Is Obama planning his revenge on Netanyahu?
EDITOR'S NOTE: On the eve of Passover on April 22nd, the United Nations will vote on Climate Change referendum. The Palestinians want a vote on condemning Israel for building on their own land in the West Bank. Will Barack Obama use this moment to demand the creation of a Palestinian state? Insiders say this would be his 'perfect revenge' against Netanyahu whom he has long shown contempt for.
With the Obama administration in its final year, several officials have said that the president has grown so frustrated with trying to revive Middle East peace talks
that he may lay down his own outline for an Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace agreement, in the form of a resolution in the
United Nations Security Council.
If that happens, count on two reactions:
Israel’s prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, will oppose it, and a chorus of American politicians and commentators will suggest that it would be unprecedented — even unthinkable — for an American president to support a Security Council resolution that Israel opposed, rather than veto it.
Last spring, when similar reports circulated, Senator John McCain of Arizona said that such an action would “
contradict American policy for the last at least 10 presidents of the United States.” The Republican chairman and ranking Democrat of the House Foreign Affairs Committee joined in a letter protesting that “for decades the U.S. has used its U.N. Security Council veto to protect Israel from undue pressure at the world body.” A bipartisan group of senators agreed, seeking assurances that the policy would not change.
Remarkably, the assumption beneath those protests — that
President Obama would be committing an unprecedented betrayal of the American-Israeli relationship if he did not block every Security Council resolution that challenged the actions or positions of Israel’s government —
has gone unchallenged.
Until Obama decides how to act, Israel is focusing on frustrating Palestinian diplomatic efforts at the UN. The Palestinians are planning to bring their own resolution to the UN Security Council declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem are illegal and that calls on the sides to return to the negotiating table with a time frame of one year to reach
a final status agreement. The UN vote
is set for April 22, Passover-eve, and Palestinian media reports that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is set to be present in New York for the vote.
No comments:
Post a Comment