Let's Just Save Time And Assume That Whatever Obama Says To AIPAC--He Intends The Opposite

The White House is pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to publicly adopt President Obama's view that Israel's pre-1967 borders should be the basis for future peace talks.
Eli Lake, Washington Times

Jennifer Rubin writes that pressuring Israel on the 1967 lines contradicts Obama's promise at AIPAC that he would not force Israel to negotiate with Hamas, which openly seeks the destruction of Israel--and Abbas remains in a 'unity' government with them.


Rubin gives Elliot Abrams' opinion on Obama's latest tactic:

If the reports are right, the U.S. is now abandoning the Quartet Principles — and asking Israel to negotiate with a Palestinian side that includes Hamas without Hamas taking one single step away from terror. The Palestinian ‘concession’ if these negotiations start would be to pull the plug on seeking U.N. membership.” Moreover, it is a “concession” with very little meaning. Abrams told me that the Palestinians “can’t get U.N. membership if the U.S. vetoes it, so this looks like a desperate White House effort to avoid having to veto. It would leave Israel negotiating with Abbas in the mornings while he is negotiating with Hamas in the afternoons.Then when he gets the Hamas deal the negotiations will collapse, just like they did last year.”

Obama's backtrack here is reminiscent of the other time he spoke at AIPAC, defending Israel's right to an undivided Jerusalem--before backtracking there as well.

Rubin notes:

This weekend it became apparent that there is much to worry about and that the Obama administration has been playing a game usually practiced by the Palestinians, namely telling its domestic audience one thing and the negotiating parties something different.

Read the whole thing.

I suppose that is not surprising, after Obama has already led Abbas to demand concessions on settlements as a precondition to talks and now the Arab side is demanding an agreement on the 1967 lines as well.

As Rabbi David Jay Kaufman notes, for Israel to agree to the 1967 lines is a huge concession on Israel's part:

• First, the pre-1967 lines are actually armistice lines, not borders. This means that they were simply where the armies were when the previous conflict ended. These were not necessarily reasonable, much less defensible, borders.
  
  
• Second, the situation on the ground has changed substantially since 1967 and hundreds of thousands of Jews now live on the other side of the lines.
  
  
• Third, this statement automatically places the vast majority of Jerusalem and all of the holy sites on the Palestinian side and makes Israel offer concessions from pre-1967 Israel in exchange for any of it to be agreed upon by the Palestinian side.

...In other words, the President has de facto granted the Palestinians the West Bank including the Old City and told the Israelis to negotiate with them in exchange for what Israel wants to keep from it.

Read the whole thing.

Let's just hope that Netanyahu will not cave in to such an absurd demand.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Obama and AIPAC.