Washington: United States President Barack Obama has warned Palestinians that they could not get isolated Palestine state through the United Nations and urged the future Fatah-Hamas unity cabinet to make a decision on their stance toward peace talks with Israel.
While giving an interview to BBC before the AIPAC conference in Washington, Barack Obama said the US commitment to Israel’s security is ‘ironclad’ and that the US would demand that Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Obama reemphasized the special relationship between the US and Israel, and said his administration would continue to provide military aid to Israel. He also urged Hamas to release abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit.
Earlier, Netanyahu criticized the US president for supporting a Palestinian state within 1967 borders, but Obama reaffirmed his commitment to the 1967 borders as a peace-talks guideline.
“They have got to make a decision, first of all, in what is the official position of a unified Palestinian authority about how they are dealing with Israel,” Obama said, adding that “if they cannot get past that barrier, it is going to be very hard for a negotiation to take place. I also believe that the notion that you can solve this problem in the United Nations is simply unrealistic.”
The US president said that he had already told Palestinian officials that “whatever happens in the United Nations, you are going to have to talk to the Israelis if you are going to have a state in which your people have self-determination, adding: “You are not going to be able to do an end run around the Israelis.”
“And so I think that, you know, whatever efforts they mount in the UN will be symbolic, he said, adding that the world has “seen a lot of these sorts of symbolic efforts before. They are not something that the US is going to be particularly sympathetic towards, simply because we think it avoids the real problems with that have to be resolved between the two parties.”
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