US trying to avoid confrontation at UN over 'Palestinians'
Having dug his own grave in the Middle East, 19 months before the 2012 elections, President Obama suddenly wants out. The US administration has launched talks with Israel and the Palestinian Authority to avoid a situation where the Palestinians would ask the UN in September to recognize a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, PLO Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo said on Monday.But the 'Palestinians' aren't backing down from the resolution and continue to raise conditions to talks.
“The Palestinian leadership won’t back down unless real and serious peace negotiations are launched on the basis of the 1967 borders,” Abed Rabbo said in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. He said that the PA was also prepared to strike a deal that would include a land, and not a population, swap with Israel.But the battleground over the UN isn't in the US: It's in Europe.
Europe is turning into the major battleground over the issue, since – according to Israeli officials – the Palestinians know that for a resolution in the UN General Assembly to have any significance it will have to be backed not only by the Islamic and developing countries that regularly give it an automatic majority in the UN General Assembly, but also by the moral authority of the world’s democracies. Both the US, and most recently Germany, have expressed opposition to the move.So Netanyahu and Abu Mazen continue to tour Europe in an effort to get the Europeans to vote one way or the other. The French told Abu Mazen last week that they'll think about it, but they also - according to Newsweek - told Abu Mazen that they are 'incensed' with Netanyahu for 'settlement building,' an accusation that Israelis ought to find sardonically laughable.
But the truth is that what's missing here - once again - is American leadership. If Obama really believes in negotiations - as he says he does - he should get off the fence and tell the Europeans to vote no. Of course, at this point, more than two years into the Obama administration, they might not even listen even if he does say to vote no.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome, unilateral declaration of statehood
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:10 AM
1 Comments:
These would be the Europeans who can't yet defeat a Libyan tinpot dictator and an American President who in the words of his own White House staff, chooses to "lead from behind". Israel will have to calculate and defend its own interests, despite unpleasantness from the Back to Munich crowd, since the alternative is not a peace process but national suicide. By starting off with the gambit to isolate Bibi on building in East Jerusalem, Obama predictably determined a process whereby the negotiating obstacles would be front loaded into resolving (or caving into) Palestinian preconditions for even starting negotiations. Bibi seems to have time and staff to play rope-a-dope with a fecklessly hostile American administration and an enfeebled decadent dhimmi Europe, but what's the point?
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