US President Barack Obama’s demands during his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Tuesday point to an intention to impose a permanent settlement on Israel and the Palestinians in less than two years,” the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, wrote on Monday. We may draw a similar conclusion from analyses such as the one by Tony Karon in Asia Times Online. [1]
United States-Israel rifts have widened to the point where the BBC recently reported that the US would “seriously consider abstaining” if the United Nations Security Council were to vote on a resolution on Jerusalem (presumably against Israel). US officials promptly denied the report, but in any case, the US is pushing extraordinarily hard a literal interpretation of “the 1967 border”. This is a strong indicator that Obama might secretly hope to impose a solution.
Last December, American officials spoke of a timeframe of two years until the creation of a Palestinian state. At that point, it seemed like an unrealistic hope, but so did the healthcare overhaul until recently. A bilateral compromise among Israelis and Palestinians appears now less likely than ever; however, Obama’s head-on collision with the Israeli government, coupled with his open support of a new, moderate and more efficient Palestinian leadership (that of the technocrat Prime Minister Salam Fayyad), has increased the likelihood of another scenario.
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