Monday, December 26, 2011

'US shifted from resolving to managing conflict'

GIL HOFFMAN

Ya'alon tells Likud Anglos that gov't persuaded Obama that Israeli-Palestinian conflict can't be immediately resolved.

Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon, who maintains close relations with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, suggested Sunday night that Israel had persuaded US President Barack Obama to change his strategy from trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to merely managing it.

Speaking in English to a gathering of the Likud Anglos organization in Jerusalem, Ya’alon recalled many mistakes made by Obama and other Western leaders. He credited his own government with persuading the US to right its wrongs. “We convinced the American administration that there is no way to solve the conflict in one or two years,” Ya’alon told a packed audience at the Orthodox Union’s Israel Center. “The US is trying to manage the conflict now, rather than solve it.”

This was the first time a high-ranking Netanyahu administration official has indicated that the US had shifted from conflict resolution to management. But there has been no public indication that the Americans have given up their hope of solving the conflict, and the US helped draft the Quartet position that aims to solve the conflict by the end of 2012.

Ya’alon mocked the international community for what he called its “solutionism” and “nowism” in its attempt to solve a conflict that cannot currently be solved. He said the nation that has gotten used to getting food in an instant was impatiently insisting on instant peace.

“They say we reached the moon, so why can’t we solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Ya’alon said. “Do we have a solution for everything? In medicine we don’t, not even in mathematics. God has solutions. We as human beings should be more modest.”

Ya’alon complained about American representatives blaming Israel for the persistence of the conflict at the beginning of the Obama administration, out of what he called “Western self-guilt.”

He said the US and other Western countries were making mistakes due to naivete, patronization, appeasement, self-guilt and political correctness.

He singled out Obama’s speech to the State Department about the Middle East on May 19, in which the president called for resolving the conflict over territory before resolving the refugee issue.

“[The conflict] is not about territory,” Ya’alon said. “That was the reason for the dispute with President Obama. When Obama said borders would be decided first, we rejected it strongly. We said clearly, we’re not going to fall again into the Oslo trap and let the Palestinians get without giving.”

On the Iranian issue, Ya’alon was also critical of Obama, saying that “France and Great Britain are leading the West now in calling for crippling sanctions on the Iranian central bank and preventing Iran from exporting oil, while the US is unfortunately leading from behind.”

Ya’alon’s sole criticism of political opponents in Israel was that opposition leader Tzipi Livni held Israel responsible for the conflict, even as former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice blamed the Palestinians and not Israel in her new book.

Guest Comment: Obama's new reelections tactic and when he is reelected he will kick the Israelis in their rear ends. A leopard does not change his spots.

The below indicates that Ya'alon knows Israel has a "breather" from hard core US pressure to commit suicide. But Israel has not yet got the grip how important it is to delegitimize Team PA/Abbas. Even if a Republican gets elected, if PA/Abbas has not been completely and totally delegitimized there will be pressure on Israel. The PA/Abbas has to be sooo very exposed that even the appeasing EU countries will back off. FM Lieberman also said t6hat this is not the time to talk peace, rather focus on Arab-Palestinian economic improvement. He did said that Abbas "in not a partner for anything". But that is not enough. The Government of Israel needs to be very specific about Abbas inciting hate and violence tactics and his ongoing delegitimization of Jews' right to any part of the land tactics. Why is it so hard to state that he is a mastermind terrorist in a suite? THAT will show US and EU that Abbas is not a partner for anything. Just saying it is not enough, acting it.

1 comment:

kyriba said...

Rhetorically, Obama will pay lip service to the political expediencies de jour. But in terms of actual policy, the President never strays too far from his actual convictions. All of his major foreign and domestic initiatives have thus far conformed to his left-wing world-view.

Mark my words, this emerging "conflict-management" paradigm of Obama's - if it exists at all - will last only to November 2012. If he's re-elected, he will push anew with vigor and conviction to divest Israel of its territorial depth....so that he can bask in the glory of "peace-maker" and re-enforce his bonafides in the Muslim world. And if Israel doesn't play ball, he will preside over a dramatic rupture in the US-Israeli 'special relationship' that will usher in the Jewish state's near-total international isolation.

In other words, Obama's defeat in Nov 2012 is imperative for more than just domestic considerations.