Israel’s Prime Minister Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running as fast as he can to keep up with Barack Obama. He has said he’ll make a major policy speech soon, mapping out his government’s “principles for achieving peace and security.”
Mr. Netanyahu said, “We want to achieve peace with the Palestinians and with the countries of the Arab world, while attempting to reach maximum understanding with the United States and our friends around the world.”
Netanyahu claims he has been reformulating Israeli peace policy. But some are skeptical. Ben Caspit, a columnist, wrote in the newspaper Maariv, that Mr. Netanyahu, “is now going to have to be particularly creative if he wants to renew trust between the United States and Israel.”
Israeli officials say they expect the Obama administration “to respect understandings” they say were reached — some written and some oral — with the Bush administration on building within existing settlements. The Obama administration, however, denies that any binding agreements on settlements were ever reached by anyone. And Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has been talking tough; she has pointed out that “there is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements. If they did occur, which, of course, people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”
In any case, the governments of the Arab world will not accept anything less than an Israeli withdrawal to the borders that existed after Israel’s pre-emptive war against the Arabs 41 years ago.
Unless Israel is willing to abide by its legal obligations, including U.N. resolution 242, there will be no lasting peace.
And that really is the bottom line.
