Let us review the Obama administration on Israel. We’ll start with the Cairo speech, which you may not remember was titled “A New Beginning.â€
The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. (Applause.) This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop. (Applause.)
I love the little added applause parentheticals. But you should really listen to the speech to hear the harshness in Obama’s tone when he mentions the settlements. (There is no equivalent harshness when he mentioned the Palestinian obligations for peace.)
In any case, using that speech, the Palestinians promptly inserted a precondition for talks with the Netanyahu administration that they never had in all the years of peace talks: There will be no talking until there is a total freeze on all “settlement†activity, including the building of apartment additions in the suburbs of Jerusalem. And from there, the Palestinians only dug in their heels. Repeated efforts by various representatives of the Obama administration to get the Palestinians to drop their new precondition were met with refusal after refusal after refusal. Obama opened the bottle, the genie got out, and now his administration is trying really hard to get it back inside. And they’re not nearly as smart as Bugs Bunny was. The genie is winning.
The latest iteration is Hillary Clinton’s visit. The Palestinians are being told in no uncertain terms to get back to the negotiating table.
A halt on settlement construction in the West Bank is not a pre-condition for the resumption of talks between Israel and the Palestinians, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday.
“There has never been a pre-condition. It’s always been an issue within the negotiations,†Clinton said about the settlements.
But if you look at those words, and the words of Obama’s Cairo speech, there is a cognitive dissonance that explains why the Palestinians continue to use the lack of a freeze as a reason to halt negotiations. Because the Obama administration opened the door for it use. And the Palestinians have never, ever not used an excuse to refuse to negotiate with Israel.
Responding to Clinton’s remarks, a Palestinian official said Israel must halt settlement building for peace talks to resume.
Nabil Abu Rdainah, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said: “A settlement freeze and acknowledging the terms of reference is the only way towards peace negotiations.â€
Because the Palestinians don’t want to negotiate. They don’t want two states, living side by side in peace. They want a Palestinian state in all of what was the British Mandate of Palestine. And now, the Obama administration has given them their Best. Excuse. Ever. They’re not giving it up anytime soon.
The Obama administration’s Israel policy to date has been a miserable failure. The two sides are no closer to peace than they were under the Bush administration, or even the Clinton administration.
Smart power. Wow. It really doesn’t work very well, does it?
Smart power doesn’t work too well when you’re not as smart as you think you are.
Here we see the beginning of Hillary’s primary challenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if this statement is much stronger than the Oval Office was expecting.
She may think she is, but if so she’s counting her chickens before the eggs are laid. She’s been making an ass of herself in Pakistan. All anybody will have to do toderail her next attempt at the nomination is to play recordings of what she’s been saying to the Pakistanis. She’s just as clever as Obama about rubbishing her own country.
I said at the time of her appointment that she should have stayed in the Senate if she wanted to go further. She’d have more power and influence that way. Becoming Sec State just derailed her from further ascent.