Obama Addressing UN General Assembly (AP)
Arab-Israeli peace efforts and the upcoming talks with Iran took center stage at the UN General Assembly this week.
Following months of shuttle diplomacy by U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell and other U.S. officials, President Barack Obama held a frank first trilateral meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. At the meeting, Obama reportedly urged the two sides to set a firm time frame by mid-October to resume negotiations. “We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back,” he reportedly said, “Success depends on all sides acting with a sense of urgency.”
In his first address to the General Assembly on Wednesday, Obama elaborated on this firm demand and called for an immediate re-launch of the peace talks on all permanent status issues, including security, borders, the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. “Now, I am not naive. I know this will be difficult,” he said. “But all of us—not just the Israelis and the Palestinians—but all of us must decide whether we are serious about peace or whether we will only lend it lip service. To break the old patterns, to break the cycle of insecurity and despair, all of us must say publicly what we would acknowledge in private.”
Also on Wednesday, ahead of the talks with Iran scheduled to start on October 1, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China called on Iran to provide a "serious response" to their offer of negotiations over its nuclear program. Russia indicated for the first time that it would consider tough new sanctions against Iran. (For more on Russia’s policies toward Iran see our August interviews with The Honorable William S. Cohen and Eugene Rumer.) And dozens of delegations, including the United States, walked out in protest of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s harsh attacks on Israel in his speech. In an interview with the Washington Post and Newsweek, Ahmadinejad offered to have Iranian scientists meet with U.S. and other international scientists as a confidence-building measure. On Thursday, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution to strengthen nuclear weapons deterrents.
Below are some articles and interviews you may have missed on this week’s developments.
Don’t Descend from the Summit
By Haaretz, Editorial
It is to be hoped that the triumphal crowing from Netanyahu’s camp after the summit does not mean the prime minister interprets Obama’s decision to pull back from his demand for a total settlement freeze as a carte blanche for construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Provoking our Palestinian peace partner cannot be reconciled with a commitment to a two states for two peoples solution.
Israel also has no interest in making Obama look like a weak leader who cannot impose his will on a small, friendly state. The United States holds the key to restraining the Iranian nuclear threat, and is also Israel’s bulwark against imposed political solutions. Israel should be thankful that Obama took time off from his many burdensome domestic concerns to demonstrate to the world that he is personally committed to advancing moves aimed at ending the Middle East dispute. The New York summit was an important step, but by no means sufficient. Now is the time to move forward from mere handshakes to real action.
What Mr. Obama Said, and Didn’t Say
The New York Times, Editorial
With his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, President Obama took another step toward repairing America’s battered image. There was no bombast and bullying, but he still managed to challenge other countries to take more responsibility and this country to ask more of itself. No one can argue with the importance of the issues he dwelled on: nuclear proliferation, climate change, the global economy and Middle East peace. …
Let’s be clear: Mr. Obama has made enormous progress in the short eight months since he took office. … He has persuaded the world once again to hear, and to listen to, what America has to say, but he is still figuring out how to fully capitalize on that good will and credibility. The president learned a chastening lesson in recent weeks about the limits of his hortatory power when Israel shrugged off his call to halt all settlement activity and Arab leaders refused to make any concessions until Israel agreed to do that. Mr. Obama is not giving up. In his speech on Wednesday, he called instead for “negotiations—without preconditions—that address the permanent-status issues”: security, borders, refugees and Jerusalem.
Obama Looking for Negotiations to Produce Lasting, Not Interim Mideast Peace Solution
Interview with Steven A. Cook, senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR.org)
“It is admirable that the Obama administration is approaching the issue with the kind of vigor that it is. … He is saying that the time for interim steps is over and that any kind of effort on the part of either of the parties to walk negotiations back to interim steps is not going to be acceptable to the United States. Now what the Obama administration is willing to do to ensure that the parties don’t try to bog this down into interim steps is unclear from the president’s statement. But it is clear that they are very much interested in moving very quickly on final status. …
Senator Mitchell has only been at this for nine months, and this is a century-long conflict. … What’s important is that Mitchell has been out there and trying to work on the problem. That, in and of itself, is a difference from the Bush administration’s approach to the problem. … The Obama administration believes that the conflict is a national security concern of the United States given the linkages to other issues in the region–specifically the linkage to the Iranian challenge, and given the fact that the Iranians used the Palestinian issue to gain influence in Arab politics and that necessarily has an effect on American interests and allies in the region. And in general, the idea of Israeli security is a national security interest of the United States. That is why the Obama administration has seen this as an important priority to finally try to wind this conflict down, but they have learned in the first nine months, despite the overwhelming popularity of the president abroad, his continuing popularity at home, and his dramatic personal appeal, these are extraordinarily difficult issues.”
For more on the Obama Administration’s strategy on resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict see our June interview with Daniel C. Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt; S. Daniel Abraham Professor, Princeton University.
