Thursday, May 21, 2009

Netanyahu At The White House: Not Yet Change We Can Believe In

"Overall, yesterday's White House meeting between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has to be seen as a draw. As former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Obama adviser Daniel Kurtzer noted before the meeting, "for different but complementary reasons, both Obama and Netanyahu do not want this meeting to fail." And it didn't. There was no public acknowledgement of strategic differences between them, the tone was friendly and upbeat, the U.S.-Israeli "special relationship" re-emerged unchanged and intact.
"Palestinian parliamentarian and pro-democracy activist Mustafa Barghouti wrote in the Los Angeles Times just before the meeting, "It's now or almost certainly never. If Obama lacks the political will to stand up to Netanyahu now, he will lack the capacity later. And by the time Obama leaves office, it will be too late to salvage anything more than an archipelago of Palestinian bantustans. We Palestinians seek freedom, not apartheid, and not the sort of Potemkin villages on the West Bank that Netanyahu is trying to package to the West as visionary economic boomtowns for desperate http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3870.""
Znet

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