent world poll conducted for the BBC found that people in 22 out of 23 countries believe U.S. efforts to weaken the terrorist organization have failed.

Should Israels charismatic Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni manage to surmount the odds and succeed within the next 40 days to form a government she will become the next prime minister of the state of Israel.

Will President Bashar Assad of Syria, like Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel, become a recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of extraordinary efforts in advancing the cause of peace with justice in the Middle East?

CAIRO – When it seemed that all was going smoothly on the Cairo-Tehran diplomatic front and full relations were not far off after a near 30-year hiatus, out comes a movie in Iran praising the assassins of late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that throws both governments into a bitter row.