Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, has blamed Palestinian “incitement” for the attacks but Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, said the violence was “bred from almost five decades of Israeli occupation” and the result of “fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust” among Palestinians.
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Obama also began his remarks by touting the special bond between the two countries.
“Hillary Clinton is likely to make a push for greater Israel-Palestinian coexistence even if it can not solve the whole conflict”, Makovsky said.
“It is important for America’s national security to ensure we have a safe and secure Israel, one that can defend itself”.
The Obama administration has vetoed or otherwise prevented throughout its two terms all Security Council resolutions on the Israeli-Arab conflict not favored by Israel, a record unmatched by its predecessors.
In his eighth speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Obama gave little time to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
In public, Obama and Netanyahu spent most of their time touting a 10-year military assistance deal their countries struck this month worth $38 billion, the largest tranche of military aid the USA has ever given another country. -Israeli aid deal only makes Iran more determined to strengthen its military.
Netanyahu thanked Obama for “the many meetings we’ve had, in which we discussed how to confront common challenges, and how to seize common opportunities”.
Ties between the two leaders never fully recovered after Mr Netanyahu showed up on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress against Mr Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Obama, for whom this was the last meeting with Netanyahu as president, expressed hope for a productive future dialogue between the two allies.
The United States has objected to continuing Israeli settlement activity in Arab lands, which Obama sees as making an permanent peace agreement all the more hard.
Netanyahu said the Jewish state has “no greater friend than the United States of America”.
In likely his last United Nations speech, on Tuesday, he spoke little about the conflict beyond voicing the unsurprising sentiment that matters would improve if Israel let go of Palestinian land and if the Palestinians rejected incitement and embraced Israel’s legitimacy.
The CIA Factbook online says about 371,000 Israelis live in settlements scattered among an estimated 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
He added: “We all have to do better as leaders in tamping down, rather than encouraging, a notion of identity that leads us to diminish others”.
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“The settlements took up on a few minutes of the [roughly half-hour long] meeting, but they were still the subject that for the umpteenth time grabbed headlines”, Ravid writes.
