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Anti-Israel Security Council Resolution Will Not Help Peace
(Washington Post) Eugene Kontorovich - For years, there has been mounting speculation, fueled by the administration itself, that President Obama would use his lame-duck period in office for a major anti-Israel action. Obama's goal with such a resolution would be to create diplomatic facts on the ground to box in President-elect Donald Trump's foreign policy. Such a resolution would not cement any positive legacy for Obama. To the contrary, it would vastly magnify the actual obstacles to resolving the Palestinian issue. A Security Council resolution will reinforce all the dynamics that have made a solution more remote. The resolution would teach the Palestinians that appealing to the international community will always give them a better offer than negotiations with Israel, since the international community asks nothing of the Palestinians in return. A Security Council resolution would only entrench Palestinian maximalism and refusal to negotiate. This is exactly what the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said when vetoing a similar resolution in 2011. The writer is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law.