THE GUARDIAN: US president tells Time magazine his efforts to secure a Middle East peace deal have failed
Barack Obama has admitted that his attempts to break the political deadlock in the Middle East by pressuring Israel to end the construction of Jewish settlements have failed.
He said he raised expectations of a breakthrough too high because he underestimated the political obstacles involved – an acknowledgement that he was unable to force the hand of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
"The Middle East peace process has not moved forward and I think it's fair to say, for all our efforts at early engagement, [it] is not where I want it to be," he told Time magazine. "This is just really hard … This is as intractable a problem as you get. If we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high."
Obama made a push to break the political logjam in his first months in office. Unusually for an American administration, he focused his pressure on the Israelis by demanding that Netanyahu halt all Jewish settlement construction in the occupied territories. The growing settlements are widely considered to be one of the major obstacles to peace and a test of the sincerity of Israeli claims to accept an independent Palestinian state.
Obama put pressure on Netanyahu at a testy meeting in Washington in May, leading to a strain in relations rarely seen between the two governments. But the White House disappointed the Palestinian leadership by weakening its demand in the face of Israeli resistance.
This opened the way for Netanyahu to announce that he would scale back, but not halt, settlement construction in the West Bank, and continue unfettered building in East Jerusalem, which is the focus of a strategy to seal off the city and ensure all of it remains under Israeli control.
Obama said that the Israelis "after a lot of time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies" but "still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures". Obama admits US underestimated Israeli-Palestinian deadlock >>> Chris McGreal in Washington |Friday, January 22, 2010
