1. Senate Passes Iran Sanctions Bill - S. 2799
2. Text of Senate floor "discussion" of S. 2799
3. APN Hill Event on Jerusalem
4. Berman (D-CA) on the record at APN event in LA
1. Bills and Resolutions
2. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) on the record
3. Speculation over Iran sanctions legislation continues
4. APN to Obama: Time to play hardball, for the sake of Middle East peace
5. APN blog post: Israel's Democracy in Jeopardy
As President Obama embarks on his second year in office, he and his
team continue to reiterate their commitment to achieving
Israeli-Palestinian peace. Indeed, President Obama's peace team remains
actively engaged and for the first time in months there are encouraging
signs of progress toward renewing peace talks.
An important lesson from 2009, however, is that it will take more than
patience and polite words to make peace. In his first year in office,
President Obama articulated a clear vision for Middle East peace,
worked tirelessly to make progress toward that goal, and in tangible
terms achieved something significant, in the form of Israel's decision
to adopt a partial settlement moratorium. His efforts to make further
progress, however, were stymied by intransigence on the part of both
Israel and the Palestinians, by lack of clear buy-in and support from
the Arab world, and by his own resolve to be unfailingly patient and
polite, regardless of the behavior of others.
In order to achieve a breakthrough toward peace in 2010, the Obama
Administration will have to be prepared to play political hardball,
re-orienting the US approach to Middle East peace efforts in the
following ways:
For some time there has been a debate over whether President Obama will, or should, release his own ideas about the content of an Israeli-Palestinian permanent status agreement (PSA). Now, as there appears to be a renewed push underway to launch Israeli-Palestinian permanent status talks, there is again discussion of whether it is time for President Obama to lay down some clear US ideas about those talks.
Interestingly, the Obama Administration has already gone a good way in this direction. The fact is, with little fanfare and nobody really noticing, the Obama Administration has - in speeches and other statements of President Obama and his top officials - been gradually laying out some clear premises upon which it believes any permanent status talks will be based. While these statements fall short of directly stating US expectations for the content of a PSA, they very clearly communicate US policy on some of the key permanent status issues, and it is no great leap to infer from them some clear US expectations about the shape and content of a PSA.
Transforming these discrete policy utterances into a cohesive set of premises about peace could arguably be very helpful in energizing President Obama's Middle East peace effort, reasserting US leadership and confidence in the Middle East policy arena. Doing so could also reassure Israelis and Palestinians - as well as key allies in the region whom the US needs help from in launching talks - that the US recognizes and validates their core concerns. Moreover, were the US to release a formal policy statement of some kind, along the lines discussed below, it would be very difficult for Israel or the Palestinians to attack the content, since it genuinely includes nothing that has not already been said.
