AMMAN -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has launched an unusual kind of peace campaign, by targeting the Israeli public with paid advertisements in major Hebrew-language newspapers to promote the Arab peace initiative.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obamas historic election victory may have done a lot more for Israeli moderates than just boost the election prospects of the Kadima party and its new leader Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. A remarkable public speech by one of the Jewish states espionage chiefs Monday suggests that Obamas emergence is encouraging Israeli doves to spread their wings, even in the military high command.

JERUSALEM -- In an endeavor to breathe some life back into the moribund Israeli-Palestinian conflict the British government is taking steps to encourage disinvestment from illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank by labeling all produce manufactured and produced by settlers.

The minor escalation of hostilities this past week between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip did manage to make some noise amid the epochal cacophony of the global financial crisis. The headlines in the international media, however, had less to do with the limited border skirmishes, rocket launches, air strikes, and border closures which transpired, than with the fact that the nearly five-month ceasefire between the Palestinian militant group and the Jewish state appeared to be unraveling.

GAZA CITY, Gaza -- Following intensive negotiations with Hamas, the de facto leadership of Gaza, a group of European parliamentarians has been told by the organization that it will accept a Palestinian state within the internationally recognized 1967 borders as well as offer Israel a long-term ceasefire.

The recent acknowledgment by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of her problems in creating a coalition government, and her request for national elections can create the conditions for her coming back to power. If she succeeds, she represents a better chance for peace than her rivals Benjamin Netanyahu chairman of the hawkish Likud party and Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor party.

And now it is Israels turn to go to the polls. Israelis will be electing next February a new 120-member parliament. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

MOSCOW -- The election campaign began in Israel when its foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, elected the leader of the Kadima party last September, failed to form a government coalition supported by a majority of the Knesset, Israels parliament.

The raid by U.S. military helicopters on a Syrian village close to the Iraqi border that Damascus claimed killed several Syrians comes at a bad time for the U.S. administration of George W. Bush. Given the precariousness of the Middle East with the war in Iraq tying down U.S. forces, the conflict in Afghanistan gaining momentum, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks deadlocked, Iran defiantly pursuing its nuclear program, and Lebanons political situation uncertain with tens of thousands of Syrian troops camping on its border, the last thing Washington needs right now is to ignite another front.

PARIS -- A quiet move is afoot in Europe to persuade the next American president to give Colin Powell, the distinguished U.S. soldier-statesman, the difficult task of reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process.