Obama Pledges Support For '67 Borders

Byrnzie

Hopefully his word on this is good. We can only wait and see.

Obama:
"...what America and the international community can do is state frankly what everyone knows: a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples. Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people; each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."

whygohome

Seems fundamental to me. Though he will lose both financial support and possibly votes form the U.S. Jewish population.

Gee, what do most of the world's problems have in common?
Answer: Religion. (and also, imperialism, greed, colonialism, ignorance, stupidity, etc. etc, etc.)

Jason P

Obama must think that his approval ratings are too high.

whygohome

Jason P wrote:

Obama must think that his approval ratings are too high.

With respect to Israel/Palestine, he is doing the right thing (as far as my limited knowledge tells me) so yes, he will be met with opposition. Sad how that works.

bytterman

Byrnzie wrote:

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."

About the contiguous state, what sort of link is proposed between Gaza and the West Bank? The Israeli government reaction will be interesting, to say the least.

Byrnzie

bytterman wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."

About the contiguous state, what sort of link is proposed between Gaza and the West Bank? The Israeli government reaction will be interesting, to say the least.

http://www.ipcri.org/files/passages.html
The Gaza-West Bank Passage
A Review of Options and Recommendations
Monday, July 04, 2005


...Our main recommendation is that a rail link of about 1.5 kilometers between Erez and Zikim be constructed that will link Gaza to the Israeli rail system. Once moving on the Israeli system goods could travel to Ashdod, Ben Gurion airport, and other points in Israel. With minor infrastructure developments movement to other West Bank points could easily be developed including a linkage to Tulkarem. The most logical connection would be an additional rail link from Kiryat Gat to Tarqumieh which is about a distance of 25 kilometers. This is the cheapest and fasted way of ensuring the movement of goods between the West Bank and Gaza.

A security checking facility able to scan containers would be set up in Erez. Containers would be sealed and loaded onto the trains for transshipment to the West Bank.

In the future it could be possible to discuss how the train link could be used to transport vehicles and people between the West Bank and Gaza. Once the rail link connections are in place, dedicated trains could be placed on the rails that would transport directly between Gaza and the West Bank without any stops in between.



http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... ation.html
USAID Study on a Transportation Link Between Gaza and the West Bank
(October 1, 2005)

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded $1,000,000 to fund a study of ways to boost the Palestinian economy by creating a viable trade and transportation link between Gaza and the West Bank. The study, which will be conducted in collaboration with the World Bank, will look for efficient, low-cost, and secure solutions that would allow for a physical link between the West Bank and Gaza, thereby facilitating the movement of people and goods in a secure fashion. In addition, it will identify infrastructure projects and services needed to make the connection possible.

USAID has spent more than $1.7 billion to combat poverty, create jobs, improve education, build roads and water systems, construct and equip medical clinics, and promote good governance in the West Bank and Gaza during the last decade.

redrock

Byrnzie wrote:

Hopefully his word on this is good. We can only wait and see."

Hopefully.....

And hopefully this is the start of a new US approach to Israel affairs. No more 'blind' support....

Idris

redrock wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

Hopefully his word on this is good. We can only wait and see."

Hopefully.....

"hope!" "change!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed3e6t5uEo4

rfenton4

The return to '67 borders, with land swaps, is not a unique proposal being pushed for by the Obama administration. These paramaters had been put forth by Ehud Barak's government, with brokerage by the Clinton administration in 2000 at the Camp David Accords,the Taba Summit in 2001 and as recently as 2008 by Ehud Olmert's government. The continuing themes between all of these negotiations is not only the refusal of the Palestinian delegation to accept the proposals when they are on the table but its refusal to take any of the blame once negotiations fall apart. Reading Mahmoud Abbas's most recent op-ed in the New York Times seems to cement this point when he carefully refuses to acknowledge that a Palestinian state could have been created in 1947. Until the newly formed unity government of Fatah and Hamas (who calls for both the destruction of Israel and a Jewish presence in the state), comes to the table as willing and honest partners in the peace process, the status quo will carry on.

Mariamaniatis

Byrnzie wrote:

Hopefully his word on this is good. We can only wait and see.

Obama:
"...what America and the international community can do is state frankly what everyone knows: a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples. Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people; each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."

