Obama’s Middle East Dead End

Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies sees a real danger that such talks “will put power back into the hands of the Quartet and President Obama. They will be able to use this as leverage to push the Israelis on concessions for peace. In other words, if they don’t extract what they want from the Israelis, they can always threaten to take the Security Council proposal down off the shelf.” That said, he believes, “from the Israeli perspective, negotiating under pressure from the U.S. and Quartet is probably better than no peace talks coupled with a newly-minted Palestinian state that has new powers to actively undermine the Jewish state.”