White House denies leaking Obama speech to Israel
In an earlier post, I reported on materials published by YNet (Yedioth Aharonoth's online site) that claim to have a draft of President Obama's major address on the Middle East, which is to be delivered on Thursday night. The White House is now denying that any such draft was leaked. "We have not shared a draft of the speech with anyone outside of the administration," White House spokesman Jay Carney said during a press briefing. Carney would not specify if Obama would talk about the 1967 lines at all in the speech, nor would he give any other specifics of the address.What could go wrong?
Amidror unequivocally denied the report in an Army Radio interview on Tuesday, saying Obama’s speech “did not come up in meetings between me and the national security adviser of the US, and not with his aides. Not in one manner, or another,” he said.
Ambassador to the US Michael Oren told Army Radio on Wednesday that he had also been present at the meetings in question and the content of Obama's speech had not been discussed.
Washington sources, meanwhile, are anticipating that Obama will strike a nonconfrontational tone with Israel in the Middle East speech on Thursday, as well as in his meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
There was little expectation that Obama would venture into great detail of the Israeli- Palestinian peace process, much less address the controversial final-status issues.
Instead, one Washington hand suggested that the furthest the White House was likely to go was into a reframing of the formula US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has long used as the basis for resolving the conflict.
“We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements,” Clinton said in 2009 after Netanyahu announced a partial settlement freeze.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Tom Donilon, Uzi Arad, Yaakov Amidror
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:34 AM
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