Obama cools on Palestine state in election run-up

WHEN Barack Obama declared his opposition yesterday to the Palestinian Authority's bid for statehood through the UN Security Council, he left many disappointed. But for other commentators it was all too predictable as the election cycle gets underway.
 
Obama's incongruous position
President Obama threw the weight of the United States directly in the path of the Arab democracy movement even as he hailed what he called the democratic aspirations taking hold in the Middle East, says Helene Cooper in the New York Times. For Obama the challenge in crafting his much-anticipated General Assembly speech was "how to address the incongruities" of his administration's position.
 
This is the president who promised to make peace negotiations a priority from Day One, says Cooper, and the president who opened the door to Palestinian state membership at the UN last year. But he was now threatening to veto that membership. Obama was "determined to get on the right side of Arab history" but has ended up, "in the views of many Arabs, on the wrong side of it on the Palestinian issue".

Israel and US against the world
Yes, it was Israel and the US alone against the world yesterday, says Lisa Marlowe in the Irish Times. The icily silent audience in the cavernous hall of the UN General Assembly seemed to say "Obama, we hardly knew you". In 2010, Obama's hope of welcoming "an independent sovereign state of Palestine" was greeted with thunderous applause. But no one interrupted this speech. "Obama's third annual address to the UN General Assembly was a flop."

In Ramallah, some were happy that Barack Obama (pictured with Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu above) would veto a Security Council vote on Palestine's statehood, says Robert Fisk in the Independent. "This would finally prove to all Arabs that America was not their friend." No one suggested that Obama might courageously support a vote for Palestine at the cost of his re-election. "That would be fantasy, wouldn't it?"

It all comes down to domestic US politics
Yes, this is politics, says Julian Borger on his Guardian blog. Fourteen months from the elections, the US president "is already fighting for his political life". He clearly feels he cannot afford to be outflanked by his future Republican opponent on the defence of Israel.

As Alexander Cockburn writes for The First Post today, Obama and the Democrats are still "reeling" from the loss of the heavily Jewish Brooklyn district of Rep. Wiener whose seat, held by the Democrats for 80 years, was captured by Bob Turner, a Republican campaigning on the theme that Obama was selling out Israel.

As a result, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry, "not known hitherto for his interest in foreign affairs," was able to pledge: "I hope you will tell the people of Israel: Help is on the way." ·