Obama’s Speech a ‘Historic Shift’ on Israel and Palestine? No.
May 19th, 2011There’s so much fur flying and dummy spitting this morning, you’d think that something noteworthy actually happened.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
If you’ve read the lead story in The New York Times on President Barack Obama’s Middle East speech this afternoon, you’re probably under the impression that the president has taken a bold new step to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The first paragraph of the story, filed from Washington, is quite dramatic. Obama, “seeking to harness the seismic political change unfolding in the Arab world… publicly called for the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war to be the baseline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first time an American president has explicitly taken that position.”
The only problem is, it’s not much of a shift at all.The key word in that opening paragraph is that word “explicitly.” What it means in this context, is that he said something that multiple presidents have said before him, but with slightly weaker language. What did he say? “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
That an eventual settlement would be based around borders from before the 1967 war, with land “swaps” of some kind to reflect the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has been a central assumption behind the peace process kicked off under President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and pursued with subtle variations by presidents George W. Bush and Obama after him. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters, amid a push to restart peace talks that failed, that a solution could be found that “reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.”
Sound familiar?
What wasn’t in Obama’s speech was anything new on how you get from here (complete dysfunction – it’s a “process” by convention only at this point) to there (peace). He made no mention of the settlement freeze his administration had pushed for – and failed to get – in return for restored talks with the Palestinian leadership. He also sought to shoot down Palestinian efforts to win recognition for an independent state at the United Nations, something the Palestinian Authority has been gearing up for in September.
If Obama really wants to say something that will get attention, he should say, “Bibi- Stay home. I’m not giving you the $3 billion annual check anymore and we’re going to stay out of Israeli politics.”
I watched for a few minutes, getting more nauseous with each passing second. When he said this, “The West was blamed [by the nations of the Middle East and North Africa] as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism,” I couldn’t take it any more. A perfect and gigantic lie of omission — as if the West just pulled out of the region “a half-century ago” and left those countries all to themselves all these years. What a cynical, evil prick.
Yeah, and I think with so many lies and betrayals from this con man, even the Obamapologists are starting to (finally) decrease in number. Regardless of what Obama says, just keep an eye on what he does. As always.