Posted on 09/18/2009 3:21:40 PM PDT by Steelfish
September 18, 2009
President Obama Blow As US Fails To Secure Israel Peace Talks Progress
Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem and Giles Whittell in Washington
A frantic effort by the US Middle East envoy to wrest an agreement that would restart peace talks appeared to have ended in failure yesterday, inflicting President Obama’s first important foreign policy setback.
George Mitchell shuttled between Jerusalem and the West Bank attempting to wrest an agreement on settlement building before the UN General Assembly meeting next week.
US officials had hoped that Israeli and Palestinian leaders would meet on the sidelines of the assembly, kick-starting peace negotiations that have been stalled for nearly nine months. But a spokesperson for the State Department told reporters, “There has been no agreement to have the trilateral meeting . Of course we were hoping for a breakthrough.”
It appeared that Israeli and Palestinian leaders remained at odds over several key issues, most notably Israel’s West Bank settlements. Mr Mitchell was said to be pushing Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, for a year-long freeze but an Israeli official said that this “was not an option”.
It would consider a freeze of up to nine months, the official said, excluding approximately 3,000 housing units that had already been approved. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, told Mr Mitchell yesterday that he would not resume talks without a complete freeze, according to the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. “We once again reiterated that there is no middle ground solutions for settlements. A settlement freeze is a settlement freeze.”
The White House put an optimistic gloss on Mr Mitchell’s efforts. Asked about a nine-month freeze, Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s spokesman, said that it could be “very helpful to the overall process”.
Despite the evidence of faltering diplomacy....
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
I guess Obammy's embarrassingly amateurish fooling around with Russia and North Korea doesn't rise to the level of "important."
The list, ping
Funny, that’s how I kept reading it.
Hussein doesn’t give a damn about Israel. Not one. I don’t know why the Jews in America vote for him...his lifelong associates and Hussein are all anti-Israel.
This is what gets me about the left, Bozo has failed several times since he got in office with his foreign policy, but the SRM says this is his "first". Just like his vacation to Marxist Vineyard when he had just come off a vacation at Grand Canyon and they claimed it was his "first vacation". They will keep doing this, the next failure of foreign policy will also be his "first" if the SRM has anything to do with it.
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