Donald Macintyre

The Independent's Jerusalem correspondent since 2004, Donald Macintyre was the paper’s Chief Political Commentator for eight years and before that Political Editor of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. He has written for the Daily Express, Sunday Times, Times and Sunday Telegraph.

Donald Macintyre: To be in favour of peace is not anti-Israeli

It started with an internet campaign against Robert Malley. Malley, who worked on the Clinton team at the failed Camp David Israel-Palestinian peace talks in 2000, had fetched up in a long list of people who advise Barack Obama on foreign policy.

Recently by Donald Macintyre

Donald Macintyre: Olmert's real moment of truth has yet to come

Friday, 1 February 2008

Talking with a few foreign journalists 10 days before Wednesday's Winograd report on the 2006 Lebanon war, a senior member of Israel's cabinet suggested that the report would not unseat Prime Minister Ehud Olmert but that his negotiations with the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas might.

Donald Macintyre: The EU should demand more from Israel

Wednesday, 26 December 2007

Everyone in northern Gaza knows the bridge at the entrance to Beit Hanoun. When Mohammad Shtayyeh, the chairman of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, remarked recently that, since the beginning of the intifada in 2000, the bridge had been destroyed three times by Israeli forces and rebuilt each time by the European Union, no one in the Middle East aid world needed to ask what he was talking about.

Donald Macintyre: Does Israel want to seize this opportunity?

Thursday, 22 November 2007

Some time in the mid-1990s, James Baker, who a few years earlier had probably done more than any other US Secretary of State to pressure Israel into making peace with the Palestinians, attended a dinner in Jerusalem given by the then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Coming under fire from several of his fellow-guests, he told them: "I know that in Israel I am always suspect. I am not regarded as a friend here. A day will come and you will realise that I, of all people, was a true friend of Israel."

Donald Macintyre: Like it or not, Europe and America are going to have to start talking to Hamas

Friday, 17 August 2007

It's not widely known that during the efforts to free the BBC journalist Alan Johnston from his miserable incarceration in Gaza, a British official travelled to Damascus to enlist the help of Khaled Mashaal, the exiled head of Hamas's political bureau and widely regarded as the Islamic faction's most powerful single figure.

Donald Macintyre: Blair faces a hard road in the Middle East

Wednesday, 18 July 2007

As Tony Blair prepares to meet his new bosses, the international Quartet on the Middle East, tomorrow in Lisbon, Monday's speech by President George W Bush is hardly the flying start he might have hoped for. It's true that the one new element, an international conference on the region, is akin to the one which Mr Blair pressed Mr Bush in vain to allow him to host over two years ago. But Mr Bush produced no other new policy, and precious little outline of how, if at all, the conference will advance the peace process.

Donald Macintyre: Blood flows as the dust settles in Gaza's civil war. And on the West Bank they mourn

Sunday, 17 June 2007

Samir Hamad lit a Marlboro Red, took a sip from his glass of sweet mint tea, picked up a copy of yesterday's Al Quds newspaper and started reading out, with considerable disgust, the latest proclamation from Kamal Sheikh, the Palestinian police chief, to his Fatah-supporting officers in Gaza. The police chief's instructions are not to co-operate with Hamas, not to go to work, and not to take any instructions from any Minister of the Interior appointed by Hamas. "Of course this is a bad thing," says Mr Hamad. "He has a nice villa here in Ramallah, and he is telling people in Gaza what to do."

Donald Macintyre: Universities should not be punished, say Palestinians seeking priceless places

Thursday, 31 May 2007

Saed Hasan, a software engineer at the Ramallah office of a US-owned IT company, GSSI, was thrilled to be offered a place on the prestigious Tel Aviv University Kellogg Recaniti MBA programme, a forcing ground for Israel's highest-flying executives.