Tag Archives: Palestinian Statehood

Michael Snyder points out possibilities of US formally recognizing Palestinian Statehood

Question-marks

Important Takeaways:

  • As Part Of The Upcoming Middle East Peace Covenant, Will The U.S. Formally Recognize Palestinian Statehood At The United Nations?
  • For months, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been quietly negotiating a deal that would normalize relations between the two nations. But they aren’t the only parties involved.  Israel and Saudi Arabia both want formal security agreements with the United States as part of any agreement.
  • In other words, if either of those two nations get attacked, the U.S. military would be required to intervene.
  • The Saudis also want to develop a nuclear power program, and they want U.S. assistance with that.
  • But the biggest barrier to a deal was always going to be the Palestinians.
  • The Saudis are insisting that any agreement must include major concessions from both the U.S. and the Israelis. And the Palestinians are publicly making it known that they will not accept any outcome that does not involve formal U.S. recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
  • At one time, such a demand would have killed negotiations, but apparently the Biden administration is very open to making such a move.
  • In fact, on Friday National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told the press that “a basic framework” for an agreement has been “hammered out”…
  • It is being reported that the Palestinians are demanding the transfer of territory in the West Bank from Israel and “recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations” from the United States…

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Biden, Israeli PM seek to reset relations, narrow differences on Iran

By Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday will seek to reset the tone of U.S.-Israeli relations in their first White House meeting and find common ground on Iran despite differences on how to deal with its nuclear program.

In talks overshadowed by the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the two leaders will try to turn the page on years of tensions between Bennett’s predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was close to former President Donald Trump, and the last Democratic administration led by Barack Obama with Biden as his vice president.

The meeting, originally scheduled for Thursday morning, was delayed until later in the day, U.S. and Israeli officials said, while Biden held consultations with top aides about two explosions near Kabul’s airport amid a frantic evacuation effort from Afghanistan.

Suspected suicide bombers struck, causing a bloodbath among desperate civilians hoping to flee. A Taliban official said at least 13 people were killed. The Pentagon said U.S. personnel were among those hurt.

In what was planned as a low-key meeting, Bennett wants to move on from Netanyahu’s combative public style and instead manage disagreements constructively behind closed doors between Washington and its closest Middle East ally.

The visit gives Biden an opportunity to demonstrate business as usual with a key partner while contending with the complex situation in Afghanistan. Biden’s biggest foreign policy crisis since taking office has not only hurt his approval ratings at home but raised questions about his credibility among both friends and foes.

Topping the agenda is Iran, one of the thorniest issues between the Biden administration and Israel.

Bennett, a far-right politician who ended Netanyahu’s 12-year run as prime minister in June, is expected to press Biden to harden his approach to Iran and halt negotiations aimed at reviving the international nuclear deal that Trump abandoned.

Biden will tell Bennett that he shares Israel’s concern that Iran has expanded its nuclear program but remains committed for now to diplomacy with Tehran, a senior administration official said. U.S.-Iran negotiations have stalled as Washington awaits the next move by Iran’s new hardline president.

Briefing reporters ahead of the meeting, the official said: “Since the last administration left the Iran nuclear deal, Iran’s nuclear program has just dramatically broken out of the box.”

The official said that if the diplomatic path with Iran fails, “there are other avenues to pursue,” but did not elaborate.

Bennett has been less openly combative but just as adamant as Netanyahu was in pledging to do whatever is necessary to prevent Iran, which Israel views as an existential threat, from building a nuclear weapon. Iran consistently denies it is seeking a bomb.

The two leaders are expected to speak briefly to a small pool of reporters during their Oval Office meeting but there will not be a joint news conference, limiting the potential for public disagreement.

AT ODDS ON PALESTINIAN ISSUES

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Biden and Bennett are also divided. Biden has renewed backing for a two-state solution after Trump distanced himself from that long-standing tenet of U.S. policy. Bennett opposes Palestinian statehood.

The consensus among Biden’s aides is that now is not the time to push for a resumption of long-dormant peace talks or major Israeli concessions, which could destabilize Bennett’s ideologically diverse coalition.

But Biden’s aides have not ruled out asking Bennett for modest gestures to help avoid a recurrence of the fierce Israel-Hamas fighting in the Gaza Strip that caught the new U.S. administration flat-footed earlier this year.

Among the issues that could be raised in Thursday’s talks is the Biden administration’s goal of re-establishing a consulate in Jerusalem that served the Palestinians and which Trump closed. Biden’s aides have moved cautiously on the issue.

The administration has also emphasized that it opposes further expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied land.

Bennett, 49, the son of American immigrants to Israel, has been a vocal proponent of settlement building.

Biden’s advisers are also mindful that Israeli officials may be concerned about the apparent failure of U.S. intelligence to predict the swift fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.

Biden intends to reassure Bennett that the end of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan does not reflect a “de-prioritizing” of the U.S. commitment to Israel and other Middle East allies, the senior U.S. official said.

