Peace is needed in the Middle East. Barack Obama is to pursue a peace plan involving the recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders.
Obama wants to throw his support behind a 2002 Saudi Peace initiative endorsed by the Arab League and backed by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima Party.
The Arab Peace plan received a boost when President Shimon Peres, a Nobel Peace laureate and leading Israeli Dove, commanded the initiative at a Saudi-sponsored United Nations conference in New York. Peres told King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (who was behind this original intiative), "I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region."
Most of us don't want further procrastination BUT an END to the conflict! Barack Obama should lose no time in pursuing this peace plan.
After 63 years of the Palestinian Nakba, and despite 20 years of unsuccessful peace negotiations, the Palestinian people continue to be denied their most fundamental and inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence, sovereignty and return to their homes and properties from which they have been forcibly displaced.
“By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and every State has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter.”
The U.S. president said that an independent Palestine should be based on 1967 borders — before the Six Day War in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — as adjusted by possible land swaps agreed upon by both sides. He said Israel can never live in true peace as a Jewish state if it insists on "permanent occupation."
"For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state," Obama said, in a speech in which he repeatedly praised nonviolent protest in other parts of the region in pursuit of national "self-determination."
Livni, the leader of Kadima, which favours the plan, is the front-runner in Israeli elections due in February. Her rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud, is adamantly against withdrawing to borders that predate the Six Day war in 1967.
But Netanyahu, don't be fooled by the applause! People around the world want peace, Peace.
According to a Washington source Obama told Abbas: “The Israelis would accept this initiative because it would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco."
Obama is endorsing the Palestinians' demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war. Israel says the borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.
Then, Please, let us start the negotiations! Palestinian people cannot live anymore in forced exile and they do need a state, a Palestinian state!
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