Tag: rejection

Not Ready: Palestinians Leaning Against Resuming Talks

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas strongly suggested Saturday that he would reject a peacemaking blueprint put forward by international mediators, saying he would not agree to any proposal that disregarded Palestinian conditions for the resumption of peace talks.

Abbas, who returned to the West Bank on Saturday after submitting a statehood bid at the United Nations a day earlier, told reporters accompanying him that he was still studying the proposal by the peacemaking Quartet — the U.S., European Union, United Nations and Russia.

But he appeared to tip his hand by saying “we will not deal with any initiative” that doesn’t demand a halt to Israeli settlement construction or negotiations based on borders before the 1967 War when Israel captured land the Palestinians claim for their state.

The Quartet statement made no such demands.

Abbas dug into his positions after resisting heavy, U.S.-led pressure to abandon his bid to have the U.N. recognize a state of Palestine in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. His willingness to stand up to Washington has won him newfound respect at home, where he had been considered a lackluster leader. The unilateral bid for statehood and U.N. membership reflects deep-seated Palestinian exasperation over 44 years of Israeli occupation.

Israel has had no comment on the Quartet plan to resume long-stalled negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel, which mediators regard as the only way to establish a Palestinian state. Israeli leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the long-standing conditions Abbas has put forth, saying talks must go forward without imposing terms.

The Quartet urged both parties to draw up an agenda for peace talks within a month and produce comprehensive proposals on territory and security within three months. Mediators aspire to a final deal within a year, but similar plans have failed to produce a peace agreement in the past, and this latest proposal offered no program for bridging the huge differences that have stymied negotiations for most of the past three years.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon relayed the Palestinians’ statehood request to the Security Council on Friday, shortly after Abbas formally submitted it. It is expected to be shot down there, either because it won’t win the required support of nine of the Council’s 15 members, or because the U.S. will make good on its threat to veto it. The Security Council will meet Monday to deal with the membership request, but final action is likely to take weeks or months.

Washington has been lobbying hard to muster enough support in the Council to block the statehood application so the U.S. won’t have to resort to a veto — something that would be frowned upon by the Arab world at a time when autocratic regimes are coming under assault there.

Abbas told reporters, without explaining, that he expected the Council to take action within weeks, not months. With Council support necessary to be admitted to the U.N. as a state, the Palestinians are expected to ask the U.N. General Assembly, where they enjoy broad support, to grant them a more modest status upgrade to nonmember observer state from permanent observer.

On board his plane, Abbas described himself as exhausted by the international efforts to wear him down but buoyant when he explained in a speech to the General Assembly why he had sidestepped the negotiating process that had been the cornerstone of international Mideast policy for nearly two decades.

The pressure “didn’t affect our spirits to reach the target and to deliver the Palestinian message officially,” he said.

Abbas noted, without elaborating, that some unspecified Arab states had also tried to pressure him to drop the statehood application.

Republicans Reject Bush Legacy As Too Liberal

George W. Bush commanded total support from the Congressional GOP when in office, failing to pass legislation only when the American people roared in disapproval, as they did when he tried to privatize Social Security in 2005. So it’s telling that they now reject his domestic policies as too progressive and his foreign policy as too interventionist:

Bush’s attempt to re-position the GOP to the center-right has been rejected in favor of an unmodified brand of conservatism that would rather leave people alone than lift them up with any “armies of compassion.” Many of Bush’s distinctive policy ideas have fallen by the wayside, replaced by a nearly single-minded focus on reducing the size of government.

Twelve years after the then-Texas governor chastised his party’s congressional leaders for attempting to “balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” it’s unthinkable that any serious Republican presidential hopeful would attempt to get to the left of the congressional GOP.

As Bush’s successor in Austin illustrated in a jeremiad at a Republican conference here this weekend, potential White House hopefuls now are competing to prove their conservative bona fides—and any criticism of their own party is for its purported drift away from principle.

And in last week’s New Hampshire presidential debate, the Republican field even edged away from the Bush administration’s activist foreign policy, condemning the intervention in Libya and calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan.

It adds up to a comprehensive and unmistakable rejection of the Bush legacy – and above all, of Bush’s platform of “compassionate conservatism” that was supposed to give the GOP a permanent electoral majority.

The problem here for the GOP is not their shift on foreign policy–Americans seem to agree that U.S. troops are overextended. But on domestic issues, the 2008 election was essentially a rejection of supply-side economics and a hands-off policy when it came to regulating banks and the financial industry–and moving further to the right hardly seems a recipe for success when the voting universe is sure to be larger than the one composed primarily of older, white Tea Party types that turned out last fall. [Politico]