Biden will also discuss with Bennett behind-the-scenes efforts to get more Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel, the senior U.S. official said. This would follow in the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which reached accords with Israel brokered by the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Bennett met U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. He was expected to discuss, among other issues, the replenishing of the Iron Dome missile defense system that Israel relies on to fend off rocket attacks from Gaza.

(Reporting By Matt Spetalnick; additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Steve Holland in Washington; writing by Matt Spetalnick; editing by Grant McCool)

Netanyahu opposes Palestinian state, Israeli minister says ahead of U.S. visit

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) stands next to Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump during their meeting in New York, U.S.

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Benjamin Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state, a senior Israeli cabinet member said on Monday, but left it unclear whether the prime minister would say that publicly in talks with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington this week.

Netanyahu has never explicitly abandoned his conditional support for a future Palestine, and his spokesman did not respond immediately to a request to comment on Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan’s remarks.

Erdan belongs to Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, whose leading members have often espoused a harder line than the prime minister himself.

“I think all members of the security cabinet, and foremost the prime minister, oppose a Palestinian state,” Erdan told Army Radio after the forum met on Sunday on the eve of Netanyahu’s departure for Washington for talks with Trump on Wednesday.

“No one thinks in the next few years that a Palestinian state is something that, God forbid, might or should happen,” he said in the interview.

But asked if Netanyahu would voice opposition to statehood on camera when he meets Trump, Erdan said: “The prime minister has to weigh things according to what he feels in the meeting and the positions he encounters there. No one knows what the positions of the president and his staff are.”

Palestinians seek to establish a state in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel captured those areas in a 1967 war and pulled its troops and settlers out of Gaza in 2005.

NUANCED

Citing Israeli settlement activity, Palestinian leaders and the former U.S. administration of Barack Obama have questioned Netanyahu’s commitment, which he first made in a 2009 policy speech, to the so-called two-state solution to decades of conflict.

“It is not only their statements – what the government of the extreme right in Israel does on the ground prevents any chance of the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Wasel Abu Youssef, an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said of Erdan’s comments.

Since Trump took office last month, Netanyahu has approved construction of 6,000 settler homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, drawing international condemnation which the White House did not join.

In recent days, however, the Trump administration has taken a more nuanced position, saying building new settlements or expanding existing ones may not be helpful in achieving peace.

Netanyahu has spelled out terms for a future Palestine: its demilitarization, the stationing of Israeli troops in its territory and Palestinian recognition of Israel as the “nation-state” of the Jewish people.

Last month, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said Netanyahu, in a closed-door meeting with Likud ministers, coined a new term “Palestinian state-minus” to describe his vision of limited Palestinian sovereignty.

Under interim peace deals, Palestinians, who number about 2.5 million in the West Bank, currently exercise limited self-rule in the territory, where some 350,000 Israeli settlers live.

Some members of Netanyahu’s government have called for the annexation of parts of the West Bank, a demand he has resisted.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Maayan Lubell and Janet Lawrence)

Obama says Israeli settlements making two-state solution impossible

Palestinian laborers working at construction site on Israeli settlement

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama, in an interview aired on Israeli television on Tuesday, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu policy backing settlements in occupied territory is making a future Palestinian state impossible.

“Bibi says that he believes in the two-state solution and yet his actions consistently have shown that if he is getting pressured to approve more settlements he will do so regardless of what he says about the importance of the two-state solution,” Obama said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.

Some 570,000 Israelis now live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem, together home to more than 2.6 million Palestinians. Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. It later annexed East Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally.

Obama, who leaves office on Jan. 20, said that in the past few years both he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had “countless times” personally appealed to Netanyahu to stop settlement activity, but that those pleas were ignored.

“Increasingly what you are seeing is that the facts on the ground are making it almost impossible, at least very difficult, and if this trendline continues – impossible, to create a contiguous, functioning Palestinian state,” Obama told Channel Two’s Uvda program.

Israel expects to receive more favorable treatment from Obama’s successor, President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump has denounced the Obama administration’s Israel policy and has vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, riling the Palestinians. He has also named as U.S. ambassador to Israel a lawyer who raised money for a major Jewish settlement.

Relations between Netanyahu and Obama have been strained for years over their differences regarding settlement-building and Iran nuclear deal’s with world powers signed in 2015.

Ties deteriorated to a low point in December when Washington did not exercise its veto to stop a U.N. Security Council resolution that demands an end to Israeli settlement building, prompting harsh criticism from Netanyahu of Obama and Kerry.

The right-wing Netanyahu has accused the Obama administration of being obsessed with settlements and not recognizing what he called “the root of the conflict – Palestinian opposition to a Jewish state in any boundaries.”

Netanyahu, for whom settlers are a key constituency, has said his government has been their greatest ally. The Palestinians want the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with the Gaza Strip – which Israel also captured in 1967 but withdrew from in 2005 – for an independent state.

The last U.S.-brokered peace talks broke down in 2014.

Washington deems settlement activity illegitimate and most countries view it as an obstacle to peace. Israel cites a biblical, historical and political connection to the land – which the Palestinians also claim – as well as security interests.

(Reporting by Maayan Lubell; editing by Mark Heinrich)