This is how Al Jazeera reported Hillary’s stop in Jerusalem on Saturday.
The US has called for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians as soon as possible and without preconditions, an apparent climbdown on earlier demands for Israel to halt settlement building…
Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor to The Middle East Report, said that it was not surprising that the US had changed its stance on the negotiations.
The US had initially demanded a halt to any construction in the occupied territories [AFP]
“In Januaray [and] February this year there were all kinds of hoorays on the basis that the Obama administration was somehow going to effect a revolution in American foreign policy.
“If you look at what’s happened over the course of the past year, it’s basically been a gradual collapse of the American position, which in my view [means] there is] absolutely no surprise that they’ve ended up where they are now – basically heeding Israel’s decision to continue settlement constructon in the occupied territories,” Rabbani told Al Jazeera from Amman, Jordan.
Rabbani said a “pattern is consistent with American policy since the beginning of Israel-Palestine diplomacy in the early 1990s – always leaning on the Palestinians to make concessions in order to solve the problems they’re having with the Israelis. No surprise here; nothing new”.
Akiva Eldar, the chief political commentator with the Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, told Al Jazeera: “It is a betrayal. The secretary of state, I assume with the full support of the president, has turned around after 10 months of negotiating the precondition of freezing settlements … she says there is no precedent to preconditions.
More news from the region: Saudis find ‘al-Qaeda’ arms cache
Saudi officials say they have found a large arms cache near Riyadh, linking it to a dismantled al-Qaeda cell.
They say nearly 300 assault rifles and some 41,000 rounds of ammunition were found near the capital.
The weapons are linked to 44 suspected al-Qaeda militants whose arrests were announced in August.
Saudi Arabia has detained scores of suspected Islamists since al-Qaeda stepped up its campaign of bombings across the desert kingdom in 2003.
The Saudi Arabian government has recently expressed its concern about the resurgence in Yemen of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Similar Posts:
- BBC: Israelis ‘seize Iran arms ship’
- Pakistan Lashes Back at Clinton
- Reuters: U.S. reverses stance on treaty to regulate arms trade
- Obama’s Iran Policy Offers the Bush Policies to Iran–in Person
- The Front: The Taliban-Al Qaeda merger
