Obama's Tough Talk to Israel: Good for Two-State Solution

Obama's Tough Talk To Israel: Good for Two-State Solution

US President Barack Obama is prepared to talk tough with Israel, the US's most loyal ally. An Obama administration official has stated that he might allow anti-Israel UN resolutions to pass, if Israel does not remove illegal settlements in the West Bank.

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I am a firm supporter of two states for two peoples. I applaud Obama's maneuvering on the Palestinian-Israeli track. It is good for the future of the two-state solution. Good friends and allies must be able to speak frankly to each other. The US must enhance its credibility in the Arab world and stem the tide of radical Islam. The two-state solution might advance these goals, reasons Obama. I do not buy the ultra-nationalist Israeli position that Obama's tough talk is a bad sign for Israel. Now we need to get Hamas on board, as well as Netanyahu. Both for now are rejecting a two-state solution. They delay what is inevitable. It is more or less the solution that was proposed in 1947 by the UN Partition Plan. The boundaries were slightly different. Whether this two-state solution will stop the conflict is another question. I believe it will weaken its intensity and minimize the power of the maximalist fundamentalists on both sides. Yet predicting Middle East politics is like predicting that waiting for Godot will one day bring Godot. But that is precisely the type of abundant hope that we need to one day end the Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflicts.

Tamir Bar-On