President Obama’s terms for what he proclaimed in his 2010 UN speech would be “an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent, sovereign state of Palestine” would jeopardize Israel’s security.
From virtually the very beginning of his presidency, President Barack Obama has gone out of his way to push Israel into making unreasonable unilateral concessions. He demanded a freeze on all settlement building, including expansions of existing settlements. He validated the Palestinians’ bogus claims to East Jerusalem. And he threw Israel under the bus earlier this year with his irresponsible proposal that Israel negotiate borders with a new Palestinian state based on the indefensible pre-1967 lines, with some unspecified mutual land swaps.
Egypt’s UN ambassador, Maged Abdelaziz, explicitly linked President Obama’s “peace” proposal with “the efforts by the Palestinian leadership to garner the most possible number of recognitions of the state of Palestine on the borders of 1967, with those swaps.”
While expecting Israel to essentially return to pre-1967 conditions, Obama did not demand that the Palestinians simultaneously give up their “right of return” claim for millions of Palestinian refugees to relocate to the pre-1967 Israel territory, which would extinguish Israel’s identity as the world’s only homeland for the Jewish people. At the same time as demanding the “right of return” for Palestinians to pre-1967 Israel cities and towns, along with their own independent state, the Palestinians hypocritically do not want any Jews living anywhere in their independent state, according to the Palestinians’ ambassador to the United States. “I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” he said, in a two-faced remark that ignored the contrary consequences of implementing the Palestinians’ “right of return” demand.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has only lightly criticized the Palestinians’ plans to set up a so-called “unity government” backed by both Palestinian President Abbas, whose authority now extends only to the West Bank territory, and by the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas, which controls Gaza and refuses to recognize Israel.
Some have argued that it is no big deal if the Palestinians succeed in obtaining General Assembly recognition of observer state status, since they still will not be a full-fledged member state in the United Nations as a whole. The European Union is reportedly trying to broker a compromise to avoid a showdown at the Security Council that would force the U.S. to exercise its veto of a resolution recommending full UN member state status. The thinking is to start with the baby step of observer state status and come back after the U.S. 2012 presidential election (which the Palestinians, Arab countries and Europe hope will lead to Obama’s re-election) for a full UN membership bid.
