Obama makes a blunt push for Middle East peace
Whashingtonpost--The president hails the pro-democracy movements in the Arab world, but has tough words for Israel and the Palestinians, urging them to negotiate a deal and stay ahead of the wave of popular unrest.
The president hails the pro-democracy movements in the Arab world, but has tough words for Israel and the Palestinians, urging them to negotiate a deal and stay ahead of the wave of popular unrest.
"The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome," he said.
Obama warned Palestinians that they would not achieve statehood through a proposed U.N. resolution, which the Palestinian leadership has been pushing to pass in September.
And he warned Israelis that time is not on their side.
"The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation," he said. "A region undergoing profound change will lead to populism in which millions of people, not just one or two leaders, must believe peace is possible."
Obama's principles for negotiations contained elements for each side to dislike: He said the two parties should resolve the borders of a future Palestinian state and find ways to guarantee Israel's security before negotiating over the future of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians have long objected to separating the issues that way. The president also said the Palestinian state should be demilitarized.
But afterward, it was the Israelis who reacted more negatively, focusing on Obama's declaration that the negotiations should start from Israel's borders before the 1967 Middle East War. The pre-1967 lines have been used behind closed doors as the basis for negotiations for more than a decade, and the last three U.S. administrations have informally embraced the concept.
But Israel has rejected them, and Obama's speech was the first time a U.S. president has publicly said the boundaries should be the starting point for talks.
Netanyahu began to fire off objections via his office's Twitter feed even before boarding his plane for Washington. He pronounced the 1967 lines "indefensible" and said his nation's defense "requires an Israeli military presence along the Jordan River" in the West Bank.
In a sign of the internal debate over how far Obama should go toward injecting himself into the Mideast process, the White House did not release a text of the speech until the president began to deliver it. Continued…