Differing views on Clinton’s settlement announcement
The announcement was met with condemnatory statements by senior Palestinians, who were widely quoted in the ensuing coverage. For example, The Times quoted spokesman Ghassan Khatib as saying: ‘Negotiations are about ending the occupation and settlement expansion is about entrenching the occupation’, while the Financial Times quoted another spokesman, Nabil Abu Rdainah, in 'Palestinian ire as Clinton backs Israel on settlements': ‘The negotiations are in a state of paralysis and the result of Israel’s intransigence’.
While The Times, Financial Times and Independent covered the negative Palestinian reaction to the change in policy, only the Daily Telegraph’s news article discussed the factors which may have led to this apparent US policy u-turn. These factors were also echoed in an opinion piece in The Observer by former Ha’aretz editor David Landau, critiquing Obama’s position on settlements.
In ‘US drops demand for Israel settlement freeze’, the Daily Telegraph’s Adrian Blomfield argued that the shift represented ‘an end to America’s brief flirtation with the Palestinian cause’ and will ‘damage Mr Obama’s reputation among Arabs as a peacemaker’. However, the Middle East correspondent also noted that the change in approach will ‘bolster critics who have accused him of naivety’.
The article addressed the specific charge of naivety, regarding Obama’s stated policy on settlements, which is that all construction must stop: ‘Critics… denounced Mr Obama for setting Israel an unrealistic goal, pointing to the huge domestic opposition that Mr Netanyahu would have faced had he imposed such restrictions’. This was enunciated further by a quote included from Israeli political scientist Eytan Gilboa: ‘[Obama] created very high expectations in the Arab world with his excessive focus on the settlement issue. Now he has lost credibility on both sides’.
David Landau’s contribution to: ‘A year on: has Obama met the hopes of the world?’, argued that that ‘We’re uniquely placed for a breakthrough’ but chastised Obama’s ‘un-nuanced and unworkable demand’ that not only ‘pumped pointless hubris into the Palestinian’s rhetoric’ but also ‘played into Netanyahu’s hands’.
These two articles offered a rare insight into an alternative take on US President Obama’s policy on Israeli settlements and its impact on the peace process, rather than simply focus on the inevitable Palestinian backlash.