It is disappointing, if not disturbing, that US President Barack Obama avoided airing any views about the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict in an hour-long interview about US foreign policy issues with CNN’s much-respected anchorman Fareed Zakaria.
One possible explanation is that Obama had told Zakaria that he did not want to discuss the issue, or Zakaria thought it wiser not to raise the subject since US-Israeli relations have hit rock bottom. Whatever the case, the fact remains that the American president has avoided the issue ever since he and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, failed to bring the two parties any closer, which prompted the Palestinians to successfully approach the United Nations. The obvious reason in the view of many Palestinians is that Israel has strong support within the American establishment.
But a Washington-based think-tank, the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) recently painted a different, and more appealing, picture. A “special report” written by its director, Grant F. Smith, focused on a lawsuit that it has filed challenging “US ambiguity towards Israel’s nuclear arsenal”. More