By Editorial, PRESIDENT OBAMA and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have a powerful and urgent common interest. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has turned his back on both Israel and the United States; he is seeking accommodation with the extremist Hamas movement and has announced that he will seek a declaration of Palestinian statehood from the U.N. General Assembly in September. The result could be what Mr. Netanyahu’s defense minister calls “a diplomatic tsunami” against Israel and possibly the eruption of another Israeli-Palestinian war. As for the United States, the U.N. vote could isolate it in support of Israel, undermine the ambitious strategy that Mr. Obama has just announced to promote democracy in the Arab world — and maybe derail the Arab Spring itself. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Monday addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference in Washington, saying the only way to maintain Israel as the national home of the Jewish people was to take the lead in enacting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Livni said that such a move was in Israel’s interest and was not to be done as a favor to anyone else, including the US president, nor was the peace process nearly to be used as a talking point to increase Israel’s standing in the world. Livni added, however, that peace could not be negotiated with Hamas because they represented religious ideology, and religious conflict cannot be solved. In addition to the Palestinian unity deal between Hamas and Fatah, Livni listed Palestinian plans to... By Ted Belman “The Conflict Is Not about the 1967 Lines” writes Alana Goodman in COMMENTARY House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was outspoken in his criticism of President Obama’s speech last Thursday, and he took another swipe at the president during an address to AIPAC this evening. Cantor said that the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel’s existence because they have “a culture infused with resentment and hatred” of the Jewish state. I am pleased that AIPAC understands this and now more Americans do. But I disagree, not with the fact that the Arabs refuse to accept a Jewish State in the ME, but with the idea that but for that the ’67 lines with swaps, would be acceptable. The cumulative impact of Obama’s declarations is to chart a course for Israel comparable to that charted for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain endorsed Hitler’s demands of that country. I expected President Barack Obama’s AIPAC speech would be a bunch of feel-good clichés to persuade the audience that he is Israel’s best friend. Thus there would be nothing worth analyzing in it. But as I read the speech carefully I was astonished at how thoroughly Obama reveals his underlying miscomprehension, indifference, and even hostility toward Israel. Examine this speech and you see everything wrong — far more than in his Cairo or State Department speeches on the Middle East — with Obama’s view of Israel and why he cannot be trusted on this issue. There are some remarkable Freudian slips in his formulations and they have nothing to do with his discussion of the framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
WaPo: Obama wrong again
Now, of all times, the Israeli and U.S. governments ought to be working closely together; they should be trying to defuse the U.N. threat, induce Mr. Abbas to change...Livni: Israel must take lead in enacting two-state solution
The opposition leader stated that Israel must take the lead in the diplomatic process or the country risks having decisions made about its future against its will.The conflict is not ONLY about Arab rejectionism.
“And this is the root of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. It is not about the ’67 lines,” said Cantor, prompting an extended standing ovation.
There is no ligitimacy to the demand of the world that Israel retreat to such lines. Afterall the ’67 lines...Obama’s Neville Chamberlain Speech
In his May 19 speech on the Middle East, President Obama, in a matter of minutes, abandoned Security Council Resolution 242, which for more than four decades had been the cornerstone of diplomacy in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace; likewise abandoned the Roadmap, adopted in 2003 by the so-called Quartet (the U.S., UN, EU and Russia) as a blueprint for resolving, more specifically, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; committed his Administration to pushing Israel back to indefensible borders; and essentially adopted as Administration policy Mahmoud Abbas’s variation on Arafat’s “Plan of Phases” for Israel’s destruction.
“We believe,” declared the President, in just one of his statements undermining Israel, “the borders of Israel...Obama’s actions speak louder than his words
He spoke at great length of his support for Israel, how he wants it to be strong and secure, and the common values of the two countries. Yet if he really thinks that, why didn’t he say such things in his State Department speech on...The Israeli Heart
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Tuesday, 24 May 2011
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