In a Q & A at Davos, Tom Friedman of the NYT interviewed Secretary Kerry. Kerry spoke of why the US abstained - one part of his comments was:
But our credibility is important too. We’re a nation. The United States of America’s sovereignty and our policies and our morality also matter. And we have, Republican and Democrat administration alike, for years – for decades – been opposed to settlements. Now, I’ve had well more than 375 hours of conversations with the prime minister of Israel, whom I’ve worked with closely, and we’ve had many personal moments and real exchanges, and we consider ourselves friends. But in almost all those conversations I’ve said: Look, you’re affecting the ability to make peace. You’re changing the peace map and you’re doing it unilaterally. And if you continue to do that, you’re going to have trouble also with us, because our credibility’s on the line. We can’t say we’re against settlements and then turn around and turn away from an effort to try to do something about it when you continue to build.
So what’s happened is – and people don’t know this in the world, and it’s a hard thing to be the messenger of truth, because it quickly gets distorted into one sentence or one attack – but the reality is that in 1993 under Oslo, Area C, which is 60 percent of the West Bank, was supposed to be turned back over to the Palestinians, and it didn’t happen for a number of different reasons. And the Palestinians weren’t faultless in all that. But the concept is still something everybody signed up to and that matters, because you have to build capacity among the Palestinians to be able to be a state. I mean, it takes time. And none of us are – not me, not President Obama – none of us are suggesting that you’re going to pull out and suddenly turn it over in three years, five years; it’s going to be Gaza next week. Of course not. Can’t do that. Israel’s security is a paramount consideration as a final status issue.
But we saw a process taking place whereby the West Bank is slowly and steadily being eaten up, where municipal boundaries of settlements are expanded well beyond the settlement buildings themselves. And if you take all the concentric circles of the municipal boundaries around these settlements, you actually see that most of the West Bank has been reserved for the exclusive use of Israel. That’s not a Palestinian state. You see 11,000 demolition orders for Palestinian homes right now, and they’re taking place at an increased rate. You see the 110,000 settlers that were there in 1993, when Oslo was signed, is now 385,000 and growing. And 70,000 of them are east of the separation barrier, which Israel itself decided where it would put it and build.
So it’s impossible to say that every person you add isn’t a complication when you decide what kind of state you’re going to have. And if you keep building in the corridors where you could have contiguity between that state, you no longer have a contiguous Palestinian state. So it really was important for us to make a statement and, frankly, ignite a debate. And I think that debate is now on.
Friedman himself spoke of the moral issue that the Jewish community will face going forward:
And when the debate was around two states, the debate within the American Jewish community was right/left – you think the line should be here; I think it should be there. But when it moves to one state, the debate will be right/wrong. And when that happens, you will fracture every synagogue and every Jewish institution in America, and, I would suggest, all over the world. And I think we’re close to that. So thank you on behalf of this one person for drawing that redline.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2017/01/267073.htm
I would like to add an Israeli left perspective of the Paris conference where many nations, including Saudi Arabia, backed a statement that was mostly based on Kerry's principles put force in his speech.
The article speaks of how Kerry and his team politely rejected an offer by a foreign minister to take the Paris concluding statement to the UN, even though it could have worked, that there goal was to get international consensus on Kerry's principles. The result of the Paris convention was to do just that. The significance is explained by the article:
It sounds perhaps trivial until you think about the content of those principles. The contain recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, annexation of settlement blocs by Israel, full demilitarization of a Palestinian state and a resolution of the refugee issue in a "realistic" way that wouldn't change the character of the state of Israel.
The American diplomats said that the one who stood out at the closed foreign ministers meeting in Paris was Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Jubeir.
Jubeir devoted a central part of his speech to the American secretary of state's plan and expressed full support for it without any reservations.
The Saudi position that was presented at the Paris conference with regard to the Jewish state and Kerry's other principles was a result of discrete contacts the outgoing American secretary of state held with Jubeir and other senior Saudi officials in the past two years, especially ahead of Kerry's end of December speech.
read more:
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.766180
The article also spoke of the phone call then between Kerry and Netanyahu -- where Netanyahu, continued his public temper tantrum. IMO the anger is because Obama and Kerry acted on their own morality and American values -- rather than doing the bidding of the RW PM of Israel. IMO, where Netanyahu never meant the words he spoke in favor of two states; Kerry and Obama actually do.
= new reply since forum marked as read
