United Nations – President Barack Obama opposes the idea, but the Palestinians are still calling for a Security Council vote Friday on a U.N. resolution that would condemn Israel’s “illegal” settlements.
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The United States opposes new settlements, which it calls “illegitimate” and an impediment to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the Obama administration doesn’t want the issue taken up by the U.N.’s most powerful body, arguing it will only complicate efforts to resume stalled Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at a final peace settlement and creation of a Palestinian state.
The Palestinians have said repeatedly that they will not resume peace talks until Israel halts settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it wants as its capital. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed just weeks after they restarted in September because Israel ended a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction.
The Security Council scheduled a meeting on the Palestinian question at 3 p.m. local time Friday.
The vote puts Obama in a difficult position, both internationally and domestically.
A U.S. veto of the resolution — which has about 130 co-sponsors — would anger Arab nations and much of the rest of the world at a time of growing street protests in the Mideast, fueled by hopes for democracy and human rights which the Obama administration supports.
An abstention would anger the Israelis, the closest U.S. ally in the region, as well as Democratic and Republican supporters of Israel in the U.S. Congress.
Obama and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke by telephone for 50 minutes on Thursday, according to Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Aburdeneh. They discussed the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and the resolution on settlements, he said.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Obama is looking for a compromise to avert an American veto of the resolution, but a well-informed Arab diplomat said late Thursday that the vote was still scheduled for Friday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican chairwoman, said any compromise statement supported by the United States would be a “major concession to enemies of the Jewish state.”
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the Security Council vote would be counterproductive.
“We have consistently over many years said that the United Nations Security Council and resolutions that would come before the Security Council are not the right vehicle to advance that goal,” she said at a news conference in Washington after a briefing with senators.
“We are working with our partners in the Security Council, with our friends in the region, to find a consensus way forward that is consistent with our overall approach,” she said. “Our goal is absolutely the same as it always has been … the Palestinians having a state of their own to realize the aspirations of the Palestinian people, Israel with secure borders and normalized relations with all of their neighbors.”
On Wednesday, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, proposed a weaker Security Council presidential statement instead of a legally binding resolution and several other measures but the Palestinians rejected the offer. Diplomats said a new version of the U.S. statement was put forward Thursday, but apparently the Palestinians still weren’t satisfied.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. observer who announced Friday’s vote after a meeting late Wednesday of the 22-member Arab group, reiterated that settlement expansion is the “main obstacle” to the resumption of peace negotiations and said construction must stop.
Rabosai:
The Security Council will continue to do what it always did. It is vehemently anti-Israel. It is with chesed from HKB”H that the US leaders chose to veto many of the anti-Israel resolutions. We now have a president that sympathizes more with the Arab and terror regimes than any leader we ever had. While efforts to lobby must continue, it would be foolish and simply wrong to place complete reliance on our interventions. We must place our bitachon in Hashem that will be the only source from which our yeshuos come. Get out the tehilim, daven with kavana, and do some extra mitzvos to bring a few additional merits before HKB”H. A little achdus does wonders for yeshuous for Klal Yisroel.
That stinking little Abbas should be told in no uncertain terms, if you expect our millions of dollars annually, we call the shots.
Why don’t we just stop the funding of ALL of these arab countries?? I can understand if they need food or meds so we “TRADE” with them. They will need food sooner than we will need oil!! We get oil more than 60 per cent perhaps more from Canada and some from Mexico. The difference is from Saudi Arabia.(about 20%) not too much. They need wheat and corn from us . If we don’t ship to them so the prices for us will go down. At least we will be able to afford corn flakes again since they shot up prices. It is just a matter of supply and demand!!