Obama Means Business About Two-State Solution

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090721_obama_means_business_about_two-state_solution/

Obama Means Business About Two-State Solution

Posted on Jul 21, 2009

By William Pfaff


The Israeli press reports with alarm that the United States has threatened to reduce by $1 billion the guarantee the U.S. treasury customarily provides for Israel’s state borrowings, thereby assuring the nation the best commercial terms. The U.S. threat is evidence that the Obama government is serious about halting Israel’s colonization of the Palestinian territories—and about imposing, rather than merely inviting, a two-state Middle East solution.

During the next two years, Israel would lose more than a quarter of its U.S. loan guarantees, a sum equal to the estimated total the Netanyahu government now proposes to spend on the 120 West Bank colonies, where 300,000 Israelis live. This penalty excludes Israel’s borrowing for military purposes, ordinarily underwritten by the U.S. That exclusion defends President Obama from a charge of weakening Israel’s security. It is also recognition that nearly all that Israeli military spending goes to American companies.

This development out of Washington seems to have antedated the defiant announcement by Benjamin Netanyahu last Monday that Israel will construct a new housing project for Jews in Arab Jerusalem, the issue responsible for much current uproar. The prime minister declared that Israel can do whatever it pleases anywhere in Jerusalem since “united Jerusalem” has been pronounced “the capital of the Jewish people and of the state of Israel,” and “our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged.”

The statement followed Washington’s summons of Israel’s ambassador to the State Department to be told that the construction project “must stop,” as it is illegal (and, unofficially, that it is an unacceptable slap in the face to the U.S.).

snip//

The responsibility to settle the matter, if the parties can’t do it themselves, is implicit in the U.N. resolutions that created Israel and awarded a right to self-determination to the Palestinians.

If the United States and the European Union join forces to impose such U.N. settlement terms, and back them with their combined political and economic resources, sending an international force to enter the currently occupied Palestinian territories to establish the rule of law, assist the Palestinians in building government institutions, and to assure Israel’s security, this dangerous and endlessly painful stalemate might at last be ended, to everyone’s relief, the profound benefit of the whole region, and to the credit of Barack Obama and Javier Solana.

[rateyes]

1. Don't just threaten to do it. Do it.