I thought you said Obama was a murderer like Bush?

aerial

I see Israel with such a small piece of land, why do people think they should give it up. I really do not understand. Where will they go?

Mariamaniatis

aerial wrote:

I see Israel with such a small piece of land, why do people think they should give it up. I really do not understand. Where will they go?

Back to their homes in Europe of course.....

aerial

Mariamaniatis wrote:

aerial wrote:

I see Israel with such a small piece of land, why do people think they should give it up. I really do not understand. Where will they go?

Back to their homes in Europe of course.....

Israel is there home.
What part will millions of people be welcomed? Should these people just get along, have they been fighting long enough? Talk about hate. I am so surprise people on here agree with the Palestine

Byrnzie

aerial wrote:

I see Israel with such a small piece of land, why do people think they should give it up. I really do not understand. Where will they go?

Nobody's asking them to give up Israel. They are being asked to give up the land they've been stealing from the Palestinians since the 1967 war.

gimmesometruth27

aerial wrote:

Mariamaniatis wrote:

aerial wrote:

I see Israel with such a small piece of land, why do people think they should give it up. I really do not understand. Where will they go?

Back to their homes in Europe of course.....

Israel is there home.
What part will millions of people be welcomed? Should these people just get along, have they been fighting long enough? Talk about hate. I am so surprise people on here agree with the Palestine

and i am surprised more people reflexively support israel without reading up and making an informed decision.

aerial

What will America do when we have no allies.

gimmesometruth27

aerial wrote:

What will America do when we have no allies.

what do allies matter? we have had a go it alone foreign policy and that seems to suit us fine.

Byrnzie

rfenton4 wrote:

The return to '67 borders, with land swaps, is not a unique proposal being pushed for by the Obama administration. These paramaters had been put forth by Ehud Barak's government, with brokerage by the Clinton administration in 2000 at the Camp David Accords,the Taba Summit in 2001 and as recently as 2008 by Ehud Olmert's government. The continuing themes between all of these negotiations is not only the refusal of the Palestinian delegation to accept the proposals when they are on the table but its refusal to take any of the blame once negotiations fall apart. Reading Mahmoud Abbas's most recent op-ed in the New York Times seems to cement this point when he carefully refuses to acknowledge that a Palestinian state could have been created in 1947. Until the newly formed unity government of Fatah and Hamas (who calls for both the destruction of Israel and a Jewish presence in the state), comes to the table as willing and honest partners in the peace process, the status quo will carry on.

Except the Israeli's didn't offer the Palestinians these parameters at Camp David, which is why they were rejected. In fact, Israel made no concessions whatsoever at Camp David, but instead sought to carve up the West bank into a series of Apartheid-style bantustans:


http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e14120.htm

Interview with Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky explains the reality of Israel's actions to Canadian interviewer Evan Solomon.

Chomsky: The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal...here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.

So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.

This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.

Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.

Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.

Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.

Chomsky: That's not true.

Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -

Chomsky: They did. That's false.

Solomon: That's false?

Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .

Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .

Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.




Very good article here on the subject:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/henry-sieg ... ocess-scam

The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
2007
'...Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a ‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.

In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.

...Underlying Israel’s efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory to which they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding...That the former prime minister Ehud Barak (now Olmert’s defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of Israel’s ‘generosity’, and never as an acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, is another example of this mindset. Indeed, the term ‘Palestinian rights’ seems not to exist in Israel’s lexicon.

The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this.

Byrnzie

aerial wrote:

What will America do when we have no allies.

I don't see how Israel qualifies as an ally of the U.S. They bleed you to the tune of $4Billion of tax-payers money every year, and your governments unqualified support of their continual aggression makes America hated the world over, placing American lives in danger. Not only that, but the Israeli leadership treats the U.S with contempt, as evidenced by it's recent dismissal of Washington's calls to halt settlement expansion.


"This guy doesn't get it, does he?"
- Netanyahu responding in cabinet to Obama's first criticisms of his settlement policy

unsung

Are they cutting all foreign aid to Israel? If not it is all pillow talk.

Idris

unsung wrote:

Are they cutting all foreign aid to Israel? If not it is all pillow talk.

Right, just cut the funds, then see how serious things get.