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Obama Must Be Blunt with Abbas, Too

(Bloomberg) Jeffrey Goldberg - A couple of weeks ago, President Obama laid out for me his view of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's responsibilities in ongoing peace talks. My hope is that Obama will pressure Palestinian President Abbas to meet Netanyahu halfway on the issue of recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Abbas is opposed to offering such recognition: If Jews indeed have a connection to Palestine, then the mainstream Palestinian Arab narrative - that Zionism is a foreign, colonialist ideology, and not the movement of a people returning to its home - gets blown apart. (It's astonishing that after 60 years of Israel's existence people are still arguing about whether it is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.) I'm fairly pessimistic about Abbas' willingness to move forward in the negotiations. A study of his statements over the years suggests that he's never been willing to move boldly toward compromise.
2014-03-18 00:00:00
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