Posted on 07/22/2009 6:54:23 PM PDT by Cinnamon Girl
Last summer, in the course of a campaign speech reaching out to pro-Israel groups concerned about his commitment to the Jewish state, then presidential candidate Barack Obama declared, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." Those words, which he later qualified, may now be coming back to haunt the President as he seeks to restart the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process by getting Israel to freeze all construction outside its pre-1967 borders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drawn a line in the sand over Jerusalem, vehemently rejecting Washington's demand that he halt a construction project in the Arab eastern portion of the city that was occupied by Israel in 1967. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, and Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday that this claim was nonnegotiable.
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The problem facing Obama is that pressing for a two-state solution has put him at odds with a reluctant Israeli government that has now chosen the emotive issue of Jerusalem as the test of how far he's willing to go. If he backs down, Obama pulls the plug on his carefully crafted outreach to the Muslim world and can expect to see his effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fail before it has practically begun. But pressing ahead on Jerusalem and the wider peace agenda of which it forms part could, like pushing his health-care plan, come at a rising political cost for the President.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Drive the Arabs back to Arabia and there will be peace. There is NO other way.
LOL! I’d pay cash to see that speech (even with subtitles ...)
I wish we could have BiBi here for U.S. President.
Israel could really be Ozero’s downfall. Look at the reports today that real estate sales have gone way up in the “settlements” since Ozero and Hillary! warned Israel to stop building.
I wholeheartedly agree.
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