I claim no special knowledge of the inside workings of the Obama administration — merely an ear that notes the difference between substance and flatulence and to my ear what sounded like a farting contest started on April 7 with a column by David Ignatius: “Obama weighs new peace plan for the Middle East.”
According to Ignatius — which is to say, according to the nameless officials he had been talking to — Obama was “seriously considering” proposing a peace plan. Chatter, chatter, chatter.
Even as late as Thursday, Ignatius wasn’t ready to completely pull the plug on the story he’d started. After all, one of the primary reasons it had been taken so seriously was because it came from such an august columnist. A Middle East peace plan is on Obama’s foreign policy checklist and he’s “still working on it,” Ignatius wrote last week.
Even yesterday, Agence France Press reported: “Washington’s foreign policy echo chamber is reverberating with speculation that President Barack Obama could try to blow open the deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians with his own peace plan.”
Enough. The man has now spoken — Rahm Emanuel, that is.
The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports:
The time is not ripe for a U.S.-promoted Middle East peace plan, President Obama’s chief of staff said.
“A number of people have advocated that,” Rahm Emanuel said Monday on the Charlie Rose show on Bloomberg Television.
“That time is not now,” Emanuel said. The “time now is to get back to the proximity talks, have those conversations that eventually will lead to direct negotiations…”
I guess George Mitchell can carry on snoozing in the back of his limo as he waits to start shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
Palestinians should refuse to talk proximately, distantly, or at all to Israel (re peace) until the US has demanded that Israel remove all 550,000 settlers and all of the wall from all OPTs and backed up the demand with real muscle. Talk is unavailing until then.
Holding “peace talks” (unless for the limited purpose of developing a “lexicon” of small concrete proposals to be discussed seriously at the time of REAL negotiations) is pointless until Israel understands that its long-time guarantor is no longer guaranteeing everything Israel asks for.
See Sam Bahour’s article:
http://www.bitterlemons.org/issue/pal2.php
and compare my earlier:
http://123pab.com/essay.php?n=24
Sam Bahour says:
In his Cairo speech, Obama also said, “We cannot impose peace”. I hope he has reached clarity that imposing peace is not what is needed to avert yet another catastrophe in Palestine. What is needed is for the US to respect international humanitarian law and numerous UN resolutions, and leverage US power to bring Israel in line with the will of the community of nations by forcing it to end its occupation. For the US to uphold international law would be a true expression of “shock and awe” that could well prove to be Obama’s historical legacy: putting the US on the correct–as in just–side of history in this region.
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Actually the US could ‘impose’ peace.
It just won’t. For one reason and one reason only…the Jewish Lobby and donations from the collection of Jewish orgs. for Israel
It’s called corruption.
Genocide and wurs and slaughters and dead children for sale to interested donors. Call toll free, 1 -877-762- 8762.